In the summer of 1979, when I lived on the East Side of Providence, a 20-year-old RISD junior fell down an elevator shaft in a loft on Westminster Street. The elevator door opened, she stepped inside, but the car wasn’t there. She plummeted five stories.

That’s the dark side of Providence — one minute, you’re pressing an elevator button, the next, the ground gives way beneath you. It’s the city that inspired horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, where Poe courted Sarah Helen Whitman, and where bodies occasionally turn up in concrete foundations.

There’s plenty of the macabre in “Providence Noir,” a new anthology of mysteries edited by Rhode Island novelist Ann Hood as part of a series published by Akashic Books. It features authors as well known as Elizabeth Strout, who won a Pulitzer Prize for “Olive Kitteridge,” and Peter Farrelly of the movie-making brothers.

The collection begins on a creepy note with Luanne Rice’s “Gold Leaf,” about an artist bound on eliminating her lover’s wife, and ends with Farrelly’s riotously funny story about a con man getting his comeuppance, called “The Saturday Night Before Easter Sunday.” This tale is worth reading just for the one-liners and ends the anthology with a dose of black humor.

In between you’ll find plenty of straight noir, such as Hood’s own campy homage to “Double Indemnity,” a story called “Under the Shepard Clock” that makes use of a department store icon and favorite meeting place. Among the darkest are “Femur,” by Hester Kaplan, set at the psychiatric institution Butler Hospital, and Taylor M. Polites’s “Armory Park,” where a random shooting unnerves a young couple.

There are Mafia references here too, no surprise for the city where Raymond Patriarca once ran the New England mob from his vending machine business on Federal Hill. Robert Leuci’s “The Vengeance Taker” is a poignant, original and unflinching look into this world that avoids the usual clichés.

But the two finest selections don’t try too hard to be Providence stories — they are just damn good stories, with compelling situations and vivid characters. In John Searles’s “The Pig,” a recent widower arrives back in Providence from his Florida home with a cookie jar full of his wife’s remains. But all is not as it seems. (Searles nails the average Rhode Islander’s ambition to winter in Florida.) LaShonda Katrice Barnett’s “Waltz Me Once Again” features an older lesbian couple in conflict with a developmentally challenged neighbor. The tension is kept high not by contrivance but good characterization.

For best results, curl up with “Providence Noir” on a train headed into the city and then wander the narrow streets of the East Side, preferably on a rainy afternoon. Just be sure to watch your step.

Betty J. Cotter is a Rhode Island author and teacher. Her blog on writing can be found at swampyankeewoman.wordpress.com.

IF YOU GO

What: An evening with “Providence Noir” editor Ann Hood and contributors Taylor M. Polites, Robert Leuci, Thomas Cobb and Pablo Rodriguez

Where: Bank Square Books, 53 W. Main St., Mystic

When: Friday at 6 p.m.