This collection of 13 short stories is the latest offering in Akashic Books’ flourishing Noir series. Brooklyn-based Akashic began the series in 2004, and it has proven to be a savvy entrepreneurial move in an industry rarely celebrated for innovative business models.

Akashic’s gambit: Tap local enthusiasms by issuing moderately priced collections of darkish mystery stories that take place in or around select metro areas, from which each of the books takes its title. Hence we have Brooklyn Noir, the first in the series, but also Baltimore Noir, D.C. Noir, and London Noir, to cite just a few of the 80 or so titles currently in print, with about 30 focusing on non-U.S. locales.

Brussels Noir typifies this latter category. Like the other volumes in the series, Brussels Noir is available only in trade paperback and e-book formats, a circumstance that reflects Akashic’s slogan — "Reverse Gentrification of the Literary World" — as much as the company’s intent to disrupt the established format conventions of its industry.

And in large measure because established crime writers (e.g., Dennis Lehane, Laura Lippman, and George Pelecanos) are tapped to serve as locally prominent editors of each volume, the series does not fall short. The stories in the Brussels anthology are consistently first-rate, as well, both in entertainment and “literary” value. They’re compelling representatives of a genre which, the critics tell us, is today in full flower as a renascent artistic phenomenon.

In spite of the high quality of these little mysteries, some readers may be disappointed if they open Brussels Noir expecting to encounter the familiar elements they’re used to from American film noir and traditional hard-boiled detective fiction. There are no private dicks in these pages, no duplicitous femmes fatales, and few revelations of criminal rot in the hearts of seemingly respectable paragons of polite society.

Most of the Brussels stories unfold in the nighttime cityscape of obsession and disguise, where many agents of ill intent — human and otherwise — lurk. If you’re intrigued by seduction and betrayals, then yes, you will find these here. Love triangles? More than a few. Violence? Not as much as you might expect, given American conventions, but when it occurs, it’s quick and targeted, never gratuitous, and always emotionally resonant.

As I noted above, most of the action in these stories takes place after dark, with the narratives often centering on a character’s wanderings in the dark streets in search of someone or something. In Brussels Noir, these include vanished sons and lovers, a lost artist fitted out in full African ritual regalia, a kidnapped mermaid, a killer long disguised and gone underground, and, on the simplest level, the way home. The stories in Brussels Noir range from stark family tragedies to tales of love gone aground to dystopian visions of an unspecified future, and on through — perhaps surprising in a noir anthology — a thorough dose of magical realism.

For the reader unfamiliar with the political and cultural realities of Brussels, this book can be instructive. As center of administration for the European Union (not to mention NATO and a number of other pan-European institutions), the city stands in the public consciousness as an embodiment of organization and political order. Conversely, it can also embody (and it often does in this book) a bureaucracy that’s at best unfeeling and at worst cruel and capricious. (Ask the U.K. citizens who recently voted for Brexit about this dimension of Brussels’ public persona.)

At the same time, as this anthology bears out, Brussels is remarkably diverse. Its population includes substantial minority groups beyond the well-known top-level distinctions between Dutch speaking versus Francophone populations. Look closely, and there are quadrants of the city where African, Turkish, Caribbean, Arab, and other practitioners of Islam dominate in numbers. This is the canvas on which the authors in this collection paint.

For this reviewer, a handful of the stories are singularly resonant. Kenan Görgün’s “Ritual: Diary of Flesh and Faith,” my favorite, is a haunting evocation of a character’s search through Brussel’s midnight cityscape for ceremonies of ritual sacrifice.

“The Parakeet,” Barbara Abel’s narrative of a mother who perceives a rivalry for her husband’s favor between her son and their student boarder, culminates in a moment of ironic violence that suggests Nathaniel Hawthorne at his best. In “The Beekeeper,” Jean-Luc Cornette tells of the unlikely friendship of Belgium’s prince and a marijuana-dealing city-bureaucrat-turned-royal-gardener and their joint exploration of the unseen world via a self-styled Caribbean psychic.

Today so many of the newly minted short stories we encounter in (literally) hundreds of little magazines, both in print and online, seem to dwell unremittingly on character and language at the expense of narrative.

At the same time, the online serials that specialize in crime fiction and “noir” too often focus on shockingly sudden and gratuitous violence, on the unhinged criminal mind, and on catalogs of illicit drugs fueling clumsy robberies and tire-screaming getaways. If you’re interested, the compelling narratives in Brussels Noir — not to mention the other volumes in the series — can provide a welcome counterbalance to both these prevailing trends.

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