Curt Colbert

“All Along The Watchtower” relates Matt Rossiter’s efforts to identify the person systematically killing the members of his Viet Nam platoon. The police find a list of the platoon members on the first victim and contact Rossiter, now a Seattle PI, because his name is on the list. The list and some reference to the music of Jimi Hendrix are the only clues Rossiter has to guide the direction of his investigation. The book is named after Jimi Hendrix’s version of the Bob Dylan song of the same name.

Readers learn at the outset that Rossiter suffers from PTSD and a sizable portion of the brief 145-page book deals with his flashbacks. During these Rossiter relives the horrors he experienced in Viet Nam. The emphasis on flashbacks kills the feeble forward movement of the plot. It’s rather remarkable that such a short tale comes across as bloated.

The premise sounds interesting, but the book is a boring disappointment.… (altro)

Saw this little gem of a book at Metsker Maps in the SEA-TAC airport. I am participating in Turner Classic Movie's Summer of Darkness film noir study (Summer 2014) and had to have the book when I saw it. This book of short stories by Seattle writers brings Seattle old and new alive as a place of shadowy nooks and crannies exuding questionable morals - and, really, isn't that just Seattle? The various protagonists may not always have a happy ending, but that's the point of noir. One story even brings Sherlock Holmes and Moriarity (sort of) to Seattle. I think I will take the book with me on my next trip up and visit the settings of the stories.

If your interested, this volume is one of a series. Also available are Baltimore, Bronx, Brooklyn, Chicago, D.C., Dehli, Detroit, Dublin, Havana, Istanbul (can anyone say, "Maltese Falcon"?), Las Vegas, Manhattan, Miami, New Orleans, Paris, Portland, Queens, Rome, San Francisco, Toronto, Trinidad, Twin Cities, and Wall Street collections noir.

P.S. Metsker's, if I can plug, is a wonderful Seattle map store of which I am very fond. They have all sorts of cool maps and map-like treats. They are a Seattle original located near Pike's Market and worth your patronage.… (altro)

I have a theory about why I didn’t enjoy this book as much as I enjoyed another entry in in Akashic Books noir series, Delhi Noir. Seattle Noir solid, but it didn’t grab me quite like the earlier anthology.

Theory: I have a lot of biased assumptions about Delhi that made the setting very foreboding. But being Seattle born and raised, I know this place much better and have a much harder time seeing its seedy underbelly. Oh, we have our problems. In its early days, Seattle could hold it’s own against any up and coming city. But today this is not a place where crime runs rampant, the cops are on the take, or organized crime takes a cut of everything.

In addition, with a few exceptions, the stories don’t mine the reputations and possibilities of the Seattle neighborhoods in which they’re set. Or they do use genteel areas which limit the crime possibilities to a fairly narrow set. Where’s Lake City, or Aurora, White Center, Rainier Valley? Conversely, a couple of the stories set in places I wouldn’t have expected to be so scary turned out to be quite good at imparting a dark mood.… (altro)