Paris Noir

September 29, 2008
Rarely has the City of Light seemed grittier than in this hard-boiled short story anthology, part of Akashic's noir series that began in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir
. The 12 freshly penned pulp fictions by some of France's most prominent practitioners play out in a kind of darker, parallel universe to the tourist mecca; visitors cross these pages at their peril, like the hapless hunk taken captive in Chantal Pelletier's kinky “The Chinese Guy.” As is usual for such volumes, the quality varies considerably among the selections made by Masson, young editor of Gallimard's Série Noire, but it's worth fast-forwarding through the few duds for direct hits like Christophe Mercier's “Christmas,” the poignant tale of a pair of doomed lovers on a snowy night in Pigalle, or Dominique Mainard's “La Vie en Rose,” in which a Piaf-worthy tragedy unfolds amid her old haunts in Belleville. Bull's-eye.

February 15, 2009
The most uneven of the international entries in the series, Paris Noir brings together a collection of bleak and violent stories that attempt to show the dark side of the City of Lights. Modern issues of race and class, particularly among immigrants, feature heavily, as do prostitutes, thieves, and corrupt cops. Although most of the stories certainly capture the desperation at the heart of noir, they lack the strong sense of place that should be central to this geographically driven series. One notable exception is the story The Revenge of the Waiters, by Jean-Bernard Pouy. Thumbs up for noir; thumbs down for Paris.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)