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 Click for words events Dark Shadows Searching the mean streets of Chicago noir
Chicago, make no mistake, is a city that sleeps. At night, in the dark,
we drift into dreams of our city, our streets, our neighborhoods and
intersections. And we have nightmares.
Breathtaking buildings cast monstrous shadows on the pavement and a
body of water threatens from the east. Abandoned stockyards echo
not-so-ancient screams and stench and factories guzzle smoke into the
starless, inked sky. A saxophone dribbles against the walls of an empty
L station--the rails shudder and shake as phantoms travel. Ghost signs
haunt buildings. The faded stencils of forgotten companies tell us
we'll
never know the whole truth. We feel like jazz and we taste bourbon.
Nelson Algren whispers into our ears from Division Street and James
Farrell warns us of what's ahead--and the endless alleyways cross our
eyes into blindness. We sleep and we fear who's still awake: the
degenerate drunks, the drug-addled men of scruff, the musicians and
hired muscle; the cops who take bribes and the toughs who turn their
heads. The inevitable crime found in wayward streets in the middle of
the middle of the night lurks like a jealous lover. And there's a man
who smokes a cigarette on every street corner, hissing one word:
noir.
Chicago noir creeps different than other cities. There's mild glitz
and glam when compared to Los Angeles and San Francisco, a condensed
biceps alongside New York. "Chicago Noir," the upcoming collection of
short stories and the latest in Akashic Books' noir series--the third
so
far after two successful stabs at Brooklyn--hits Chicago streets at
just
at the right time. Corruption oozes out of chambers of power as if the
city's biggest blister has been popped. A glance at the dailies makes
Roman Polanski's "Chinatown" live again. Raymond Chandler, the
hard-nose himself, was merely born here, but that explains everything.
Let's face it, Chicago came to life with an attitude--hard with grit,
darkness and clenched fists--and the city is damn proud of it. Each
street, each intersection has its own personality--we feel, in our
guts,
different about every avenue we stroll. Chicago shouts noir from the
top
of the Sears Tower to the nether regions of Wacker Drive, from the
crime-ridden West Side to the moneyed taint of the North.
"I decided that I wanted to do my own collection about a city that
I knew something about," says "Chicago Noir" editor and contributor
Neal Pollack on what attracted him to the project. Pollack, the author
widely known for his cult-favorite "The Neal Pollack Anthology of
American Literature" and rock novel "Never Mind the Pollacks,"
worked
as a Chi-town reporter for nearly a decade in the nineties (he now
calls
Austin, Texas home). He wrote for the earlier "Brooklyn" collections.
"I always wanted to write fiction based on my time as a reporter in
the
city. This is kind of a new genre for me, but it's kind of what I
always
thought that I would be doing. The McSweeney's stuff and the humor
stuff
just kind of happened--I always planned to catch up with everything
else
later."
Pollack decided to divide each story into a specific intersection of
the city, beginning south and working up to the north, using landmarks
as the foundation of the city's murk. "[I did that] just because
there
are such distinct neighborhoods in the city. When I was a reporter, I
didn't have a car, so I would be constantly exploring on foot. Each
intersection has its own personality. Maybe it's an intersection with
a
generic condo building, but it has a tiny storefront on the bottom.
Each
ward has its own personality, characters and crime. Every neighborhood
has its own thing--they all have their own crime, not every one is a
hotbed of murder."
The diversity of crime is an important piece of the classic noir
puzzle, and Pollack has always been intrigued by the vast landscape
that
noir offers. "Lots of crimes happen," he says. "I kind of hate the
typical detective books. The classic noir is about an alienated loner,
a
guy not necessarily into crime but forced into it. I wanted people to
go
in that direction. I like the idea of ordinary people thrust into
different situations."
Pollack's collection also touches on the constant shifting of
neighborhood dynamics, race relations and a fear thereof. "Chicago is
so ethnically diverse, you could do ten of these collections and it
would be a different book every time. Brooklyn is similar, but Chicago
isn't living in the shadow of anything, like Brooklyn is with
Manhattan.
Chicago stands on its own. There's a lot of drama in class and racial
tension, and there's certainly a backdrop of gentrification or fear of
gentrification. It's always looming in Chicago. That's the way
cities
go. Sometimes stuff cannot be prevented."
And the Chicago way, the "he sends one of yours to the hospital,
you send one of his to the morgue" mantra that Sean Connery's Jimmy
Malone barks at Eliot Ness in "The Untouchables," rings throughout.
