Richmond Noir

Foreword by Tom Robbins

It may sound odd, but when I think of Richmond, Virginia — or, at least, when I look back on my years in that charming, antebellum, ostensibly conservative town — my thoughts turn frequently to alleys. And considering the images and moods that most people associate with those narrow, secluded, generally unlit and gritty little passageways, it should not then be totally unexpected that my memories of Richmond’s alleys tend to be colored with shades of noir. Which is to say, colored with seamy urban romance and suave big-city vice, the twin elements most responsible for the seductive throb at the murky heart of noir.

Presumably, alleys in other parts of Richmond are quite different in character, but the bohemian/bourgeois/badass Fan District, where I lived, boasts to this day alleyways that are simultaneously inviting and forbidding, elegant and squalid, ominous and suffused with grace. Old, cobblestoned (Stone Age marshmallows in the silver moonshine), lined with wisteria, rose bushes, and carriage houses (servant quarters become artist studios, stables become garages); perfumed by honeysuckle, motor oil, invisible kitchens, brown-bagged beverages, garbage cans, and history; resonant with dog-bark, woo-pitch, bottle-shatter, domestic squabbling, financial plotting (legitimate and otherwise), fervent intellectual discourse, and stray fragments of Southern rock and jazz; they become all the more interesting after nightfall, when secrets — some merely naughty, others more darkly hued — seep increasingly into them from shadowed crannies or the backrooms and walled gardens of abodes along the way.

On scores of hot, sticky, summer nights, with a restless city feeling like the interior of a napalmed watermelon, I walked the alleys of the Fan, sometimes until dawn; and having thus been privy to certain of the secrets they protected, having trusted them with a secret of my own (I was desperately in love with a married woman at the time and fully expecting her armed husband to leap out at me from every spooky nook), it doesn’t exactly surprise me that there is sufficient noir in Richmond — enough hidden larceny, lunacy, and lust — to fuel the fiction of the fine writers who enliven these pages.