Berkeley Noir

Introduction The Other Side of Piedmont

This is not Oakland. This is a swing-shift sistah on the 51B moving from Rockridge, down College Avenue and Telegraph, to let Thursday night meet Friday afternoon / this is a song of ritual and tradition sung soft and hard by a downtown with two mouths / one that chews and one that swallows.

Is it pretentious to claim that a Bay Area college town can be a breeding ground for noir? For that certain kind of shadow and light, but mostly shadow? Where’s the noir in that perfect view of the Golden Gate, cutting-edge lettuces served in a ghetto dubbed “gourmet,” the parking lot with reserved spaces for Nobel Laureates?

This place is red wine and beer spilling over pepperoni cheese pizza and late-night final exams living on the edge of every new beginning. This is a bullet on a cloud dancing around the Berkeley Marina, or a week of wet kisses and PhD applications, love poems, and broken promises on the page / a slice of the pie for everyone running with the promise of chutney, chopsticks, toothpicks, and bottles of Tabasco dangling from preconceived notions of a city that wiggles itself between hot and spicy / get-down or takeout.

A town named after a British philosopher doesn’t exactly evoke visions of Goodis or Highsmith. Grifters? Dames? Cops? In Berkeley? On the surface the alleys don’t seem that dark, until we look a little closer. Possibly the most iconic visual image of Berkeley does involve cops. It’s from a film with activist Mario Savio, atop a police car, declaring, “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part!” Now there’s a statement that sums up the spirit of noir.

Berkeley Noir asks, If not here, where? When pulling together this outstanding list of authors, we were constantly reminded of Berkeley’s rich literary history, one that swerves through varying shades of noir. Those who helped pave the way for this collection include Anthony Boucher, Janet Dawson, Margaret Cuthbert, Ellen Gilchrist, Linda Grant, Jonathan Lethem, and Barry Gifford. There will always be a place in the heart of this city where even outcasts can feel at home. From legends like Philip K. Dick setting his stories here, or Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni working out marital bliss in her early novels, or Linnea A. Due tackling teenage alcoholism in the 1970s in High and Outside. The search through darkness for an authentic, eclectic voice is the most important ingredient in the rich stew that is Berkeley, California.

The fix is in, and the grifters, the cops, the profs, the students, and the unsheltered are aware of that, and play the game they choose (or don’t choose). And what of the cops of the BPD, whose squad car once became a stage for Berkeley radicalism? Susan Dunlap gives us a police procedural, gourmet-ghetto style, that serves as a kind of equalizer: “‘Citizens of Berkeley,’ Shelby grumbled as the siren faded away, ‘they bitch about everything. But a guy guns a man down and trots off and not a single concerned citizen bothers to follow him.’”

Yet the spirit of Berkeley, at least as perceived by most Berkeleyites, is in opposition to cops. Berkeley has been famous for its resistance mentality for at least fifty years. When the fix is in they shine some light on it, fight it, sometimes to the point of political correctness, but who cares?

When we began discovering the noir landscape, we went to the UC Berkeley campus, to University Avenue. We ventured into the hills, and of course Telegraph Avenue, for its wild and complicated dreamlike characteristics. There is a careful hand in the mix of dark tales in this volume that makes Berkeley’s mystical water landscape the perfect crime accomplice. Jim Nisbet’s nautical opus “Boy Toy,” and Lucy Jane Bledsoe’s “The Tangy Brine of Dark Night,” play a wicked duet on the dreamy waters that embrace the Berkeley magic, and the dark, slow-burn, brown-gravy world of Kimn Neilson’s “Still Life, Reviving” reminds us that even the stillness in shadows can destroy, distract.

The stories in this book skew left of center, even left of left. There’s crime, as we witness in J.M. Curet’s “Wifebeater Tank Top,” there’s corruption, there’s the double cross, but always with some political context (well captured in Shanthi Sekaran’s “Eat Your Pheasant, Drink Your Wine” and Thomas Burchfield’s “Lucky Day”). The bottom is the bottom, even in the People’s Republic, and it’s as hardscrabble as Gary, Indiana, or Pittsburgh.

All that sunshine can be cruel if you’re sleeping in the park, or trying to finesse a place for your kid to go to school (check out Aya de León’s excellent story, “Frederick Douglass Elementary”), or dealing with an aging parent.

Noir is at its best when it comes up from the bottom, fighting that losing battle to do a little better. The faces in this book reach beyond careful politically correct glances and song.

This is a city of curtains and kisses / keys and six degrees of separation.

Poets and prophets, and farmer’s-market physicists.

Fallen ideals on the back of sun-dried tomato peels and pizza slices / chasing CBD and Telegraph / University Avenue got you wondering what’s in the back pocket of this Berkeley Noir song.

This is Berkeley!

Here, too, the fix is in. But, jeez, is that the sun shining through the fog across the bay? What a view!

Jerry Thompson & Owen Hill

Berkeley, California

February 2020