Detroit Noir (Akashic Noir)

Motor City’s finest literary talents―including Oates, Estleman, Holden, and Parrish―offer a shadowed spectrum of gripping, haunted visions.

Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each story is set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book.

Brand-new stories by: Joyce Carol Oates, Loren D. Estleman, P.J. Parrish, Nisi Shawl, Craig Holden, Craig Bernier, Desiree Cooper, Melissa Preddy, E.J. Olsen, Joe Boland, Megan Abbott, Dorene O’Brien, Lolita Hernandez, Peter Markus, Roger K. Johnson, and Michael Zadoorian.

From the introduction by E.J. Olsen & John C. Hocking:

“Detroit is an old and wounded city, broken into wildly diverse splinters, but it is not dead, for it is possessed of a unique vitality rooted in its complex history and in its hardy people. Detroit is noir, shadowed and striving, grim and powerful. It is impossible to truly know the city and not respect it . . .

In Detroit Noir you will find noir in many forms, embodied by many characters. From a driven detective with a mystery to solve to a working man just trying to make it through another day, from a bemused outsider seeking a thrill to one so deeply inside the city as to see no outside at all. Urban professionals, night watchmen, tarot card readers, waitresses, caretakers, and criminals, all bound together by the city and by a dark dilemma that looms just ahead. A moment awaits each of them, a moment of truth or violence or epiphany or change. A noir moment.”

E.J. OLSEN is a freelance writer and editor who grew up in the shadow of the Motor City. He reads everything, but his heart was stolen by noir fiction and film. He is the coeditor of Detroit Noir.

JOHN C. HOCKING grew up outside Detroit in the ’60s and ’70s. He is an obsessive reader, writer, and collector of pulp and noir fiction. He is the coeditor of Detroit Noir.