BOOK REVIEW
Forget Savannah -- it has nothing on Richmond.
In 1994, John Berendt put a new spin on old Georgia eccentrics and Southern Gothic misdeeds with his best-selling nonfiction work "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil." Now, the editors of "Richmond Noir," an anthology of short stories, prove that the River City is second to none in its mixture of the proper, the improper and the flat-out dangerous.
"Richmond is a city of winter balls and garden parties on soft summer evenings," the editors, Andrew Blossom, Brian Castleberry and Tom De Haven, write in their introduction. "It's also a city of brutal crimes and drug corners and okay-everybody-go-on-home-there's-nothing-to-see."
In keeping with the noir tradition of film and fiction, the subject here is crime, especially homicides. There's a large and varied cast of characters but the star is always Richmond itself -- sometimes seedy, often grand and always edgy. Each story deals with a crime committed in a different part of the city -- from West End to East End, Providence Park to Manchester.
Sometimes, it seems there's no escaping crime here, and for the writers represented in this book, there's no escaping its history either -- and isn't it interesting how often the two mix? In Pir Rothenberg's "The Rose Red Vial," set in the Museum District, the plot revolves around a vial of perfume that longtime Richmonder Edgar Allan Poe is supposed to have given his bride, Virginia. It has been stolen from the vaults of the Virginia Historical Society. For the culprits, the motive isn't money but the purloined vial's historic value, the pull of the past. What Richmonder wouldn't understand that?
Most of the book's stories involve crimes more serious than theft -- murder, sometimes by unusual means. This being Richmond, the perps tend to be history buffs. Clint McCown's "The Apprentice" involves a barely working offspring of a once-prominent Richmond family -- "My inheritance was siphoned off by carpetbaggers," he tells the reader. He's a passive observer of life until an associate ventures upon insult. The instrument of revenge is a bulldozer, and the crime scene is Hollywood Cemetery.
Black humor also abounds in stories such as X.C. Atkins' "A Late-Night Fishing Trip." This might have been an idyllic account of three guys from Oregon Hill going fishing by the James River if it weren't for the assaults by drug dealers, a killer dog and two psycho neighbors.
Some of the stories forgo black humor and go straight for the really scary stuff. "Homework," by David L. Robbins, tells of a burglar returning to Sandston in eastern Henrico County, where he grew up. He sits in the stands of a ballfield, reminiscing about his playing days. Then he breaks into the home of a former teacher. The contrast between the mentally unbalanced criminal and the elderly lady's iron courage is haunting and disturbing. Does the intruder want to recapture his past or destroy it?
Just as unsettling is Clay McLeod Chapman's "The Battle of Belle Isle," about two homeless people seeking refuge on that "real diamond of an island" in the James. As they dodge police and struggle to survive the cold, the narrator meditates on the island's role as a prison for Union prisoners who froze and starved there during the Civil War. There's sudden death here, too, but the real crime may have been committed by a society that neglects the powerless.
"Everybody in this city's a [expletive] Civil War aficionado," one of the homeless characters, Benny, tells the narrator. "How do you know about all this stuff?"
"I just pay attention is all," is the response.
So do all the authors in this distinguished collection.
Contact Clarke Crutchfield at (804) 649-6455 or ccruttchfield@timesdispatch.com
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