Palm Springs Noir

As Barbara DeMarco-Barrett says in her introduction, Palm Springs seems an unlikely place for a noir setting: it's bright and sunny year round, with mountains always in the horizon, the desert seemingly ready to take over without warning, and more pools per capita than anywhere else in the United States. But given her definition of noir (maybe the best I've seen)—"the main characters might want their lives to improve and may have high aspirations and goals but they keep making bad choices, and things go from bad to worse"—you realize noir is not a place but a state of mind, and thus can be set anywhere. This is the best of the Akashic Noir Series I've read to date, with each story uniquely memorable, some in subtle ways (T. show more Jefferson Parker), others a sucker punch to the gut (Rob Bowman). You might even say a couple of them (Eric Beetner, Tod Goldberg) are hilarious if you have a very, very dark sense of humor. The more I read this series, the more I love it. Well done, Akashic. Keep 'em coming! show less

Akashic’s noir series of short story collections just keeps getting better and better. In Palm Springs Noir, fourteen stories peel back the sunshine veneer of the desert resort to let us see grit and grime of human nature that noir does so well. Every single story works, and works well.

Palm Springs Noir is the most recent of the Akashic Noir series. Set in the legendary resort city about a hundred miles from Los Angeles. In any resort area, there is always an innate tension between those who visit and those who live there. Usually, the visitors have conspicuous wealth while the townspeople are often living hardscrabble lives in low-paying service jobs that cater to the wealthy who make their homes unaffordable. Palm Springs is no different and that tension infuses several of the short stories in this fabulous new issue in the series.

Barbara DeMarco-Barrett, who edited Palm Springs Noir contributed one of her own stories, a diabolical case of sibling rivalry and the attentions of one of those service workers, the one show more who cleans the pool. She also wrote one of the shortest introductions ever and I am so grateful. She manages to define noir and how it has changed over time as well as give us a capsule history of Palm Springs and its society all in five pages. Well done!

There are fourteen stories and not a stinker among them. I thought “The Salt Calls You Back” to be particularly chilling. “The Expendables” is a perfect fit for our Qonspiracist era despite being set in 1981. “VIP Check-In” is another perfect little story .

Palm Springs Noir is an outstanding collection of noir short stories. I cannot tell you how much I love it when editors focus their innovations on finding more diverse voices and characters rather than trying to redefine noir. I love it when editors show they understand the noir aesthetic is already deep and wide and does not need to be elevated. This is an excellent collection and I came away feeling like I understood Palm Springs better than I could if there were a “Real Housewives of Palm Springs” series.

I received a copy of Palm Springs Noir from the publisher through LibraryThing.

Palm Springs Noir at Akashic Books
Barbara Demarco-Barrett author site
Akashic Noir Series

https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2021/07/18/palm-springs-noir-by-barb... show less

It pains me to write this review. I’ve read many Akashic Noir collections, and I've loved the vast majority of them. As with most short story anthologies, the stories are a mixed bag ranging from terrible to amazing, with most falling somewhere in the good to great categories. Out of the typical 14 stories in each collection, there are usually one or two I really dislike, and a handful of gorgeous standouts, while I enjoy the rest. Palm Springs Noir is, sadly, an outlier. To me, the majority of the stories were poorly paced, ridiculously plotted, and capped off with bad endings. There were a couple that I thought were brilliant: The Expendables by Rob Roberge and The Stand-In by J.D. Horn being my favorites. Barbara show more DeMarco-Barrett’s The Water Holds You Still and Alex Espinoza’s The Salt Calls Is Back, were also good. I really appreciated the creepy atmosphere of Espinoza’s tale and the surprising ending. The rest were either boring and unremarkable, or like The Loop Trail by Ken Layne, ended so badly that they actually made me mad. If The Loop Trail had ended two pages sooner, I'd have loved it. As it is, I'd really like the 5 hours of my life back that I spent reading this collection.

