Palm Springs Noir (Akashic Noir)

May 1, 2021
Fourteen tales of dark doings in sunny Palm Springs. As editor DeMarco-Barrett points out, it's hard to think "noir" in a landscape that offers 300 days of sunshine a year. But unrelenting heat and light can do funny things to your brain. What else could explain why a longtime karaoke DJ heads south with a trunk full of his partner's body parts in Tod Goldberg's "A Career Spent Disappointing People"? Or how a runaway from the Betty Ford Clinic becomes a cat burglar in Eduardo Santiago's "The Ankle of Anza"? Or how two vacationing college grads get hopelessly lost on a road three miles from the Joshua Tree parking lot in Ken Layne's "The Loop Trail"? Of course the desert has always been a magnet for the extremes in human behavior. Where else would a group of religious renegades set up camp, as they do in Alex Espinoza's "The Salt Calls Us Back"? Where else would the CIA conduct the bizarre mind-control experiments Rob Roberge chronicles in "The Expendables"? But even in the extreme Palm Springs climate, the tried-and-true noir motives still stand. There's money, as in Janet Fitch's "Sunrise." There's the love that goes wrong in Chris J. Bahnsen's "Octagon Girl" and Kelly Shire's "A Cold Girl." There's the fear that sprouts in J.D. Horn's "The Stand-In." And sometimes all three can produce a toxic mix, as they do in DeMarco-Barrett's "The Water Holds You Still." An engaging mix of the good, the bad, and the off-kilter.

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July 12, 2021
As the 14 stories in DeMarco-Barrett’s fine noir anthology set in Palm Springs, Calif., and vicinity show, swimming pools are meant for more than leisurely dips, and Frank Sinatra songs are an ever-present soundtrack to the desert landscape of abandoned dreams and broken hearts. Highlights include T. Jefferson Parker’s “Specters,” in which PTSD haunts Iraq war vets; Eric Beetner’s “The Guest,” in which a body in the pool of an Airbnb leads to a series of grisly deaths; and Kelly Shire’s “A Cold Girl,” in which family relations sour after a stripper takes up with a cousin’s boyfriend. Sinatra’s strains are most prominent in J.D. Horn’s unsettling “The Stand-In,” in which an aging actress reminisces about her ties to organized crime decades earlier. When a cat burglar slips in and out of homes in a private community grabbing birth and death certificates in Eduardo Santiago’s slyly comic “The Ankle of Anza,” the “concerned neighbors” take justice into their own hands. It’s rare to find a group of stories without a bad one, but DeMarco-Barrett has chosen well and there’s not a dud in the bunch.