Las Vegas Noir

"People come from all over the world to do dumb, dangerous things in Sin City, whether it's someone locking himself in a Fremont Street motel to kick a nasty heroin habit, hooking up to an oxygen tank in a last-ditch scheme to double his nest egg at the downtown slots, or shooting a weekend porn flick that goes disastrously wrong once a rabid pit bull is introduced." So writes Jarret Keene and Todd James Pierce, the editors of Las Vegas Noir, one of the entries in the Akashic Noir series. This series is story collections from cities as varied as Brooklyn to the Twin Cities of Minnesota. Since noir is my favorite genre and Las Vegas my favorite city of the imagination, it was a natural for me to read.

Unfortunately, that sentence is more interesting than most of the stories presented. Some of them aren't really noir, such as Bliss Esposito's "Guns Don't Kill People," which has a suburban housewife wanting to teach her son how to shoot, and some are just poorly written. Some stories have promise, and play like opening chapters of a novel, but then trail off, such as Todd Goldberg's "Mitzvah," which has a man masquerading as a rabbi.

There are few little gems here that are self-contained stories, the best of which is "Crip," by Preston L. Allen. The theme--a killer for the mob has a soft heart for a child (this is as hold as the hills, and was basically the plot of the film Leon) is well-written and succinct. I also liked the off-kilter nature of Jose Skinner's "All About Balls," which finds an anthropology student at a convention in Las Vegas stumbling upon a community of Mexican Indians, with disastrous results.

Of course there is a story about Area 51, with Janet Berliner's "The Road to Rachel." Befitting the weird legacy of the place, it has to do with ostriches.

Some of the stories don't really have much to do with Vegas, but aren't bad stories, like Vu Tran's "This or Any Desert," which takes place in Chinatown (it could be a Chinatown anywhere), or "Murder is Academic," by Felicia Campbell, about a serial killer targeting literary women (the ending of this story is pretty bad, though).

If they do a Las Vegas Noir 2 I'd be willing to take a chance, but the stories should be more specifically about the city. I didn't get the sense of the place from this collection.