Chicago Noir Read online

  Table of Contents

  ___________________

  Introduction by Joe Meno

  PART I: THE JAZZ AGE

  30 Seconds of Darkness

  HARRY STEPHEN KEELER

  Rogers Park, 1916

  Brothers

  SHERWOOD ANDERSON

  Douglas, 1921

  Kaddish for the Kid

  MAX ALLAN COLLINS

  West Town, 1998

  The Man Who Went to Chicago

  RICHARD WRIGHT

  Illinois Medical Distract, 1945

  PART II: NOIR AND NEO-NOIR

  He Swung and He Missed

  NElSON ALGREN

  Lakeview, 1942

  I'll Cut Your Throat Again, Kathleen

  FREDERIC BROWN

  Magnificent Mile, 1948

  The Price of Salt (excerpt)

  PATRICIA HIGHSMITH

  Gold Coatst, 1952

  The Starving Dogs of Little Croatia

  BARRY GIFFORD

  Wicker Park, 2009

  Blue Note

  STUART M. KAMINSKY

  Woodlawn, 1997

  The Whole World Is Watching

  LIBBY FISCHER HELLMANN

  Grant Park, 2007

  PART III: MODERN CRIME

  Skin Deep

  SARA PARETSKY

  Michigan Avenue, 1987

  Death and the Point Spread

  PERCY SPURLARK PARKER

  Lawndale, 1995

  One Holy Night

  SANDRA CISNEROS

  Pilsen, 1988

  The Thirtieth Amendment

  HUGH HOLTON

  Bridgeport, 1995

  We Didn't

  STuart DYBEK

  Oak Street Beach, 1993

  About the Contributors

  Bonus Materials

  "Like a Rocket with a Beat" by Joe Meno, from Chicago Noir

  USA Noir: Best of the Akashic Noir Series

  Also in Akashic Noir Series

  Akashic Noir Series Awards & Recognition

  About Akashic Books

  Copyrights & Credits

  Introduction

  Language of Shadows

  Noir is the language of shadows, of the world in-between. The shape a stranger’s mouth makes murmuring in the dark, the color of a knife flashing in a dead-end alley, the sound of an elevator rising to an unlit floor; noir is the language of stark contrasts, life and death, good and evil, day and night.

  First defined in the 1940s and ’50s by French academics to describe a specific kind of bleak, black-and-white crime film produced by Hollywood in that era, the term gained popular relevancy in the 1970s and since then has also been applied to various works of literature as well: crime novels, detective stories, mysteries, suspense thrillers, each with elements of the gothic or traditional tragedy. Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest, and James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice all defined the genre with their conflicted heroes and antiheroes, mysterious plots, murky atmospheres, and punchy, stylized writing. These novelists and their counterparts who published short fiction in pulp magazines like Black Mask depicted the moral uncertainty of the modern age—the human struggle to find meaning in a world that by its nature is necessarily obscure.

  Noir writing, like the night, is also, by its very definition, somewhat borderless. The history of crime writing in America bears this out. Black Mask, the pulp magazine that first exposed these sorts of stories to the public, was initially created by journalist H.L. Mencken and drama critic George Jean Nathan to help finance their literary journal, the Smart Set. This dynamic tension between the “highbrow” and the “lowbrow”—between the literary elite and the man on the street—is one of noir’s most enduring qualities. Recent award-winning books by the likes of Michael Chabon, Denis Johnson, Jonathan Lethem, Roberto Bolaño, and Cormac McCarthy attest to this liminal phenomenon.

  Over the years, the literature of noir has proven to be as essential as any other writing genre. Although highly riveting, it’s much more than mere entertainment. It’s modern mythology at its most powerful. Like its musical equivalent, jazz, I believe it may be one of America’s most enduring cultural contributions.

