As Crime and the City has already done the other Birmingham – you know the one in the English Midlands, full of Peaky Blinders, warm beer, the famous “Curry Miles” and with more miles of canal than Venice – it seems only fair to tackle the other one – Birmingham, Alabama. Though I’m not sure the two Birmingham’s really have much in common – Alabama is not known for its canals or its Balti curries. I visited the Birmingham in America once and there’s no Bullring (as the centre of town is known), no canal boats, and no Aston Villa Football Club. Very different cities…. But perhaps united in crime writing (though there’s way, way more guns in Alabama).
Birmingham, Alabama low-level legbreaker Kincaid has a gun. In local author (and Birmingham sportswriter) Bobby Matthews’s noir love story Magic City Blues (2023) he’s supposed to protect Abby Doyle, the daughter of the city’s most dangerous crime boss. But when Abby’s fiancé is found murdered, Kincaid is forced to team up with Birmingham Police Department (BPD) detective Laura D’Agostino to find the killer and protect Abby at all costs … even from her own gangster father. This is a great introduction to Birmingham – at least its back alleys, hole-in-the-wall clubs and bars. By the way, Magic City Blues is published by the terrifically named Shotgun Honey, a US small press publisher with a focus on rural noir, grit lit, and the everyman protagonist – check them out if that’s your preferred sub-genre.
Cheryl A Head’s Time’s Undoing is also a great trawl through the streets of Birmingham – this time though in 1929. This is Birmingham is in its supposed heyday, when it was known as the “Magic City” for its booming steel industry. Though the city didn’t welcome everyone equally. With his beautiful, light-skinned wife and flash car, Robert is beginning to worry that he might be drawing the wrong kind of attention in his new home town. He is. Then skip to Detroit in 2019 and Meghan McKenzie at the Detroit Free Press has grown up hearing family lore about her great-grandfather’s murder — but no one knows what really happened back then. Determined to find answers to her family’s long-buried tragedy, Meghan travels down to Birmingham. Apparently the book is inspired by true events. Cheryl A Head is also the author of the Detroit-set Charlie Mack Motown mysteries.
Waights Taylor Jr. was born in a segregated Birmingham and writes about that horrid era in his Joe McGrath and Sam Rucker series, starting with Kiss of Salvation (2014). White BPD Homicide Detective Joe McGrath teams up with Sam Rucker, the city’s only black private eye, to try and solve a 1947 series of multiple murders of black sex workers. Their task isn’t made easier by Joe’s boss, racist police chief, Big Bob Watson. Joe McGrath and Sam Rucker return in Touch of Redemption (2016). It is 1948 in segregated Alabama, and Joe, a white man, and Sam, a black man, face numerous obstacles as they attempt to find the murderers of Joe’s father twenty-five years ago. The pair face corrupt judges and law enforcement officials, and a secret fraternity of men determined to maintain the Southern way of life and ‘the operation,’ their illegal liquor business. And lastly, we jump forward to 1963 in Heed the Apocalypse (2017) though Joe and Sam are still around as the Freedom Marchers arrive in Birmingham.
Of course, if you need more noir there’s Alabama Noir (2020) in the amazing Akashic series with stories by Ace Atkins, Tom Franklin, Anita Miller Garner, Suzanne Hudson, Kirk Curnutt, Wendy Reed, Carolyn Haines, Anthony Grooms, Michelle Richmond, Winston Groom, Ravi Howard, Thom Gossom Jr., Brad Watson, Daniel Wallace, D. Winston Brown, and Marlin Barton. The book blurb says it all: ‘We see desperate behavior on the banks of the Tennessee River, in the neighborhoods of Birmingham, in the affluent suburbs of Mobile, in a cemetery in Montgomery, and even on the deceptively pleasant beaches of the Gulf of Mexico.’ What more could you want?
Now for a change of tack. There are a lot of successful cozy series set way on down in old Alabama. You might like Erika Chase’s The Ashton Corners Books Club mysteries, which are about Lizzie Turner, an elementary reading specialist in a small Alabama town, and her group of friends in the Ashton Corners Mystery Readers and Cheese Straws Society. Or JJ Cook’s The Biscuit Bowl Food Truck Mystery Series which follows Zoe and her specialty classic Southern food truck around Alabama dispending fried biscuit bowls and solving murders, or there’s GP Gardener’s series featuring Professor Cleo Mack who decides to retire early and move to Harbor Village, a retirement community on the Alabama Coast where the seniors keep dying slightly prematurely. I’ll add in Susan Wittig Albert’s Darling Dahlias historical mystery series set-in a small-town called Darling, Alabama during the Great Depression and featuring the ladies of the local garden club who band together to solve murders too. So many – but they’re not set in Birmingham.
However, and finally, the late Alabama poet laureate Anne George did write about Birmingham in her cozy eight book the Southern Sisters Mystery series. George’s main character, Patricia Anne Hollowell, is a sweet-natured, retired schoolteacher who lived in Birmingham, Alabama – and solves a murder now and then. The books – and most fans of the genre seem to agree that Murder Shoots the Bull (1999) is the best (you don’t need to read them in any particular order really) and typical of the style George uses – a narrator of the most southern ladylike vocal style – think Janet Evanovich down south. The last in the series – Murder Boogies With Elvis (2001) – has to be one of the best murder novel titles ever too. The series won a coveted Agatha award.
So, no curry, Peaky B’s or bodies in Victorian canals, but the Birmingham on the other side of the pond sure has it’s fair share of criminality to write about.
