Rome Noir is another really wonderful collection of truly Noir stories put out by Akashic books. Akashic Books has published over twenty-seven Noir collections, including their latest, just released this week, entitled Delhi Noir, with more more upcoming. Visit their enticing site at www.akashicbooks.com.

The best Noir mixes up an intoxicating combination of crime and mystery and camp. The stories in Rome Noir are by Italian writers charged with coming up with an original story set in Rome and there is not a weak submission in the bunch. Every tool they use is true to the Noir genre: setting (“the skeletons of unfinished buildings are also bones, which someone will hasten to cover with the flesh of bricks, and then fill in the spaces with wretched lives“); dialogue (“Sorry, Sweetheart, he stammers. Shut up, and take me home, she says“); and philosophical asides (“[It happened] the way everything happens…Little by little at first. Then all of a sudden“).  But the writers don’t stop there, they go further, using Rome’s history (given what really went on in the Coliseum, isn’t it strange that we all go to see it and marvel at it? It was a place of torture, humiliation, and mass murder), its present reality of tourists, crowds, crazy driving and crazier parking, and its legends (the death of Pasolini, for one) to create riveting stories.

Some of the stories are creepy and twisted (never a favorite of mine due to my too-absorbent imagination which specializes in torturing me at night with intensified re-enactments of what I’ve read), some are sophisticated and sly, some are futuristic and chilling, and a few mix humor with violence in the perfect arc of crime and camp.  I devoured these stories and hunger for more.