The collection of fourteen crime short stories has one clear central character: the city of Nairobi itself.

No-one who reads this collection of short crime fiction by contemporary Kenyan authors, drawn together by Peter Kimani (who also contributes one story) will place it on the shelf with tourist guides to Kenya or glossy coffee table books about the countries dramatic landscape and plentiful wildlife. There is plenty of wildlife in the collection, much of it extremely dangerous: but these threatening creatures walk on two legs.

James Joyce’s Nairobeans?

If the collection were written by the same author there would be a temptation to compare it, perhaps, to James Joyce’s Dubliners: the stories capture the nature of the city just as Joyce did the Irish capital just over a century ago. There is a fun element of spotting locations you know, as this is set very much in the real Nairobi on real streets and in real bars.

But sometimes you don’t even need to be told the location of the story, notably in Winifred Kiunga’s ‘She Dug Two Graves’, set in Eastleigh (what a wonderful crime genre title). Life as a Kenyan Indian is brought to life to an incredible degree in Rasna Warah’s psychological thriller, ‘Have Another Roti’ (not a crime genre title at all), where the setting is a part of society, not geographical.

All the city’s denizens are here: the Kenyans themselves; the Kenyan Indians; the Kenyan Somalis; the white Kenyans (‘the Kenyan Cowboys’); and those passing through as tourists, international workers, students doing ‘research’.

Cops are robbers

The police appear as regularly as you might expect in a collection of crime stories: but they are generally more criminal that the criminals themselves and are universally feared and avoided. In the final story in the collection, ‘The Night Beat’, the police even rob each other of both money and wives. This probably isn’t a collection to gift to a friend who is a police officer.

Only the most perverse of tourists would use this is a guidebook anyway: even affluent Karen, Parklands and Westlands pose a risk, although not so obviously dangerous as, say, Kangami or Mukuru kwa Njenga. Ironically, Kibera is a place of safety that a foolhardy young man leaves for the enticing pleasures of Karen in Peter Kimani’s ‘Blood Sister’, a decision that costs him and those close to him dearly.

Drink (Tusker and changaa) and drugs, especially weed but also cocaine, are routine ways of escaping what is often a living hell. Sex provides another release, often graphically described using real street language and swearing. Don’t gift this collection to your staid church going aunt either.

Religion is there, and one of the most intriguing stories in a collection where intrigue is already plentiful, Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s ‘The Hermit in the Helmet’, is as much a magical realist allegory as it is crime fiction. Many of the stories transcend the often constraining ‘rules’ of the crime genre, but that is a good thing. There are no bodies in the library: because there are no libraries. Here the bodies are in the street or, in Caroline Mose’s ‘Plot Ten’, in the toilet.

Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman

Everyone in this collection has a hard time: women have it harder. Troy Onyango’s ‘A Song from a Forgotten Place’ is unrelenting in its portrait of life for a woman who has fallen prey to drug addiction. It, and Kevin Mwachiro’s ‘Number Sita’ are definitely not suitable for children (the latter also features very frank descriptions of prostitution and lesbianism). Children are omnipresent and see many things that young eyes should not see.

The collection isn’t perfect. Some of the stories don’t help the reader out enough and end in obscurity. The Swahili and the slang aren’t always explained; and the proof-reading could have been more thorough. But the main issue is that this unique collection is just that: unique. The reader ends the collection wanting so much more.

Nairobi Noir, published by Jahazi Press, features stories by Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Stanley Gazemba, Ngumi Kibera, Peter Kimani, Winfred Kiunga, Kinyanjui Kombani, Caroline Mose, Kevin Mwachiro, Wanjiku wa Ngugi, Faith Oneya, Makena Onjerika, Troy Onyango, J.E. Sibi-Okumu, and Rasna Warah and is available in softcover, on Kindle and as an audio book.