San Francisco Noir [Paperback]

Take an intermission from your Hitchcock marathon, and turn instead to the 15 stories between the covers of? The protagonists of noir fiction have their own agendas, but for readers much of the pleasure is unraveling the mystery and deciphering the clues that constitute a city, and if there is a love story in noir writing its the passion of writers, readers, and protagonists for the gritty geographical details. As the bodies drop in the strong stories here, steep, fog-wrapped, fratricidal San Francisco comes alive: here are old neighborhoods, bars, bookstores, the famous and then forgotten landlord arson at 16th and Valencia, buried streams, streetcars, parks, a lost city and the new city haunting almost every page of this gorgeous anthology of San Francisco noir. I was wondering about the citys shadowside that the guides didnt show. These top writers are of the As bad as it gets brand, and then worse. If you like puke, fear & loathing caused by stray bullets, happenstance getting the hero who is an anti-hero really, a male corpse rotting in the bathtub while the woman poops in the garden, the Reverend Christmas shot in the ear by the PO-lice, then this is your good read for a murky, maybe even gritty, weekend. San Francisco has long been a city of back alleys and black figures; this is its romantic map. Its San Francisco-centric in this atmospheric collection of noir; hard-boiled and twisted. Dark, smooth fiction digging deep into different neighborhoods and ethnicities. The sound is pitch-perfect, too, from the understated staccato of old lost souls to the jiving rap of younger ones.