New Orleans Noir by Julie Smith

New Orleans Noir by Julie Smith

"New Orleans Noir explores the dark corners of our city in eighteen stories, set both pre- and post-Katrina . . . In Julie Smith, Temple found a perfect editor for the New Orleans volume, for she is one who knows and loves the city and its writers and knows how to bring out the best in both . . . It's harrowing reading, to be sure, but it's pure page-turning pleasure, too." --Times-Picayune

Akashic Books continues its award-winning series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each volume comprises stories set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the respective city.

Brand-new stories by: Ace Atkins, Laura Lippman, Patty Friedmann, Barbara Hambly, Tim McLoughlin, Olympia Vernon, David Fulmer, Jervey Tervalon, James Nolan, Kalamu ya Salaam, Maureen Tan, Thomas Adcock, Jeri Cain Rossi, Christine Wiltz, Greg Herren, Julie Smith, Eric Overmyer, and Ted O'Brien.

New Orleans is a third world country in itself, a Latin, African, European (and often amoral) culture trapped in a Puritan nation. It's everyone's seamy underside, the city where respectable citizens go to get drunk, puke in the gutter, dance on tabletops, and go home with strangers, all without guilt. It's the metropolitan equivalent of eating standing up--if it happened in New Orleans, it doesn't count.

The city was always the home of the lovable rogue, the poison magnolia, the bent politico, the sociopathic street thug, and, especially, the heartless con artist--but in post-Katrina times it struggles against . . . well, the same old problems, just writ large and with a new breed of carpetbagger thrown in. Combine all that with a brilliant literary tradition and you have New Orleans Noir, a sparkling collection of tales exploring the city's wasted, gutted neighborhoods, its outwardly gleaming "sliver by the river," its still-raunchy French Quarter, and other hoods so far from the Quarter they might as well be on another continent. It also looks back into the past, from that recent innocent time known in contemporary New Orleans as "pre-K," to the mid-nineteenth century, the other time the city was mostly swampland.

Julie Smith is a former journalist who started her career at the New Orleans Times-Picayune before moving on to the San Francisco Chronicle, where she spent fifteen years soaking up gritty realism and (hopefully) street smarts in preparation for a life of crime. That is, crime writing. She's the author of 20 adult mysteries with three female detectives and one misunderstood man: a cop (Officer Skip Langdon, NOPD), a private eye (Talba Wallis, poet and computer prodigy, also of New Orleans), a semi-amateur detective (Rebecca Schwartz, San Francisco lawyer), and a full amateur (Paul McDonald, crime writer, also of San Francisco). New Orleans Mourning, the first novel in the Skip Langdon series, won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel. It's the Cursebusters!

She met a young male editor while writing it, and he gave her the remark she believes best captures the spirit of the book and her personal perspective as a YA author. It's this: In YA, there's way too much emphasis on girls getting the man (or the girlthis is Bold Strokes territory!) and far too little emphasis on girls kicking ass. Smith is a great believer in the significance of girls kicking asses, an opportunity they rarely get in real life, thus any opportunity in fiction must be seized.