  Considering these aspects of the literature of noir, the city of Chicago is arguably its truest embodiment; more corrupt than New York, less glamorous than LA, Chicago has more murders per capita than any other city its size. With its sleek skyscrapers bisecting the fading sky like an unspoken threat, Chicago is the closest metropolis to the mythical city of shadows as first described in the work of Chandler, Hammett, and Cain. Only in Chicago do instituted color lines offer generation after generation of poverty and violence, only in Chicago do the majority of recent governors do prison time, only in Chicago do the dead actually vote twice. With its public record of bribery, cronyism, and fraud, this is a metropolis so deeply divided—by race, ethnicity, and class—that sociologists had to develop a new term to describe this unfortunate bifurcation. As Nelson Algren best put it, Chicago is and has always been a “city on the make.”

  The stories collected in this volume all explore this city of shadows, of high contrasts, spanning nearly a century, tracing the earliest explorations into the form. Harry Stephen Keeler’s “30 Seconds of Darkness,” first published in 1916, demonstrates both the influence of Edgar Allan Poe and the high-minded formality of Charles Dickens. In the 1910s and ’20s, Sherwood Anderson—a uniquely American writer with his interest in crime, the grotesque, and the underrepresented—influenced the still-developing genre with Winesburg, Ohio and his popular literary stories including “Brothers.” Andersons’ work alone would go on to inspire William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and Nelson Algren, whose story “He Swung and He Missed” echoes much of Anderson’s character-driven fiction. Midcentury writing like Richard Wright’s “The Man Who Went to Chicago” and Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt depict the outsider’s view of an ambiguous, foreign place where anonymity reigns and racial and sexual mores are less constrained. Several modern pieces, like Stuart Dybek’s “We Didn’t,” with its poetic repetition and lyrical imagery, and Hugh Holton’s “The Thirtieth Amendment,” with its dystopian elements, help to expand and redefine the form in new and surprising ways.

  Chicago’s history of crime writing is extensive, perhaps deserving an encyclopedia all its own. Many fine writers were not included in this collection, though their work has been no less influential: pulp writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs, with his dedication to horror and science fiction, mingling crime with decidedly otherworldly elements; newspaper reporters and fiction writers like Ben Hecht and Ring Lardner, who explored noir in their daily columns and stories (though both of them, well aware of the preferences of the New York publishing apparatus, chose to set most of their noirs in New York City); memorable literary novelists like James T. Farrell and Leon Forrest, who both depicted the grim lives of citizens on the city’s South Side. Other important crime writers like Eugene Izzi, with his brand of raw, late-’80s noir, seemed less interested in the short story form, preferring instead to produce unflinching novel after unflinching novel.

  Chicago—more than the metropolis that gave the world Al Capone, the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre, the death of John Dillinger, the crimes of Leopold and Loeb, the horrors of John Wayne Gacy, the unprecedented institutional corruption of so many recent public officials, more than the birthplace of Raymond Chandler—is a city of darkness. This darkness is not an act of overimagination. It’s the unadulterated truth. It’s a pointed though necessary reminder of the grave tragedies of the past and the failed possibilities of the present. Fifty years in the future, I hope these stories are read only as fiction, as somewhat distant fantasy. Here’s hoping for some light.

  Joe
Meno

  Chicago, IL

  June 2015

  PART I

  THE Jazz AGE

  30 Seconds of Darkness

  by HARRY STEPHEN KEELER

  Rogers Park

  (Originally published in 1916)

  Tomorrow evening, my dear T.B.,” DeLancey suddenly remarked, “I intend to be the cause of a little excitement at old Garrard Bascom’s dinner party. In simpler language, my dear fellow, I propose to steal the Countess of Cordova’s $100,000 diamond necklace. What do you think of the project?”

  With surprise I stiffened up suddenly in my chair. My newspaper dropped from my fingers and I stared unbelievingly at the immaculately clad figure that was seated across from me. But his pair of brown eyes returned my gaze unflinchingly.

  “Do you mean to assert, DeLancey,” I managed finally to ask, “that you intend to try such a feat as that at a dinner table surrounded by thirty or more people—and the usual two or three Pinkerton detectives present?”

  “Precisely,” he smiled, blowing a few smoke rings ceilingward. “I’ve had the thing in mind ever since our invitations arrived. But, my dear fellow, you haven’t yet given me your opinion.”

