Saturday Review: “The Thrill of Southern Noir” a review by Andrew Clark of Michael Cody’s Streets of Nashville forthcoming in NCLR Online Fall 2025
Big Southern City Noir could be Atlanta or Miami or Charlotte, Richmond or Birmingham or Columbia. Cody sets his in Country Music City USA: Nashville, TN. Clark posits, rightly so, that there needs to be more Southern Urban Noir and “Streets of Nashville is a crime thriller in the vein of the best noir literature.”
Clark relates the book has two plot themes: will Ezra succeed in becoming a songwriter and will Ezra succeed in staying alive after witnessing the first in what becomes a serial killer’s bundle of bodies? You’ll have to read the novel to find out the answers to both. Clark focuses on the context and setting of place ant time. “As much as Cody captures place in his novel,” Clark writes, “he also captures the sense of what it was like to live in the late 1980s.Cody’s Southerners explain the mysteries of the world in the context of their Southern religious tradition that feels like a mix of superstition and Biblical rigidity.”
For extra behind-the-scenes with the author, listen to Cody on Senior Associate Editor Christy Alexander Hallberg’s Rock is Lit podcast!
Read the review here and buy the novel from the publisher or from your local independent bookstore.
