Staff Picks – Trindad Noir edited by Lisa Allen-Agostini and Jeanne Mason

Noir Fiction is a loosely defined genre of crime writing that features gritty stories of the underside of society. Sometimes considered a subset of hardboiled mystery writing, sometimes considered synonymous with that genre, Noir Fiction traces its lineage back to the early 20th century. A quote attributed to George Tuttle in an article in Mystery Scene magazine in 1994, describes noir this way:

Classic crime writers like Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler are considered by many to be Noir authors, as are more modern authors like Elmore Leonard and Walter Mosley.

I’m not a big reader of crime writing, but when I look back over the titles I have read, a lot of them fall into the Noir category. I like their realism and their to-the-point style, but more importantly for me, they generally have strong characters and (in a lot of cases) a distinct sense of place, which is something I generally look for in books.With that in mind, it’s not surprising that Trinidad Noir caught my eye when it arrived in the branch recently. It’s a collection of original Noir short stories all set in Trinidad . It’s actually part of a Akashic Noir Series that started back in 2004. (Akashic is the publishing house.) All the books in the series are centred around specific locations – neighbourhoods, cities, countries – and contain a collection of Noir stories set therein.