Asked to assemble an anthology of darker themed stories, Chris McKinney was intrigued, but aside from local noir legends Scott Kikkawa and Lono Waiwaiole, “it’s not like there are two dozen talented wannabe Dennis Lehanes running around the island,” he says. And that’s a good thing: He says too many Lehanes—an author distinguished for his gritty crime stories and mysteries—would lead to “fedora fatigue.”

But instead of pulp crime scribblers, what if he tempted literary writers “who more or less represented the demographics of the city” into a trip to the dark side? Akashic Books publisher Johnny Temple liked the idea, but despite early yeses from two of Hawai‘i’s bestselling authors, Kiana Davenport and Alan Brennert, other rising stars rejected McKinney outright. Still, as the deadline loomed, he thought he had a good list, until several writers changed their minds.

Fortunately, McKinney’s wide net landed Stephanie Han, whose divorce thriller at Kaimana Beach opens the book. After hard-boiled tales of yakuza and double-crossing femme fatales by Waiwaiole, Davenport and McKinney himself, the “Home in the Islands” section features locals caught in locals-only nightmares: Mindy Eun Soo Pennybacker’s saga of a sovereignty con artist, a tale of a heist by private school students that I submitted, and Christy Passion’s story of an ER nurse trying to calm a suicidal terminal patient. In the “Cops” section, Kikkawa tours the 1950s mean streets, Brennert masterfully depicts Chang Apana (the model for Charlie Chan), and speculative novelist Tom Gammarino spins an AI whodunit.

The final trio of stories—including two by last-second Gen Z recruits B.A. Kobayashi and McKinney’s daughter, Morgan—scramble logic, point of view and reality itself. Conjuring a shambolic ghoul out of various deities, iconic Filipino author Michelle Cruz Skinner ends the volume with the spirit of noir itself, culling humanity as she moves indifferently through the centuries.

Reviewers were enchanted. The New York Times Book Review, New York Journal of Books, Kirkus, Booklist and Publisher’s Weekly praised Honolulu Noir’s revisionist take on our “paradise,” its diverse voices and genre-busting verve—validating McKinney, especially his enlistment of female writers. “The challenge was taking writers out of their comfort zones,” he says. In doing so, he took Hawai‘i literature with him.

Paul Theroux hadn’t planned to write a historical novel, but after reading a recent biography of George Orwell, he says he was “struck by how little there was about his time in Burma.” Theroux had read everything he wrote. “If you do that with an author—read everything—you know the person well,” he says. Now, he noticed the gaping hole about the future 1984 author’s life “when he was a policeman called Eric Blair, 18 years old, just out of Eton.”

Without telling his agent or publisher, Theroux began writing, for eight months wondering, “Is this anything?” After a “yes” from his publisher, he spent 18 more months writing, while re-reading Orwell, his letters and biographies. The result, Burma Sahib, was the most positively reviewed book by a Hawai‘i author in 2024. John Irving called it “the book of the 21st century” in The New York Times.

Readers can enjoy this as a brilliantly paced, highly sexed shocker, gorgeous with luminous linguistic cinematography. Burma and Blair come alive thanks to Theroux’s unobtrusive weaving of Blair’s own words and those of his contemporaries, including from Burmese sources. Lastly, Theroux says, “I had the great advantage of having traveled in Burma on four occasions, the first in 1970, when Burma, and Rangoon in particular, still had a colonial air and its architecture intact,” though seedier than before.

More than high entertainment, the book strips away the “dainty” (Blair’s word) nostalgia about British colonialism.

Theroux links imperial sadism, incarceration and sex to show how colonialism “alters the colonial administrators themselves, that is, makes them coarser and unjust.” And the birth of Orwell as Blair’s conscience is Burma Sahib’s subject. But, Theroux warns: “People think of him as St. George, and he was far from that. He held at times racist views, he was violent and contradictory at times, he felt he needed to atone—and that produced many of his eccentricities. He was a brilliant writer and like many of us flawed, but he is the more human for that. You have to remember how young he was—a teenager.”

Today, Theroux says, with Donald Trump “talking of making Canada the 51st state, and acquiring Panama and Greenland, you have a clear indication of colonial megalomania.” Burma Sahib couldn’t be more prescient.

Wing Tek Lum tells the story of the pioneer Chinese in Hawai‘i in brief poems that function as chapters and, in many cases, as epitaphs for individuals who’d otherwise be lost in history. Begun in the 1990s, laid down, then resumed in 2015, the book exudes the confidence of a writer who has reached peak mastery by taking on the grandest, most challenging project of his life—and has seen it through to perfection.

Part One delves into the plight of those who immigrate to Hawai‘i, and those they leave behind. Both are losers in the deal, as these poem titles hint: “An Ocean and a Lifetime Away,” “In Exile,” “The Letter,” “The Spinsters.” Work dominates Part Two: “Sugar Cane Lament,” “Poi Factory,” “In the Store,” “The Houseboy” and so on.

We taste the bitterness of lives of drudgery that end without success or even variation. Because Lum has consulted numerous texts, archives and government reports, these spare chronicles are nonetheless packed with details of work, scents, foods, the sweat and, yes, joy in the landscape, the bird life, the grace of Hawaiians. And love. Lum weaves ‘Ōlelo proverbs collected by Native Hawaiian scholar Mary Kawena Pukui into his sex scenes, enriching them with hidden meaning.

Part Three, about Honolulu’s devastating Chinatown fire of 1900, is “the fulcrum,” Lum says. We experience the disaster from the inside, ignited by ignorance and racism. Afterward, newly homeless Chinese are herded into tent camps, stripped of their clothing, doused in pesticide and released to start over with nothing.

Parts Four and Five chronicle post-fire lives, especially the diversions, which include opium and brothels. Lum steps into the lives of prostitutes to record this inevitable outcome of a remittance society. But we do catch glimpses, in poems of unearthly beauty, of the few who break away and move deep into the valleys, where they marry Island women.

Part Six is a requiem. Because of China’s emphasis on ancestor worship, “these men’s stories were forgotten,” Lum says. “In retrospect that was what I was trying to do in this book, poem by poem—to give voice to all those Chinese” who died leaving hardly a trace. With The Oldtimers, they’re back in the books.