Tony Bellotto, ed., Rio Noir (2016).
Good Reads meta-data is 245 pages, rated 3.56 by 75 litizens.
Genre: krimi.
DNA: Brazil.
Verdict: dégustation.
Tagline: Varied in 14 stories, some 3 pages, others 30.
An ageing beauty convinces a gigolo to murder her husband. He does, turns out the victim is not her husband, but the man who tortured and killed her husband thirty years ago when the generals ruled. Oops. Now professional honour requires that the deceased’s body guards have to settle the score.
By chance a small time business man takes shelter from the rain in the foyer of a dilapidated office building where he sees a notice for a tarot reader. To pass the time during the storm he decides to do it. He does…. and finds out more than he wanted to know, because the mystic is…. All very Twilight Zone.
Then there is a Hannibal Lector, a teenage drug lord in the City of God on the hillside, and more. Some of the stories are distasteful to my taste but they live up to the cover blurb’s promise of the dark side of the white sands, Sugar Loaf, and beachside high rises. In some stories there is much to’ing and fro’ing and there is a rudimentary map to indicate the geography of this sprawling metropolis wedged between mountains and the sea.
***
There is certainly irony, as indicated above, but I am not sure the word ‘noir’ applies to any of the stories. Many end without a resolution, and none comply with the Knox Decalogue.
Of the fifteen authors, two are women. One of each gender are expatriates. The majority are journalists associated with O Globo, the newspaper of record, it says of itself, in Rio de Janeiro. Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza is included and I have read with interest three of his Inspector Espinosa series. Despite the puff I have neither knowledge of or interest in the editor. Aside: to my untrained eye the same translator for all the stories rendered them uniform: Word choice, idiom translations were the same for all the characters, it seemed.
Part of a series that includes scores of such other titles as Haiti Noir, Hong Kong Noir. Stories stand alone but can be used to identify authors to check out for more if so inclined.