  “I think you are bereft of your senses. The chances that you take will land us both in a state penitentiary one of these days, if not in some European rat-infested dungeon.”

  But DeLancey only smiled more enigmatically, and commenced smoothing back the black hair that was turning slightly gray at his temples.

  I confess that I invariably slumped into a feeling of profound dismay whenever DeLancey proposed to perform one of his apparently impossible exploits. Yet, time and again, he had achieved the seemingly unachievable—and I had been able to go my way rejoicing, knowing that liberty was ours for a while longer. But always, down in my heart, the dread feeling existed that sooner or later was to come the one mistake, the one misstep in DeLancey’s almost perfect plans, that would carry us both inside the dull gray walls for many years.

  Across Europe we had gone, DeLancey leaving in his wake a series of mystifying thefts—thefts that to this day are riddles to the Continental police. Petrograd, Berlin, Rome, Madrid, Paris, London, even New York, had contributed their toll to the man’s super-cunning brain and his magnetic personality. So for the last few months, while we were living in our Chicago bachelor apartments, I felt that we were assuredly to refrain from any more of these feats—at least for an appreciable time to come. It seemed to me that in justice to ourselves, to the pleasure that we took in each other’s company, to the joy of existence itself, we should continue to live quietly on the proceeds of DeLancey’s last feat—the theft of Castor and Pollux, the famous red and green twin diamonds, from the vault of Simon et Cie in the Rue Royale, Paris. Success had crowned that performance, I had good reason to know, for it was into my hands that DeLancey had sent the stones in the custody of Von Berghem. And Von Berghem, traveling as an invalid in company with his small son from Paris to Calais, from Calais to Dover, from Dover to Liverpool, from Liverpool to New York, suspected finally of having had something to do with that inexplicable crime, arrested at the docks in New York and searched for three long hours, had come through unscathed, not an inspector nor a police officer discovering that he was blind and that the diamonds were concealed behind his spectacles—concealed back of his hollow glass eyes themselves.

  True, that particular success had been due in a great measure to the skill and cunning of Von Berghem himself, yet it was DeLancey’s genius that had first seen the possibilities that lay in the blind beggar whom he had found wandering in the Montmartre cemetery.

  I pulled myself together with a start and turned to DeLancey, watching the inscrutable smile that still lingered on his face.

  “Are you able to tell me, DeLancey, just how you expect to remove a $100,000 necklace at old Bascom’s dinner table under the glare of that big electric chandelier? What do you intend to do if he orders a search? Who the Countess of Cordova is, and how you know she’s going to be there? How you know this necklace is to be around her neck? What part I am to play in the affair? How—”

  “Enough, T.B.,” he chuckled. “Stop your restless pacing back and forth. If you’ll sit down I’ll answer your questions one at a time.”

  I dropped back on the edge of my chair and waited to hear what he had to say.

  “Now,” he began slowly, “it is only fair to tell you, my dear fellow, that our exchequer is low—extremely so. The amount paid over to us by old Moses Stein for Castor and Pollux a year and a half ago was hopelessly out of proportion to the value of those two stones.” He shrugged his shoulders and frowned for the first time. “But that, T.B., is the unfortunate part of this exciting game of ours. The legitimate profits are cut to a half—to a third—even to a fourth.

  “And so,” he went on, “the time has come for one last coup—one big coup; and then, lad, South Australia for you and me. What do you say?”

  “Anything,” I replied fervently, “is preferable to this continual living in fear of a slip-up of your plans. I like you, DeLancey, and I can’t endure the thought of—” I stopped, for a picture of DeLancey being dragged away to suffer the ignoble fate of a prison sentence began to swim before my eyes.

  “No doubt you do,” he returned, after a pause. “But, nevertheless, the fact remains that our scale of living, the exorbitant rent of this apartment, our club dues, theatres, bachelor dinners, taxicabs, the gifts to that little dark-eyed love of yours, have all helped to consume our capital far too swiftly. But I don’t regret it, T.B., for it has been capital well invested, since it has secured us two invitations already to Garrard Bascom’s home in Rogers Park.”

