By A.M. Larks
Crime Plus Music, edited by Jim Fusilli, is a noir anthology published in 2016 whose crime stories are all inspired by music. While the anthology spans an impressive mix of genres and musical eras, the nearly ten years after its original publication has shown that some of the stories have not aged as well as others.
Genre writing-- and in particular crime stories,--have slowly started to shift away from the racial and sexist biases of the past and begun to reflect the current social norms and mores. Gratuitous violence, especially against women and other marginalized communities, are now considered intentional when written, often accompanying a cultural critique of the attitudes that allow or encourage such violence. The stories in this collection that reflect those past ideas are best skipped over like the filler song on a brand-new CD.
While some stories are stuck in the past, there are others that embody the new wave of crime writing to come. Unsurprisingly, it is those stories written by the female authors that reflect this ideology. Violence against the female body is anything but gratuitous in Naomi Rand’s “The Misfits” or Alison Gaylin’s “All Ages”. Indeed, it is just the violence that serves as the justification for the protagonists’ later actions. Rand’s story may suffer slightly from the stiffness of an info dump as compared to Gaylin’s, but both also tackle the vulnerability of how this industry views the female form and the need for female allyship to survive it and ultimately change it.
Allyship is truly tested in “The Long Black Veil” by Val McDermid. McDermid, inspired by Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean”, dives headfirst into the complexities of small-town life with a rape, a child, a salacious relationship, a confrontation, a murder, and a trial. McDermid does not shy away from discussing class warfare, antiquated societal values, and the prejudicial nature of small-town politics. Betrayal is at the heart of the question of “The Long Black Veil”, leaving the reader to answer for themselves just who is betraying whom? Despite not being necessarily centered around the music industry, the wider lens on the world and its view on women is what makes “The Long Black Veil” stand out in this collection.
However, it would be a mistake to only portray women as the victim. Men are not the
only perpetrators of violence. Erica Wright’s “No Place You’re Likely to Find” and “The Blackbird” by Peter Robinson feature complex female perpetrators which serves to round out our view of women in music. Without such stories, a myopic view would exist perpetrating the damsel in distress,/knight stereotypes. Wright’s story features an impressive “get-to-know-you” back and forth that spans the story and cumulates in a final realization by both the protagonist and the reader. In Robinson’s tale, the female perpetrators are on the outside of the narration and appear only briefly, which is what makes the feat of rounding them out even more admirable. It’s hard to say if the female character in Peter’s Blauner “The Last Temptation of Frankie Lymon” is a perpetrator or a victim, and the genius of the plot and backstory can make one forgive the stiffness of the prose.
However, of all the female-centered stories, Galadrielle Allman’s “Only Women Bleed” takes home the Grammy. Allman captures the confusing nature of coming to age as a woman and that comes with it specifically the violence, the desire, the awareness, and the blood. The eye-opening perspective of the narrator coming of age and introduced to the world this way allows the reader to have this experience with her. For men, it is a new hell to imagine growing up this way; for women a familiar refrain that revibrates for the protagonist, circling round and round until we see how it all plays out in her relationships with her younger “free” sister, to herself and her own awakening desire in bed late at night, and to her male relationships with bus bullies and ex-best friends.
Noir is generally known to focus on a protagonist with a self-destructive pattern, one who keeps making the wrong choices. Zoë Sharp’s “Earworms” features a rounded female protagonist whose past choices are influencing her current ones, leaving her few good choices with how to proceed. But the story itself centers around clandestine governmental agencies and geo-politics, giving the story a spy thriller feeling rather than one of a noir. It is not the only story in this collection to suffer such a turn. David Corbett’s “Are You With Me, Doctor Wu?” takes a fascinating story of a recovering addict/punk rocker replete with all his drug-fueled questionable choices into surprise spy novel in a few short unconvincing paragraphs.
Refreshingly, “Unbalanced” by Craig Johnston features a late-night interaction between two strangers, a young girl and a sheriff, that is neither violent nor a rescue; simply a moment in time between two well-rounded characters who both appreciate the connection to humanity that a good song can provide.
There are many not-to-be missed stories in this collection. They are the stories that not only round out the female character but scrutinize the treatment of women in music. It is those stories that elucidate how the music industry treats women as musicians, as patrons, as muses, and as subjects for the audience. In this way, those few stories without such an examination contribute to the exact narrative mill being criticized: women are objects. And in this way, they feel inherently dated.
Lucky for us we live in the time that we do. No longer are we forced to listen to every song on an album. We don’t have to count grooves to skip songs or count the seconds while fast-forwarding our tape deck. Treat this collection like your Pandora playlist. You don’t trash a channel because you don’t like a song it played. You vote it down, skip it, and refine the algorithm. There are several authors in this collection whose work is certainly worthy of their own channel.
A.M. Larks’s writing has appeared in Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors, NiftyLit, Scoundrel Time, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, Five on the Fifth, Charge Magazine, and the Brevity, ZYZZYVA, and Ploughshares blogs. She has served as a judge for the Loud Karma Productions’ Emerging Female and Nonbinary Playwriting Award and has performed her stories at Lit Up at Town Hall Theatre in Lafayette, CA. She is the managing editor and blog editor at Kelp Journal. She is the former fiction editor at Please See Me, the former blog editor at The Coachella Review, as well as the former photography editor at Kelp Journal. A.M. Larks earned an MFA in creative writing from UC Riverside at Palm Desert, a JD, and a BA in English literature.
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