By Jesi Khadivi
In the history of crime fiction windy, cold Chicago lurks in the shadows of Los Angeles, the sun drenched nightmare widely acknowledged as the capital of noir. The low slung bungalows and seedy downtown detective agencies propagate the myth of the Angeleno detective as a loner anti-hero awash in the anxiety of the post-war American dream. The Chicago style does not exactly fit the mold of a modern hard boiled noir; it is a style as richly varied as its history. A history soaked in the blood of gangsters, the wealth of the bread belt, and the rhythms of jazz. While Los Angeles is the American dream at the end of the line, Chicago is its crossroads.
Although its roots are in England, modern and contemporary crime writing is a profoundly American style. The rough and tumble world of dames, crooks, trench coats and cigarettes is a far cry from the genteel milieu of tweeds, pipes and parlor mysteries. American noir and crime fiction shows the underbelly of urban culture—the pimps, pushers and hustlers—and the code of ethics that help them function. A noir detective functions more as an emissary between corruption on both sides of the law than a sleuth. By and large, Chicago crime and noir writers did not lay the framework for the genre, but they have a history of innovating and pushing its boundaries.
Jonathan Latimer was a crime reporter for the Chicago Tribune and covered Al Capone and Bugsy Moran among others. He is best known for his books about private investigator William Crane written in the mid to late 1930s in which he synthesized his individual blend of hard-boiled fiction with screwball comedic flourishes.
Nothing says noir or Chicago like Nelson Algren. His fixation on the drugged and dispossessed show man in all of his existential frailty. “It’s strange how fragile this man-creature is…in one second he’s just garbage. Garbage that’s all,” Algren writes. His 1951 essay Chicago: City on the Make depicts the city's back alleys and political corruption with striking clarity. Algren is best known for his novels The Man With The Golden Arm and Walk On the Wild Side. Golden Arm was adapted for the screen in 1956 and starred Frank Sinatra as a morphine junkie. Wild Side was the inspiration for Lou Reed’s song of the same name.
Crime fiction has historically been ghettoized as “genre” or pulp fiction. Academic literary and film communities have widened their scope to examine genre fiction and film under a more rigorous lens. Despite the increased popularity and critical reappraisal of writers such as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Patricia Highsmith, contemporary crime fiction is usually relegated to mass market paperback. Clue is the only scholarly crime journal that examines contemporary crime fiction as serious work of literature.
Clue recently featured writer Sara Paretsky in its Winter 2007 issue. Paretsky, a Chicago resident since 1968, has reinvigorated the role of women within crime fiction. Women are traditionally portrayed as temptresses or victims. In the noir genre sultry, conniving women plot to drag our anti-hero down and impede the resolution of a case. Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski is a hard drinking, crime-solving spit fire of a woman who can hold her own against any of the most resilient characters in the history of crime fiction and noir.
The popularity of crime fiction in Chicago has not dropped off. If anything, it’s on the rise. Chicago Noir, the fourth installment in Akashic Book’s noir series was published in 2005. The collection of short works was edited by Neal Pollack. There is a strong community of crime writers currently based in the city. The Outfit, a blog spearheaded by novelist, Libby Hellman (A Shot to Die For, An Image of Death), is a loose collective of Chicago crime writers ranging from first time authors to seasoned pros looking to expand their audience. Hellman has made it clear that the site is intended as a platform for Chicago authors. She told Jonathan Messinger of Time Out: “There are blogs that are read by the same 200 or 300 people in the crime-fiction community, so we didn’t want to target all of the crime-fiction writers out there, but wanted to reach out to the Chicago community,” she says. “We do as much about Chicago as we do about [the work of] writing.” Other writers in The Outfit’s ranks include Kevin Guilfoile (Cast of Shadows), Michael Dymmoch (Death In West Wheeling), Barbara D’Amato (Death of a Thousand Cuts) and Sara Paretsky.