A brief literary history of Providence

Finishing Bruce DeSilva's really good crime novel, "Rogue Island," gets me thinking about the role Providence has played as a literary setting, DeSilva's being the latest in a recent bounty of Providence-set novels. Oddly, it seems to me there were not many books set in Providence for a long stretch of time - Lovecraft being the exception, though his Providence was rarely identified by name and though a few buildings made cameos the city wasn't meant to be a realistic portrayal. (Many really good writers have lived in Providence but written little about it,e.g., John Hawkes, Robert Coover.) Geoffrey Wolff set the contemporary trend afire with his eponymous novel that played off the split personality of the city, thugs and wiseguys living crossing paths with East Side gentry. Lately, with much greater focus on the thugs and petty mobsters, we've seen an abundance of crime novels set in Providence, DeSilva's the latest. Suddenly, there's a lot of shoulder-bumping: first there was Jan Brogan (female reporter with an addiction issue), then Mark Aresenault (another newspaper-based crime novel), now DeSilva - all three friends of mine and former colleagues of mine at the Providence Journal. Not sure if Arsenault or Brogan are planning to keep their characters going, but DeSilva definitely is, so we have more cool Providence noir to anticipate. (Another mystery writer, Richard Rosen, had done some Providence-based novels some years back, but not sure what he's writing today. Also worth mentioning Journal writer Mike Stanton whose nonfiction book on Providence is as rich in detail as any of the novels noted here.) Another friend, Jean McGarry, has written a number of books with Providence settings - her first collection, Airs of Providence, back in the '80s, and she's just come out with a new collection, Ocean State. Also note the recent novels of Ed Hardy, Anne Harleman, and Ann Hood, with many Providence settings and themes. So this city, long forgotten, is now a hot property for writers - but in almost every case it's a very dark view of Providence, from Lovecraft to DeSilva, that these writers offer to the world.