The pounding in my head was a Sousa March gone wild, and made it hard to keep my eyes closed. So I forced them open, blinking into the harsh light of the bare bulb. When I'd agreed to this job, I didn't know it'd lead to me laying on my back in some basement, waiting for my death. If I'd known, I'd have turned it down. Even if the dame was in distress...

Reviewing game fiction is difficult. It's almost a given that the authors are going to be unpolished and new, and the result just one step removed from the fan fiction you can find nearly anywhere. Shades of noir doesn't break the stereotype, unless you count including a tale by Max Allan Collins. So I'm not going to actually review the fiction as literature. Instead, I'm going to look at the book from the perspective of a GM and gamer.

The setting of noir is The City, a generic hodge-podge of stereotypes and cliches of noir fiction and film. What the short stories in shades of noir do is give a better picture of what The City is like. The mixed times is hinted at with old and new music, slang, cars, and characters. The City could exist in the 1920s, 30s, 50s, 80s or 90s without looking or being much different. There's a timeless quality to it, and the book does a decent job of portraying this.

Unfortunately, the book concentrates primarily on lone protagonists. This is fine for fiction, but if you are running a noir game, it is probably for more than one person. If more of the stories had included groups as the main focus, they would have had more utility for a GM looking for ideas.

I wish there was more to say about the book. Some of the stories are okay, some aren't so good. The book does have a couple decent ideas, but you could get those from better sources (Hammet and Chandler, for example). It's a bit pricey, in my opinion, for what you get. Yet, if you are really stuck for ideas or have no conception of what The City should be like, it can be a good place to start.

Style: 3 (Average)
Substance: 2 (Sparse)