A Dark and Windy City

Amertcai HGView ? INVENTIONS NOIR ?% ^-.Jf V\ A Dark and Windy City Elizabeth Hatmaker Chicago Noir Edited by Neal Pollack Akashic http://www.akashicbooks.com 260 pages; paper, $14.95 Neal Pollack's collection, Chicago Noir, raises a number ofquestions beyond the most obvious, i.e., is it good?As part ofa series ofcity-themed noircollections published by Akashic Books, Chicago Noir asks us to consider whether Chicago is, specifically, a noircity and, more significantly, how noir plays out in the current landscape. The title is appealing, no doubt, though the marketing would more precisely place these collections as "confidentials" in the great tradition of Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer's travelogues of the 1950s. Lait and Mortimer's exposés highlighted the vast corruption—vice, drugs, communism —thatexisted underthe surface ofseemingly upright American cities; they existed as a sort of "non-fiction" companion to the hard-boiled and noir narratives popular in postwar America. The stories in Chicago Noir certainly contain the noir themes, the hard-boiled characters, the sense of dangerous location that informs the sexiness ofgreat twentiethcentury cities. Butone worries thatthese terms—noir, hard-boiled, confidential—produce in our current moment nothing more than a sense of nostalgia or, worse, an easy marketing vocabulary. Given its wide usage in popular literature and film, the term "noir" has taken on a variety of interrelated and dialectical meanings. Traditional narrative logic would suggest that noir thrillers are told from the point ofview ofthe criminal, not the "law." Of course, the hard-boiled tradition challenges this very division with its mostfamous characters: Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade, Coffin Ed, and Grave Digger Detailfrom cover Jones, The Continental Op. Stylists might argue that in contrast to a more hard-boiled paratactic sentence construction, noir writers like Cornell Woolrich and David Goodis overwrite their angst with repetition and melancholic refrains. But, then, a writer like Dorothy B. Hughes is at her best when she constructs an overwrought parataxis, as in the recently re-released In a Lonely Place (1947). French film theorists Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton describe film noir's visual and conceptual ability to produce anxiety through a lack of moral reference. But this larger existential angst—that sense of the contingencies of modernity—arguably coated many ofthe melodramas both during and after the postwar period with which noir is associated. The stories explore not only what noir was or is, but also where it needs to go ifit is to overcome its own nostalgia. ChicagoÑoirembodiesalloftheseprovisional definitions; occasionally, its stories push us to think about how noir might still be relevant beyond a badass sort of nostalgia. Many of the stories in this collection are told from the point of view ofChicago's criminals. Bayo Ojikutu's "The Gospel of Moral Ends" follows a South Side church bagman's deadly religious awakening; Jim Arndorfer's "The Oldest Rivalry" details the global anxiety of an accidental murderer/Packers fan; Peter Orner's "Dear Mr. Kleczka " is narrated by Nathan Leopold. Orner's story in particular is a study in Woolrich's simple, angst-ridden style. Forinstance, here is Leopolddescribing his crime: "Once a young man bludgeoned achild with a chisel. To make certain, I stuffed my fist in his mouth. My hands are rather plump now. Still, even now I recognize them somedays."Achy Obejas's "Destiny Returns" and Daniel Buckman's "Pure Products" suggest more overtly the larger melodramatic arc of noir that links it to the popular women's narratives ofthe era. In Kevin Guilfoile's "Zero Zero Day," the police-radio fanatic narrator ruminates, "Ifyou wave agun in aperson's face you neverknow what's going to happen. If you wave a gun in a person's face and you're still more scared ofhim than he is ofyou, how do you fix that?" Here, Guilfoile's question suggests the central noir compulsion of the hard-boiled tradition as well as the anxiety that most contemporary city-dwellers continue to feel. However, to ask ifthe stories are "noir" by definition is a different matter than to ask ifthe stories are good. Are they good? To varying degrees, sure. From the stream-of-consciousness rant of a downstate bank robber...