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Overview: Discover dark mysteries nestled in every borough of the Big Apple in this collection of five noir short story anthologies.
New York City Noir: The Five Borough Set collects the five NYC borough installments in our award-winning Akashic Noir Series into a single e-book edition: Brooklyn Noir, edited by Tim McLoughlin, Manhattan Noir, edited by Lawrence Block, Bronx Noir, edited by S.J. Rozan, Queens Noir, edited by Robert Knightly, and Staten Island Noir, edited by Patricia Smith.
Genre: Mystery/Noir | Short Stories
This book is neither the first nor the last title in the Akashic Noir Series, but it represents some pretty weighty full-circle karma.
At the time Akashic publisher Johnny Temple and I were establishing just what kind of book Brooklyn Noir was going to be, we were sometimes daunted by the scope of the project, resulting in ideas that veered wildly between, among other things, the broadest and most narrow geographic focus. Some of the concepts we discussed were whether to give each Brooklyn neighborhood its own volume (Bushwick Noir?), or to try and cover the whole of New York City in one book.
It became quickly obvious that the way to go was to focus on the borough of Brooklyn and do our best to represent as many communities and voices as we could. Even before Brooklyn Noir was published, though, we were scoping out the other boroughs.
Life intrudes, however, and plans change in publishing much the same as in the real world. After Brooklyn, Chicago was the next locale featured in the series. San Francisco, Washington, DC, and Dublin, Ireland were covered before Manhattan Noir came on board. Lawrence Block writes in his introduction to that volume that Manhattan is the city, and he’s right. Manhattan is the sun around which the outer boroughs rotate, but it is the very nature of the vast difference between Manhattan and its neighbors, and the symbiotic relationship of energy and labor moving back and forth, that prevented us from encompassing all of New York in one volume.
It has taken eight years, and the publication of nearly sixty titles in the series, to complete this project, to tell the tale of a town that contains Wall Street and the Upper East Side, the slums of the South Bronx and the beauty of its botanical garden, the dizzying changes of Brooklyn’s gentrification, the weekly ethnic shifts of neighborhoods in Queens, and the inexorable transformation of Staten Island from quasi-rural suburb to the new old-Brooklyn, a package complete with traffic jams and racial violence. Eighty-seven stories ranging from art theft to horse theft, from random serial killings to good old-fashioned crimes of passion.
As editors, Lawrence Block, S.J. Rozan, Robert Knightly, and Patricia Smith have done a remarkable job, uniformly keeping the tone of each book authentic to its borough. And their work has been critically rewarded. A number of these stories are Edgar, Anthony, and Shamus award winners or nominees. Three have been included in annual Best American Mystery Stories collections, and two were adapted as short films. Lou Manfredo, Maggie Estep, and Robert Knightly expanded stories presented here into novels.
It first occurred to me that this book is a road map or an underground travel guide, then I realized that, collectively, the stories are more than that.
When I was seventeen years old, I went to Europe for the first time, and traveled with a friend who had family in what was then Yugoslavia. We spent much of the summer hitchhiking or taking buses along the Adriatic coast. We began by staying with some of my friend’s relatives, but after the first night, they gave us a letter of introduction to acquaintances a few towns away, and upon presenting that, these strangers welcomed us into their home, fed us, and showed us around their village. They then gave us a letter of introduction to their friends down the road. The tradition continued, and night after night we found ourselves hosted by people with whom we had absolutely no prior connection, who took us behind the curtains of their villages and families, and who then made certain we had a contact for the next leg of our journey.
—Consider these stories letters of introduction. Each is a cautionary tale describing the dangers of a specific part of the city. Each story is presented to you as a gift, by a stranger.
—From the largest mistake to the most insignificant slight, the price for not knowing your territory in this town can be brutal. New York City is the capital of the world, and everybody knows you don’t stay on top by being a nice guy.
—Heed the warnings.
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