Manhattan Noir 2: The Classics

Introduction It’s been noir around here for ages

Manhattan Noir 2. How did that happen?

Almost inevitably, it seems to me. Several years ago, Tim McLoughlin edited and Akashic Books published Brooklyn Noir. The book earned a warm reception from critics and readers, and spawned a series for the publisher that is rapidly taking over the world. Early on, I had the opportunity to turn the noir spotlight on my part of the world, the island of Manhattan. Because I had the good fortune to recruit some wonderful writers who sat down and wrote some wonderful stories, Manhattan Noir drew strong reviews and sold (and continues to sell) a gratifying number of copies.

Early on, Akashic expanded the franchise with Brooklyn Noir 2: The Classics, consisting of previously published stories. (I could hardly be unaware of the book, as Tim McLoughlin was gracious enough to reprint a story of mine, “By the Dawn’s Early Light.”) And this sequel, too, was very well received.

While I was editing Manhattan Noir, it struck me that Manhattan was a natural setting for noir material, not least because it had served that function ever since Peter Minuit’s celebrated $24 land grab. I thought of all the writers who’d found a home in Manhattan, and of the dark stories they’d set here, and one day I e-mailed Johnny Temple at Akashic to propose the very book you now hold in your hand. Johnny, it turned out, had already noted in his calendar: Q Block re: Manhattan Noir sequel. Great minds work alike, as you’ve no doubt been advised, and so do mine and Johnny’s.

You would think compiling a reprint anthology would be a far simpler matter than putting together a book of original stories. I certainly thought so, or I might not have rushed to embrace the project. Curiously, it was the other way around.

For the first Manhattan Noir, all I had to do was persuade some of the best writers in the country to produce new dark stories set in Manhattan, and to do so for a fee that fell somewhere between honorarium and pittance. They turned in magnificent work, and I turned in the fruits of their labors, and that was pretty much it. Nice work if you can get it.

But this time around I had to find the stories, and that’s not as easy as it sounds. I knew that I wanted to include O. Henry — but which O. Henry story? I did not want to resort to the anthologist’s ploy of picking stories from other people’s anthologies — this, of course, is one reason everybody knows “The Gift of the Magi,” while so many equally delightful stories remain unknown to the general reader. So what I had to do was read all of O. Henry’s New York stories, and that was effortful and time-consuming but, I must admit, a very pleasurable way to get through the days. And then I had to narrow the field, until I’d selected a single story.

I’ve always had a problem with introductions to collections. If the material’s good, what does it need with an anthologist’s prefatory remarks? And if it’s not good, who needs it?

Still, people who read anthologies seem to expect some concrete evidence of the editor’s involvement in his material, even as those who publish them want to see proof that the anthologist has expended sufficient effort to get words on paper. I won’t say much about the stories, they don’t require it, but I will say a word or two about the short story as a literary form, and its virtual disappearance in our time.

It should surprise no one with a feeling for noir that it all comes down to money.

Consider this: In 1902, William Sydney Porter, whom you and the rest of the world know as O. Henry, moved to New York after having served a prison sentence in Ohio. (He’d been convicted of embezzling $854.08 from a bank in Austin, Texas.) Within a year he had been contracted to write a weekly short story for a newspaper, the New York World. For each story he was to receive $100.

This was at a time when a dollar a day was considered a satisfactory wage for a workingman, and when you could support a family quite acceptably on $20 a week. O. Henry published his first short story collection in 1904, and his tenth in 1910. He never wrote a novel. He never had to.

Throughout the 1930s and ’40s, a majority of American writers made their living turning out short fiction for magazines. The upper crust wrote for the slicks, the lower echelon for the pulps, and in both tiers it was possible to make a decent living.

Then the world changed, and the publishing world with it. After the Second World War, inexpensive reprint fiction in the form of mass-market paperbacks killed off the pulp magazines almost overnight. Television finished the job and essentially took the slick magazines out of the fiction business. Few magazines published much in the way of short fiction, and those that did were able to pay only small sums for it.

And writers stopped producing short fiction.

Not entirely, to be sure. Samuel Johnson wasn’t far off when he said that no one but a blockhead writes but for money, though the fact remains that virtually all writers are driven by more than the hope of financial reward. A poet, e.e. cummings once explained, is someone obsessed with the process of making things — and so is a writer of fiction. One may indeed make it in the hope of being well compensated for its manufacture, but one nevertheless makes it too for the sheer satisfaction of the task itself. Witness the many very fine stories being written today, rarely for more than an honorarium or a pittance, and often for magazines that pay the author in contributor’s copies.

Still, money makes the mare run, or keeps her stalled in her traces. A surprising proportion of today’s leading commercial writers have written no short fiction whatsoever, and few of them have written enough to be particularly good at it. They’re not to be blamed, nor can one hold the publishing industry to account. If readers cared more about short fiction, more short fiction would be written.

And is the same thing even now happening to the novel? Are video games and hi-def cable and the World Wide Web doing to it what paperback novels and broadcast TV (Three networks! Small screens! Black-and-white pictures!) did to the short story?

But we don’t really want to get into that, do we?

Before I could select a story for this volume, it had to meet two requirements. It had to be noir, and it had to be set in Manhattan.

The boundaries of noir, as we’ll see, are hard to delineate. Those of Manhattan, on the other hand, are not. It’s an island, and the waters that surround it make it pretty clear where it ends.

But two of my choices are rather less obvious in their Manhattan settings.

Evan Hunter knew Manhattan intimately, and set a large portion of his work here. His Ed McBain 87th Precinct novels are very clearly set in Manhattan, although for fictional purposes he tilts the borough ninety degrees and calls it Isola. (That’s Italian for island, in case you were wondering.)

