Published by Akashic Books
©2005 Akashic Books
All rights reserved
ALSO IN THE AKASHIC NOIR SERIES:
FORTHCOMING:
—Merle Haggard
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
LUCIANO GUERRIERO 99th & Drexel
Goodnight Chicago and Amen
BAYO OJIKUTU 77th & Jeffery
The Gospel of Moral Ends
PETER ORNER 54th & Blackstone
Dear Mr. Kleczka
JEFFERY RENARD ALLEN 35th & Michigan
The Near Remote
ACHY OBEJAS 26th & Kedvale
Destiny Returns
CLAIRE ZULKEY 19th & Sacramento
The Great Billik
ALEXAI GALAVIZ-BUDZISZEWSKI 18th & Allport
Maximillian
ANDREW ERVIN Canal & Jackson
All Happy Families
M.K. MEYERS Grand & Western
Monkey Head
KEVIN GUILFOILE Grand & Racine
Zero Zero Day
TODD DILLS Chicago & Noble
Arcadia
C.J. SULLIVAN North & Troy
Alex Pinto Hears the Bell
DANIEL BUCKMAN Roscoe & Claremont
Pure Products
AMY SAYRE-ROBERTS Roscoe & Broadway
Death Mouth
JOE MENO Lawrence & Broadway
Like a Rocket With a Beat
NEAL POLLACK Clark & Foster
Marty’s Drink or Die Club
ADAM LANGER Albion & Whipple
Bobby Kagan Knows Everything
JIM ARNDORFER I-94, Lake Forest Oasis
The Oldest Rivalry
INTRODUCTION
ONCE THERE WAS A CITY
While I was working as a reporter in Chicago, from 1993 to 2000, the city changed. Very profound, you say. Of course the city changed in seven years; that’s what cities do. True enough, but cities change during certain periods more than others. In the ’90s, Chicago changed a lot, and it’s changed even more, and more quickly, in the years since I’'ve left.
It’s very possible to visit Chicago these days and see no more grit than you would in, say, Indianapolis. During his nearly twenty-year reign over the city, Richard M. Daley has overseen a studied program of urban renewal, civic booster-ism, and tourist pleasing. His Chicago shines with a well-buffed gloss. One by one, the weird old bars and restaurants, the bizarre little museums, the hardware stores that never had any customers disappeared, some in blatant land-grabs, others subtly, almost imperceptibly, like construction dust blown out to the lake. In their place stand condos and fresh-brick branch libraries, a Frank Gehry bandshell, and a spaceship in the middle of Soldier Field. In many ways, it’s a better city than the one Mayor Daley inherited, but it’s a far less interesting one, and it certainly makes for less interesting stories.
Chicago’s literature, with a brief detour into the world of Saul Bellow and occasional forays by Theodore Dreiser, has rarely concerned itself with the vagaries of the upper and upper-middle classes. The city’s best writers—Nelson Algren, James Farrell, Studs Terkel, Richard Wright, and so on—have traditionally used working people as their palette. They accurately captured the rough streets and random cruelty of urban life, but for people living in Chicago, their stories meant something more. They shaped the way Chicagoans think about themselves, and about Chicago.
The excellent new stories I’'ve collected in this volume try to fill the gap between how the world sees Chicago and how Chicago sees itself. Many of the stories take nostalgia as a theme. Some have a yellowing snapshot feel, as though they'’re trying to archive a city that’s just about gone. Adam Langer looks wistfully back at neighborhood life in the 1970s. C.J. Sullivan’s protagonist, long past whatever sad prime he once had, also remembers the ’70s as a golden age. Peter Orner drifts even further back, to the 1950s, while inhabiting the mind of one of Chicago’s most sinister criminals, and Claire Zulkey visits the city 100 years ago, when people were strange and their crimes even stranger. Now that was a city worth writing about.
