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• "A pearl-handled German-made stainless steel knife with a slender five-inch blade." Joyce Carol Oates

  Fifteen short stories and one poem (by Donna Tartt) comprise this offering from the school of American noir (relating to a genre of crime literature featuring tough, cynical characters and bleak settings/Suggestive of danger or violence). This is pretty much as it sounds. Among the writers trying something new or fresh was a story called Hot Springs – by James Crumley; this was very dark and uncompromising with a strong facility for good literary values – in amongst what might be termed sleaze-noir-values, something out of the ordinary at any rate. I also very much liked (or at least was moved by), Joyce Carol Oates’ contribution. Though the story itself might not have had much originality, it was enlivened, again, by her sound capacity for character creation, and – again – her assured literary values. There was one period story by Anne Perry who in real life is one of the two girls who murdered one of their mothers, immortalised in the film Heavenly Creatures a 1994 New Zealand drama directed by Peter Jackson, from a screenplay he co-wrote with his partner France Walsh, about the notorious 1954 Parker-Hulme murder. The film starred the then-unknown Kate Winslet in her first film role. A case, perhaps, of the background of the writing being more interesting than the short story. Which, incidentally, does not concern a murder, rather an attempted blackmail which, rather ingeniously turns into something else. One of the other stories is by Elmore Leonard, a prodigious writer of crime fiction who has had several books made into films. One of the best stories in the book, Karen Makes Out concerns the horrors that attend a girl who finds herself picked up by a wastrel who proceeds to thoroughly debauch her. She has the last laugh. These stories are mostly okay, though only a few have enough weight and originality to be considered up there with such as a Joyce Carole Oates, or an Elmore Leonard (and this was Leonard's first short story in more than thirty years). The poem by Donna Tartt is beautifully enigmatic and rife with what is not said.

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