I’m grateful to Akashic Books and LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program for the free advanced copy in exchange for my honest review. All opinions are purely my own. show less

Palm Springs Noir is one of the latest crime fiction collections in the Akashic Books series that now numbers close to 120 such books. The stories, with a couple of exceptions, in each book are all set in one city or region of the world, and this time around all the action takes place in Palm Springs itself or in places like Joshua Tree National Park, the Coachella Valley Preserve, or Desert Hot Springs which are all nearby. And, as usual, the stories will not disappoint fans of the genre.

The term “noir” can sometimes be difficult to explain to readers who are unfamiliar with the genre, but editor Barbara DeMarco-Barrett offers one of the better definitions of noir in her introduction to the collection that I’ve seen - and she show more does it in layman’s terms. According to DeMarco-Barrett, “In noir, the main characters might want their lives to improve and may have high aspirations and goals, but they keep making bad choices, and things go from bad to worse…characters follow the highway to doom and destruction. They are haunted by the past, and the line between black and white, right and wrong, dissolves like sugar in water. The hero rationalizes why it’s okay to do whatever dark thing they are about to do.” The genre was particularly prominent in the books and movies of the 1940s and 1950s, but it survived its lean years of popularity and seems to have made a nice comeback in recent years.

Palm Springs, in its heyday, was the favorite hangout of movie stars and celebrities, especially of Frank Sinatra and his “rat pack” friends. That’s why, as I was beginning the stories in the book’s third section, I had to smile a little when it finally hit me that the titles of the four parts all sounded familiar for a good reason: they are all also titles of songs recorded by Sinatra. The section titles always foretell or hint at the contents of the stories in the section, and these clever song title choices work particularly well. Beginning with the first section, they are “Strangers in the Night,” “Little White Lies,” “Everything Happens to Me,” and “Ill Wind.”

For me, three of the book’s fourteen stories especially stand-out, but with the exception of perhaps two others, they are all fun to read. One of my favorites is Barbara Fitch’s “Sunrise,” a revenge-story that doesn’t work out quite as one woman hoped it would despite her determination to rid the world of the evil man who ruined her life years earlier. A similar story, and another favorite, is editor DeMarco-Barrett’s “The Water Holds You Still” in which a woman learns that her brother has been looting the home and bank accounts of their mother who suffers from dementia in order to pay for all the drugs and booze he consumes. As in “Sunrise,” she ends up enlisting a less-than-reliable partner to help her solve the problem.

And then, there’s “Octagon Girl” by Chris J. Bahnsen. It is no accident that this is one of the most disturbing stories in the collection because it deals so frankly with the domestic abuse of a woman and her eleven-year-old son by the woman’s latest boyfriend - a man who has probably never in his life seen a steroid he didn’t like. I realize this will be a difficult read for some, but it does turn out to be one of the most satisfying stories in Palm Springs Noir for good reason.

Bottom Line: Palm Springs Noir is, I’m pretty sure, the sixteenth Akashic Books noir series collection that I’ve read, and I swear they just keep getting better and better. I hope this series goes on forever. show less

This was another fantastic installment in the Akashic Noir series, and probably one of my favorites in the series so far. It offered up a number of new authors whose work I'm going to enjoy looking up in the future, as well, which is always a sign of a great anthology (in my opinion, at least). My standout favorites were "A Cold Girl" by Kelly Shire, "Everything Drains and Disappears" by Rob Bowman, "A Career Spent Disappointing People" by Tod Goldberg, "Octagon Girl" by Chris J. Bahnsen, and "The Salt Calls Us Back" by Alex Espinoza.

As always, the book left me looking forward to more collections in the Akashic Noir series.

This is the first book in the series I have read, and now I need to find more of them!

I saw this in a book shop in Palm Springs in December 2022 while on holiday, and was immediately taken by the concept. Bought the book, to take home as a souvenir.

'Palm Springs Noir' is quite possibly the most enjoyable collection of short stories I have ever read - high quality writing throughout, and is the nature of the genre, one twist after another. If I had to pick a favourite, it would be Eric Beetner's 'The Guest'.