Through the valley of darkness

By Kristen Peterson

Wednesday, May 7, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Forget that it’s 1:30 on a Thursday afternoon, that the homeless are baking in the hot sun and that corporate America is muddling through its post-lunch bloat.

The regulars inside the Huntridge Tavern are partying as if everything is on the house. They have empty beer glasses lined up before them, crumpled packs of cigarettes, a million stories and all day to tell them.

Jarret Keene sips a 7 and 7.

When I heard about “Las Vegas Noir,” an anthology of crime fiction co-edited by Keene, I called him to get the skinny. I recommended, for effect, meeting in some sleazy motel in a sketchy neighborhood where everyone on the block has a sordid history, a scar with a story and a switchblade with our names on it. Somewhere so dark that even the broken, faded yellow street lamps can’t help the lucky ones find their way through the dirty streets, past the hookers, the drug dealers, the lost souls and the con artists ...

Or, a Starbucks near his work. We compromised.

“I wanted to have one of the stories set in or around this bar,” he says, glancing at the weathered faces, the beer signs, the plywood walls of Huntridge Tavern. “It’s a little bit seedy, but it’s full of interesting characters, which is what a great crime yarn is all about.”

Unfortunately, the place was so off the map of places to see and be seen that when Keene was picking writers for the anthology, nobody was familiar with it.

But the 35-year-old writer, on his lunch hour, isn’t exactly complaining. “Las Vegas Noir” covers plenty of the valley — even Summerlin and Chinatown.

“Just putting Summerlin in an anthology of Las Vegas crime fiction is funny in and of itself,” Keene says. “We did our best to avoid the cliches, like the strip clubs and the poker tournaments. There’s some of that in the anthology, but it doesn’t dominate the setting. It doesn’t overpower the characterization. It doesn’t deform the plots.

“This is dark crime fiction. It’s not mystery fiction. It’s not British cozy fiction where everyone’s lined up in the parlor, ‘Clue’ style. This is hard-core, dark Las Vegas crime fiction. It can shock you. It can startle you. It can make you uncomfortable late at night when you’re reading the book.”

The shootings, cutting up of bodies, sex crimes and thievery unfold in a collection of 16 short stories written by multicultural local and national writers who live or have lived in Las Vegas long enough to absorb its culture and its people.

The book opens with “The Tik,” a previously unpublished story by the late John O’Brien who wrote “Leaving Las Vegas.” It’s cold, shocking, gruesome.

“That’s the handshake at the beginning,” Keene says. “It gets more screwed up from there. It gets more deranged.”

This makes Keene smile.

Keene had been reading noir anthologies centered in various cities when he realized nothing had been written for Las Vegas. There was “Brooklyn Noir,” “Miami Noir,” “San Francisco Noir,” “Istanbul Noir”...

“I couldn’t fathom that there was nobody editing a ‘Las Vegas Noir,’ ” Keene says. “They had all the other cities covered. They even had ‘Twin Cities Noir.’ No offense, but Twin Cities? C’mon. I was shocked. I said, ‘I know, I know we can make this work.’ ”

He contacted the series’ publishers — Akashic Books of Brooklyn. Then he enlisted the help of an old friend from graduate school, Todd James Pierce, and compiled a list of authors.

The key was to find writers who had “a solid understanding” of Las Vegas as a city and as a culture, writers who could reach into communities and build characters while avoiding Las Vegas cliches commonly found in magazine stories, nonfiction and novels.

Keene and Pierce passed on well-known writers who knew little about Las Vegas.

Instead they mixed established authors such as O’Brien, David Corbett and Tod Goldberg with newcomers such as Bliss Esposito, who recently earned her Master of Fine Arts degree from UNLV, and Celeste Starr, a transgender escort in Pahrump. The also selected writers Nora Pierce, Pablo Medina, Scott Phillips, Jose Skinner, Vu Tran, Preston L. Allen, Janet Berliner, Felicia Campbell, Jaq Greenspon, Lori Kozlowski and Christine McKellar.

They came up with a diverse collection: A foul-mouthed Chicago mobster with a nasty background hides out in Summerlin by posing as a respected rabbi. Another man hunts for his ex-wife in Las Vegas, hoping to save her from her abusive husband, who runs a restaurant in Chinatown. An introverted young Green Valley woman, who works at a gym, makes jewelry at home and is haunted by pressure from her dominating parents to lose weight, finally reaches a breaking point and shows no remorse. A murder at the Nevada Test Site unravels a story about nuclear testing as spectator sport, and a gay man cruising in a dark and dirty Pahrump sex house hooks up for a night of sex that is about to go terribly wrong.

The writers do such a great job of layering, creating depth, building suspense and weaving in the histories of different characters that even readers who prefer their literature without violence and warped characters, derailed and teetering through social land mines, will likely enjoy “Las Vegas Noir.”

It’s not the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority’s way to market the city, Keene says, laughing.

“By its very nature, it’s a dark and twisted and distorted look at Las Vegas,” he says. “But in the details, in the settings, in the characterization, there is a truth, a dark truth in each one of these stories. Is it a balanced and fair look at our town? No, it’s crime fiction. If you want to understand the seedy aspect of this town ... you’ve got to take in all of Las Vegas as a whole.”

Keene is right about that. Las Vegas is full of guys like Benny (from Medina’s “Benny Rojas and the Rough Riders”) who leave their native country for a good job and a better life in Las Vegas.

And sure, Summerlin has a dark side. You can hide from urban grit there, but not from all the traps of humanity. When your neighborhood was built and inhabited almost overnight, you can’t know where everyone came from and why he or she left home in the first place. A million writers can explain that Vegas is a melting pot, providing refuge to anyone seeking quick money and a steady gig, but the voices of these authors make it real.

“All the characters are brought here because of all the opportunities Las Vegas offers,” Keene says. “That’s why people come here. But sometimes there are addictions here, there are temptations, there’s weirdness, like any town. You don’t have to move to Vegas to get city. You could move to Omaha and be just as down and out and dirty. But Vegas has its own particular kind of seediness that some of these writers do a fantastic job of capturing.”

After receiving a doctorate in creative writing from Florida State University, Keene moved to Las Vegas in 2001 and was an adjunct professor at UNLV. He’s had a couple of poetry collections published and a biography of the Las Vegas band the Killers.

“Every one of these stories blew me away,” Keene says. “I’ve never seen a story about Chinatown that’s that in-depth. Vu Tran really peels the curtain away behind that place. He makes it vivid.”

Johnny Temple, co-founder of Akashic Books, says the geographical breakdowns of the cities is a mandate for the noir series, as is a multicultural collection of voices. “The book is supposed to express the full city,” he says. “We want the books to feel authentic and true to the people living in Las Vegas.”

“We’re not just trying to put out city books as fast as we can,” he says. “When I’m reading the stories, I’m learning about the texture of the city, the vibe of the city ... I love the fact that the first story in ‘Las Vegas Noir’ is an unpublished O’Brien story.”

The story came via O’Brien’s sister, writer Erin O’Brien, whom Pierce met at a writers conference. It was the first story Keene and Pierce received.

O’Brien didn’t name the neighborhood in which “The Tik” takes place, but Keene and Pierce used details from the story to determine that the neighborhood is the Scotch 80s.

Now all Keene needs to see is a story set around the Huntridge Tavern.

“I also wanted a good Asian massage parlor story, but no one came through for me,” Keene says with a smile. “I’m going to have to do another one of these.”