Hunter wrote a great deal of short fiction, all of it good and much of it superb. Many of the early stories were set in unspecified locales, and while he may well have had Manhattan in mind, there’s no textual evidence to show it. The Matt Cordell stories, with there Bowery-bum private-eye hero, have specific Manhattan settings, but I opted instead for “The Last Spin,” because I simply couldn’t resist it; it’s been a favorite story of mine ever since I read it fifty years ago.

But you have to read closely to determine that it takes place in Manhattan. The two characters, champions of warring teenage gangs, never get out of a featureless room. Still, the one called Dave makes it clear where they are. “My people come down from the Bronx,” he says. When you come down from the Bronx, you inevitably land i Manhattan. Case closed.

If there’s a line in “The Last Spin” that places the story firmly in Manhattan (and, I would guess, somewhere in the northern reaches thereof, East Harlem or Washington Heights, say), that’s not a claim I can make for Edgar Allan Poe’s entry. Now, you would think Poe would have set something in Manhattan, given that the spent so much time in residence here. He lived on West 3rd Street for a time, and there was a great outcry a few years ago when New York University, determined to turn all of Greenwich Village into dormitory space, set out to knock down the Poe house and build something in its place. And he also lived on West 84th Street, which the city fathers have subsequently named after him. (But don’t give that street name to a cabby. These days it’s hard enough to pick one who can find West 84th Street.)

I read my way through all of Poe’s stories, or at least enough of each to determine where it took place, and while the man set stories in Charleston and Paris and in no end of murky landscapes, he doesn’t seem to have set anything in Manhattan. He spent quite a few years here, and while they may not have been terribly happy years, well, how many of those did the man have, anyway?

And how could I leave this Manhattanite out of this volume?

So I stretched a point and selected “The Raven.” He was living in Manhattan when he wrote it, and it takes place in the residence of the narrator, who is clearly a fictive equivalent of the author himself. How much of a stretch is it to presume that the book-lined chamber that serves as its setting (with its purple curtains and many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore) is situated like so many other book-lined chambers on Manhattan’s Upper West Side? On, say, West 84th Street?

Works for me.

But wait, you say. (Yes, you. I can hear you.) Wait a minute. “The Raven.” Uh, isn’t it, well, a poem?

So?

Yes, “The Raven” is a poem — and a magnificent one at that. And Poe is not the only poet to be found herein. It’s my great pleasure to present to you the work of two other poets, Horace Gregory and Geoffrey Bartholomew. Both are, to my mind, superb practitioners of their craft. Both are represented here by works set very specifically in Manhattan. And the works of both, like “The Raven,” are indisputably noir.

I became acquainted with Horace Gregory’s work almost as long ago as I read “The Last Spin,” and it too made an enduring impression. Specifically, I was taken with a group of Gregory’s early poems, originally published under the title Chelsea Rooming House, and consisting of poetic monologues by the various inhabitants of that building. There is a lingering darkness in the work that made my only problem that of deciding which of the poems to include, and the reader who samples these may well be moved to go on and read the rest of them.

Much more recently, Geoffrey Bartholomew published The McSorley Poems. McSorley’s is an historic saloon in the East Village — We were here before you were born, proclaims the sign over its door, and the sign itself has been making that claim since, well, before you were born — and Bartholomew has been tending its bar for a quarter of a century. He’s a longtime friend of mine, and when he offered me a prepublication look at The McSorley Poems, I found myself reminded of Chelsea Rooming House. The work of either of these poets, dark and rich and ironic and dripping in noir, would sweeten this book; together, they compliment one another; with “The Raven” for company, they make an even more vivid statement.

Yes, they’re poems, all of them, and fine poems in the bargain. And who’s to say that the notion of noir ought to confine us to prose? The term (which really only means black in French) first came into wide usage as a label for certain films of the 1940s and ’50s. When it moved into prose fiction, it seemed early on to be inextricably associated with big cities, as if the term urban noir were redundant. The novels of Daniel Woodrell have since been categorized quite properly as country noir, and Akashic’s great noir franchise, ranging as far afield as Havana and Dublin, makes it abundantly clear that noir knows no geographic limitations.

Nor does time serve as a boundary. If the term came about in the middle third of the past century, that doesn’t mean that the noir sensibility had not been in evidence before then. Consider Stephen Crane; his first novel, Maggie, A Girl of the Streets, could hardly better epitomize the noir sensibility, and our selection, “A Poker Game,” shows a dark soul indeed confounded by a rare example of innocent grace. Consider “Mrs. Manstey’s View,” the first published story of Edith Wharton, which appeared in Scribner’s Magazine in 1891.

Noir seems to me to transcend form. Film and theater can fit comfortably in the shade of its dark canopy, and so surely can poetry. Some operas make the cut — Verdi’s Rigoletto, it’s worth noting, had its plot lifted in Damon Runyon’s oft-anthologized “Sense of Humor.” And who could look at Goya’s black paintings and not perceive them as visual representations of noir? And what is Billie Holiday’s recording of “Gloomy Sunday” if it isn’t noir? Or the Beatles’ Eleanor Rigby, who died in the church and was buried along with her name? I’d include them, and I’d pull in Beethoven’s late quartets while I was at it.

Rather than exercise false modesty (which is the only sort of which I’m capable), I’ve included a story of my own, “In for a Penny.” It was commissioned by the BBC, to be read aloud, and their request was quite specifically for a noir story. Such commissions rarely bring out the best in a writer, but in this case the resultant story was one with which I was well pleased, and I’m happy to offer it here.

Really, how could I resist? How could I pass up the opportunity to share a volume with Stephen Crane and O. Henry and Edgar Allan Poe and and Irwin Shaw and Edith Wharton and, well, all of these literary superstars?

My mother would be so proud...

Lawrence Block

New York, NY

June 2008