And speaking of noir

First off, huge thanks to Kevin and Megan for their exemplary guest blog stints. I know I’ll be thinking a fair bit about editing, and nostalgia in noir, and all the other cool stuff both of them brought up.

And considering Megan wondered whether there would be a Detroit Noir anthology, it seems appropriate to segue into a piece that ran in this week’s New City Chicago about CHICAGO NOIR, the first in what promises to be a long-running anthology series from Akashic Books:

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."

Later, the article hits on what’s proving to be a serious criticism of the anthology — the skew away from crime writers and more towards lesser-known literary fiction writers:

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."

Having read both CHICAGO NOIR as well as SAN FRANCISCO NOIR (which won’t be out till October) I do see where some of the criticisms leveled (mostly by anonymous PW reviewers, granted) in that there were too many stories in both anthologies that either tacked on a murder at the end just because, or didn’t have a real feel for what they were trying to accomplish. But at the same time, it was refreshing to find writers I’m not well acquainted with deliver stories that really appealed — people like Daniel Buckman, Kate Braverman, Achy Obejas and David Henry Sterry, to name a few.

That said, anthologies depend on who accepts the invitation and who doesn’t — so those "better known names" that the PW reviewer wished had been included might well have been but for circumstance and time commitments.