The Best International Crime Fiction of 2018
While all Iraqis will readily agree that their life has always been noir, the majority of the stories in Baghdad Noir are set in the years following the American invasion of 2003, though one story is set in 1950 and three are set in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet it is this recent history of Iraq—over the last few decades—that serves to inform its present . . . Cementing the destruction of Iraqi life was Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. But that was hardly the end of Iraq’s noir story. In April 2003, the US invasion, though it precipitated the end of Saddam’s dictatorial rule, killed off any possibility of a secular, modern Iraq once and for all.
Taken as a whole, the stories in Baghdad Noir testify to the enduring resilience of the Iraqi spirit amid an ongoing, real-life milieu of despair that the literary form of noir can at best only approximate. Yet the contributions here manage to hold their own as individual stories, where the rich traditions of intersecting cultures transcend the immediate political reality—even while being simultaneously informed by it. Much like the diverse tapestry of cultures that join together on the banks of the Tigris to form the City of Peace, Baghdad Noir reveals that there’s nothing monolithic or ordinary about the voices of its writers.
“The collection goes so far beyond the Iraq most of us have been exposed to over the last 20 years and offers up a vision of this important world city in all its complexity and humanity. Crime fiction may not have a long tradition in Iraqi literature, but the authors assembled here embrace the finest noir traditions by shining a critical, incisive light on their city, ravaged by war and discord but full of moments of life and hope, some fulfilled, others crushed. This is a vital book, in every sense of the word.” —CrimeReads
“Among them these writers encompass, if not a Baghdad entire, then at least a Baghdad of diverse experiences and perspectives, and absolutely a Baghdad focused on the Arabic world and not the Western.” —NPR Books
(Group read suggestion from Julie Jacobs, book club moderator.)
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