Down This Mean Sixth Street in Austin Noir

Seems like everybody comes to Austin, sooner or later, and now the Akashic Books series of original noir anthologies has finally arrived, its freshly inked pages strewn with shadows and ill intent.

Akashic Books began their run of crime-fiction compilations in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir, and now – after almost two decades of anthologies that eviscerate, one by one, 100 cities across the globe – after having already toe-tagged Texas with Lone Star Noir, Dallas Noir, and Houston Noir – they've decided it's time for trouble right here in River City.

Austin Noir is edited by three Austinites – Hopeton Hay, Scott Montgomery, and Molly Odintz – and brings stories set throughout our increasingly unfair city, offering modern tales of turpitude and treachery from Ace Atkins, Amy Gentry, Jeff Abbott, Alexandra Burt, and others.

You want to know what kind of heavy shit goes down in a club on Red River, the sort of bitter fruit the weed of crime bears within West Campus, or where the bodies are buried in Rollingwood? Shake bloodied hands with this book, citizen. Do you yearn to see what foulness can unfold in a parking garage at the Domain, what dull evil rots within the Arboretum, the depths of depravity possible – or, at least, possible to imagine – at Southpark Meadows? Then the Austin Noir anthology is your horrifying huckleberry. And what inciting incident sparked this local showcase of misdeeds?

"I just emailed them and they said yes," said Molly Odintz, a senior editor at CrimeReads.

"Molly and I had been working together at BookPeople," said bookseller Scott Montgomery, "and the Akashic anthologies were always popular sellers. And we were always saying, 'There should be an Austin Noir.' And that conversation would always end with, 'Well, we should be the editors of it, if it ever happens.'"

"I pitched it to Ibrahim Ahmad," said Odintz, "but he left for [Viking Books] right after he accepted it, so we were mostly working with [Akashic Books founder] Johnny Temple."

"We started soliciting stories in the fall of 2020," said Hay, who also hosts the Diverse Voices Book Review podcast.

"There's two ways to do that," said Montgomery. "You can put out a kind of cattle call, saying send us your stories, but we went the other way."

"We reached out to people we knew," said Odintz. "And sometimes, the editors will pick people who are more in the literary sphere, and that leads to very lyrical story collections. We reached out very specifically to crime writers for this one. And Austin also has a strong horror writing scene that's reflected as well."

"I was looking at people who'd been on my book show before," Hay told us. "I wanted to make sure there was a diverse view of Austin, different perspectives. Because, when you move to Austin and you write about it, there's a tendency to pitch one story of Austin: It's the Live Music Capital of the World and it's weird."

"There's some really interesting locations," said Odintz. "[Gabino Iglesias'] story isn't set in a strip club, it's set in a parking lot next to a strip club. And Amy Gentry did the West Campus Co-op. And I did a revenge story about the co-op I used to live at for nonstudents. And Lee Thomas' is kind of about the Hotel Van Zandt, but it's set in the empty lot where Chain Drive used to be. I do wish we had more East Austin and South Austin, and I was really surprised at how much North Austin there was. That would've been different 10, 15 years ago.

"One of the things I think about," said Odintz, "with the intersection of crime fiction and the criminal justice system? It's complicated, because we don't want crime fiction to justify the excesses of mass incarceration. On the other hand, I also think crime fiction is one of the best ways to explore American capitalism in general – because we're resistant to the money novel in a way that we didn't used to be. So if we want to look at the expression of extreme motives and Third Man style of capitalism? Crime fiction is a really good way to get at the inherent corruption in the system."

"If you look at the typical TV portrayal of the criminal justice system," said Hay, "they're always right, and they don't generally look farther than that. I was always more interested in crime fiction that shows a nuanced view, a sort of critique of society and how did we get here."

Montgomery nodded, smiling. "In the good Akashic Books – like this one – I think you get a great range of ideas of what a city is, and a good range of the different ways that the noir genre can be interpreted."

Austin Noir

edited by Hopeton Hay, Scott Montgomery, and Molly Odintz
Akashic Books
296 pp.
$16.95 (paper)