  “I’m inclined to credit that to your strange winning personality,” I returned.

  “Personality, bah!” he snorted. “We’ve put up a bluff—we’ve jingled the money—we’ve belonged to the best clubs in the city; and those are the stunts that have made us welcome in such circles. But tomorrow night,” he added savagely, “we’ll try to reap the profits.”

  He paused a moment, and the smile that had so suddenly left his face slowly reappeared. For DeLancey was always genial, always in good humor, seldom ruffled.

  “So as I said before,” he went on, “it is up to us to make what you native born Americans—you real Yankees—call a killing. But it must be a decent killing, lad, such as the Cordova necklace, for after that episode the name of DeLancey will always be looked upon with a very slight—perhaps an appreciable—degree of suspicion and distrust. But I’ll explain.

  “Among several questions you asked me was how I know that this Countess of Cordova is to be present at old Bascom’s dinner tomorrow evening. That, T.B., is simplicity itself. The countess, before she married old Count Cordova of Madrid, was Amelie Bascom of Chicago. And her arrival in this city was chronicled in the Tribune four days ago. Quite elemental reasoning, is it not?

  “Have I never told you, my dear fellow, that I met the countess when you and I were in Madrid a year and a half ago? That the good lady, married to that old crustacean, was not at all averse to a violent flirtation? That—if I may be pardoned for any seeming egotism in the statement—I made quite an impression on her?”

  I nodded, for now I dimly remembered having heard him mention something about the matter at some obscure time in the past.

  “Now,” he continued, “when she glances over her estimable papa’s list of guests invited to that dinner party, you may rest assured that she is going to arrange to have—er—DeLancey for a partner. Have I made this quite plain?”

  “You have. You seem to have a genius for paving your way—months and years ahead.”

  “Specialization in crime, T.B., merely specialization such as characterizes success in any line of endeavor. But enough of that. I’ll now step to another one of your questions: how do I expect to remove a $100,000 necklace at a dinner table under the glare of a huge electric chandelier?”

  “Yes. How—”

  “B
y the use of a tiny pair of well-sharpened manicure scissors which, replaced in their black leather case, will be tossed clear across the room and remain unnoticed till the servants are cleaning the dining room several hours afterward.”

  “But you haven’t answer—”

  He raised his hand. “Of course I haven’t answered your question. It happens that I’m not going to perform that simple operation in the glare of any hanging electric lights. I have sent in an order for thirty seconds of darkness.”

  “Thirty seconds of darkness!”

  “Exactly. You remember Tzhorka?”

  I surely did. Tzhorka was the little dwarfed Russian electrician whom DeLancey had met in the great world of crookdom. On more than occasion the latter had vaguely hinted to me that Tzhorka had worked with him once before. And this instance, I felt certain, was the night that old Count Ivan Yarosloff’s safe in his palace on the Nevski-Prospekt at St. Petersburg was burned open by a pair of carbon electrodes and several thousand amperes of current stolen from the lighting feeders that led to the Russian Admiralty Building at the farther end of the Nevski-Prospekt. So since I, no doubt, had helped to spend part of old Yarosloff’s 83,000 missing rubles, I became interested at once.

  “Yes,” he said, “Tzhorka has been in Chicago for some time on plans of his own. And he has agreed to supply me with thirty seconds of darkness at any time I shall indicate.”

  My face must have shown my bewilderment, for DeLancey hastened to explain his statement.

  “Did you notice, the last time we were at the Bascom mansion, how the house was lighted?”

  I shook my head.

  “Which goes to show, T.B., that your faculties need considerable sharpening before you can stand alone on your legs in this game. If you had taken cognizance of this fact, however, you would have discovered that the current which lights up the mansion and outlying buildings at the center of that great estate is brought over the ground from the Commonwealth Edison Company’s feeders which skirt the eastern edge of the property. And in saying that it is brought over the ground, I am referring, of course, to the line of poles which carry two thick cables tapped on the Commonwealth Edison’s feeders.”