"The characters I wrote about are loosely based on people I knew or
hung out with at bars," Pollack says. "I can't think of any other
city
that has a self-styled working class of intellectuals. Educated men who
don't have college. If you hang out in bars long enough, you're
gonna
hear some things."
Perhaps most impressive about Pollack's collection is the wide
variety of writers selected to contribute--almost all not known for
noir
work. "47th Street Black" author Bayo Ojikutu dives into the
intersection of 77th and Jeffrey, "The2ndHand" man Todd Dills traces
the path where Chicago Avenue meets Noble and Pollack himself hightails
north to Clark and Foster to drop in on a dying breed of drunks.
"Good
writing is good writing," he says. "If you tell a good writer you
want
a story, a good writer will come up with something."
One of the writers Pollack asked to be a part of "Chicago Noir,"
well known in the city but not necessarily for his hard-boiled prose,
was "Hairstyles of the Damned" author and Punk Planet columnist Joe
Meno. "My second book ("How the Hula Girl Sings") was really pulpy,
hardcore noir. After writing `Hairstyles' I started moving into a
different direction." Meno was immediately interested in contributing.
"The heart of the story is that there's somebody doing something
they
shouldn't do or something you wish you could do. That's the
heart
of pulp or noir. Something as simple as trespassing becomes
exaggerated." Meno's story, a jazz tale he titled "Like a Rocket
with
a Beat," paints a portrait of a lost era of Chicago history that still
sometimes breathes at Lawrence and Broadway. "For the story that I
worked on," he says, "I wanted a 1950s, jazzy feel. Neal asked me
what
section of the city I wanted to do, and I totally wanted to do the
Green
Mill. I wanted to do that neighborhood."
Chicago's infamous catalogue of organized and decidedly disorganized
crime also lends itself to the genre. "Chicago has an amazing history
of criminality," Meno says. "There's something about the `B' city
that
makes it interesting. It's not as glamorous as Los Angeles or as
prominent as New York. The Green Mill was Al Capone's old hangout, you
know? There are all sorts of weird kidnappings, things like Richard
Speck. It's fertile ground for the lurid and dark. I'm not talking
about
the Lindbergh baby, though--it's really the quiet moments of violence.
The city's basically scary. There's a beautiful sense of menace.
Walking
downtown at night--it's so vacant. The shadows of the buildings are so
beautiful. But someone can jump out and, like, shank you. There's
this
sense of peril all the time." Local author Kevin Guilfoile, whose acclaimed sci-fi thriller "Cast
of Shadows" hit shelves earlier this year, contributed "Zero Zero
Day" to "Chicago Noir," the code name police use when the city or
one
of the city's regions goes a full day without crime. "That really
happened," says Guilfoile. "Last year it happened for the first time
in, like, seven or eight years. It's just an odd day where there's no
crime happening. It really underscores this reality of the city."
He finds noir a perfect fit both in its ambiguity and its
black-and-white aura. "You are in some ways free of the sort of
obligation to have straight good guys and bad guys," he says.
"You're
able to explore the darker impulses of heroes in ways that regular
crime
fiction can't. Traditional detective fiction tells you who to root for
and against, and in the end you're rewarded when all your decisions
turn
out to be right. It's like getting a tip on a fixed horse race. In
noir,
you really don't have that. In the best stories you have to struggle
to
get behind the hero."
Guilfoile believes that Chicago exists as an natural setting for an
anthology like "Chicago Noir." "Obviously there's this sort of
crime
history," he says, "a total infamous history with crime. There's a
strange history with criminals as heroes in a way--there are certainly
movies and books that glorify gangsterism. I think that one of the
things about Chicago which makes it interesting for noir, and what's
different from New York, is that Chicago has this sunny veneer. But
when
you drill it down, you sort of see this dark underbelly, and that's a
little bit more interesting than a `grittier' city."
That dark underbelly will forever exist beneath the streets of our
city. Chicago will always compete as one the most dangerous places in
the country, and its notorious history is permanently cemented in most
minds, young and old. "It just for some reason doesn't seem that
stunning [Chicago's statistical accomplishments in crime]," adds Joe
Meno. "I guess it doesn't seem as violent and strange as it should.
But, there's always a sense of the possibility of menace. It's kind
of
charming in its own way." Neal Pollack and "Chicago Noir" contributors read from their
work at Barbara's Bookstore, 1218 South Halsted, (312)413-2665, on
August 31 at 7:30pm, as well as at Quimby's, 1854 West North,
(773)342-0910, on September 2 at 7pm.
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