Sun-Spotting
Miami Noir Shows the
Shadow of Shady

By John Hood

For such a sun-stoked place, Miami sure is shady. Shadowy, too. Even at highest noon. Maybe it’s the heat. Maybe it’s the humidity. And maybe, just maybe, it’s our destiny.

So implies crime scribe Les Standiford in the intro to his edit of Miami Noir (Akashic, $15.95), a new anthology of stories. According to Les, Miami’s “a frontier town, perched on the border between the known and the rarely before experienced.” In other words: This is where the wild go. Any Miamians worth their weight in sunblock will vehemently agree — we are manifestly wild.

And we lather on the edge of oblivion. From the debauch of South Beach to the mean of Liberty City, the towered hide of Brickell to the rats of the Key, the South County crunk, the North Beach thump, the OT lean, we sweat a desperado streak as brutal as it is beautiful.

Saliently enough, in a genre where the femmes are usually but fatales, this new pulp, which transports readers around the county, provokes much of the most gruesome and — yes ! — fatal telling.

We sweat a desperado streak as brutal as it is beautiful.

Barbara Parker’s “Machete” (Biscayne Bay), for instance, twains two dames — an attorney and her investigator – with a third who may or may not have taken a gardener’s saber to some Coconut Grove doctor; Carolina Garcia-Aguilera’s “The Recipe” (downtown) puts some deadly meat on the next-door neighbor’s barbecue; Christine King’s “Dead Storage” (county line) takes all the clichés of the trailer park and twists ’em into an ugly new knottiness; and Vicki Hendricks’ “Boozanne, Lemme Be” (Miami Beach) works an atypical mid-Beach hustle into a crash that’d be heartbreaking if it wasn’t so brutally pathetic.

But don’t for a mad sec think the boys, too, aren’t below bad and worse. John Bond’s “T-Bird” (Miami River) gives wicked way to a very diabolical damsel in a mini-dress; FIU’s own James W. Hall’s “Ride Along” (Coconut Grove) makes damn ugly certain a putzy professor knows of what he writes; and Louisiana Power & Lightman John Dufresne, another scribble/FIU instructor, tells well “The Timing of Unfelt Smiles” (Sunny Isles), not to mention the telling well of what they reap.

With echoes of Charles Willeford’s Hoke Mosely series, the Miami books of Elmore Leonard, the quirk of Carl Hiaasen, who never met a shady character he didn’t wanna write, and Edna Buchanan, who seems to know all the shadows, this batch of dirty deep South Florida fiction might just send you packing … your own heat.

Standiford and his merry band of Noirists begin their Florida world tour at 8 p.m. this Friday at Books and Books in the Gables, 265 Aragon Ave., and end on Jan. 11 at Books and Books on the Beach, 933 Lincoln Road. Call 305-442-4408.