Montreal Noir

Introduction A Beautiful Mess

Montreal is an island, both literally and figuratively.

It took us longer to put this anthology together than we’d hoped, but that didn’t surprise us much. Montreal is one of the oldest cities in North America and seems to be in a constant state of flux, changing its personality every few decades. Today, the city has its own language: Franglais (or Frenglish). Maybe the first word spoken in that language was noir.

Noir is Montreal.

It’s unsettling, it’s subversive, it’s palpable, but it’s never obvious. Noir is in the shadows. Montreal’s long history is dominated by cultures coming together, almost. And cultures coming apart, almost. But always continuing.

When Frenchman Jacques Cartier reached the island of Montreal in 1535, he was met by the inhabitants of the village of Hochelaga, the Saint Lawrence Iroquoians. Yet when Samuel de Champlain arrived seventy years later, the village was gone. Champlain established a fur trading post, which grew slowly, and in 1725, walls were built to fortify the French village.

After the Seven Years’ War in 1763, French colonies in North America became British but kept the French civil laws, the seigneurial system, Catholicism, and the French language. Immigration opened up to more than just Roman Catholics and by 1830 Montreal was more Anglophone than Francophone. The city remained that way into the next century, when many people began moving from rural Quebec for jobs in Montreal factories, bringing back the Francophone majority. The first major exodus from Quebec came between 1840 and 1930, when about 900,000 French Canadians left for work in New England (including the ancestors of Jack Kerouac and Peyton Place author Marie Grace DeRepentigny, who published as Grace Metalious).

You may be wondering what any of this has to do with the short stories in this volume, but history is everywhere in Montreal. And everything.

Canada claims to be a mosaic of people, as opposed to America’s melting pot. In Canada, we don’t strive to melt into one identity, we are a mosaic of many identities. Yeah, that’s the polite and positive spin we put on the struggle that people have gone through to maintain their own identities, and Montreal is ground zero for that struggle.

Montreal has its own identity. Multicultural, urban, industrial — it’s not like the rest of Quebec. For a long time it was the biggest city in Canada, the financial and cultural center, but it was never much like the rest of the country. Only forty miles from the US border, Montreal has always been a popular destination for Americans, though it’s definitely nothing like America.

In fact, in 1775, Montreal was the first place occupied by American forces who thought they would be welcomed as liberators. The idea was that French Canadians would join Americans against the British, but as always, Montreal was complicated and unpredictable and things didn’t go according to plan. The Americans left in 1776.

In the late 1800s, an Irishman and ex — British soldier named Charles McKiernan, known to all as Joe Beef, ran a canteen that refused service to no one. “No matter who he is, whether English, French, Irish, Negro, Indian, or what religion he belongs to,” he told a reporter. In an advertisement, Beef bragged: He cares not for Pope, Priest, Parson, or King William of the Boyne; all Joe wants is the Coin. Today, Joe Beef is the name of a trendy restaurant.

In the early twentieth century, Montreal was already a busy port and known as an open city, though it really took off during the American Prohibition in the 1920s. As a popular song of the time said:

We have no idea what your Ingersoll might be, or why you’d want to bet it, but there was no prohibition in Montreal. There was, however, an Amtrak train from New York several times a day.

During World War II, Montreal was an industrial center, as the Lachine Canal, lined with factories, churned out materials for the war effort. The city was also the place where more than a million raw recruits from Ontario and Western Canada changed trains on their way to Halifax, where they would ship out to European battlefields. Most of these men had at least a few days to enjoy Montreal’s nightlife, which was still booming.

After the war, the rest of the province of Quebec, which had always been much more conservative than Montreal, elected a premier whose era became known as La Grande Noirceur. The Great Darkness. The Noir. And Montreal was officially “cleaned up.” Really, the crime was just pushed back into the shadows.

The postwar boom sent the suburbs spreading out in every direction. New expressways were built, tunnels were forged for a metro system, new bridges were constructed to link the south and north shores to the city, and an island was established in the Saint Lawrence River. The world was invited to experience the island for Expo 67, the World’s Fair.

At that time we had something called the Révolution tranquille, the Quiet Revolution, which included over two hundred bombs, two political kidnappings (one ending in murder), civil liberties being suspended, and the army being called out into the streets. So it wasn’t really all that quiet. But eventually the violence passed, the army left, and Montreal went back to being Montreal.

Back to the noir.

There is a story that the idea for the Pink Floyd song “Another Brick in the Wall” came to Roger Waters during a concert in Montreal. He felt the desire to build a wall between himself and an audience that made too much noise during the quiet parts of the concert — the concert in front of 80,000 people in the cavernous Olympic Stadium. If it’s true, it’s the only time anyone ever thought of putting up a wall in Montreal. Two referendums on separating Quebec from the rest of Canada have been held, but for all the talk of the “two solitudes” (a term popularized by Hugh MacLennan’s 1945 novel of the same name that suggested a lack of connection between Anglophone and Francophone communities), there was never any physical separation inside Montreal. No walls or fences were ever erected. The idea would have been seen as idiotic by everyone in the city, far too obvious. This isn’t Berlin or Belfast or Johannesburg or Jerusalem — this is Montreal. Birthplace of Leonard Cohen, Saul Bellow, Michel Tremblay, Maurice Richard, Mordecai Richler, and Oscar Peterson; the setting for great works by Gabrielle Roy, Mavis Gallant, J.D. Salinger, Dany Laferrière, Brian Moore, and many more.

And now, Montreal Noir.

Perhaps it’s fitting that a collection that brings so many of Montreal’s cultures together is noir. Much of Montreal’s literary tradition was defined by the two solitudes and most of the works delved deeply into single neighborhoods. Gabrielle Roy’s The Tin Flute (Bonheur d’occasion) in Saint-Henri, Mordecai Richler’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz in Mile End, Michel Tremblay’s great plays set on the Plateau, and Yves Beauchemin’s The Alley Cat (Le Matou) reveal some stark differences from before and after the Quiet Revolution. Even the pulp novels of the 1950s written by David Montrose and Al Palmer were set in Montreal. Palmer’s Montreal Confidential did for the city what the original did for New York City, taking place almost entirely in Westmount and the western half of downtown. Trevanian (Rodney Whitaker) brought an outsider’s eye with The Main and was one of the first to blend the two solitudes into a single story.

This collection, with voices of both French and English writers, visits many neighborhoods and combines them into something that is, if not totally coherent, at least as coherent as the beautiful mess that is Montreal. Patrick Senécal and Tess Fragoulis take us downtown, where three major universities mix business with shopping. Michel Basilières and Howard Shrier show us how much The Main has changed from the 1950s to today. And how little.

Along the Lachine Canal, Catherine McKenzie takes us through Saint-Henri, Robert Pobi continues to Little Burgundy, and Samuel Archibald reaches the old port and Centre-Sud. On the other side of downtown, Ian Truman’s gritty, grimy Hochelaga seems far from the gay village of Geneviève Lefebvre’s Ville-Marie, even if it is right next door. Arjun Baju explores the dreamlike Mile End that may not even be real.

The residential neighborhoods surrounding Mount Royal, the Plateau, and Côte-des-Neiges are brought into focus by Johanne Seymour, Martin Michaud, and Melissa Yi.

Montreal is an island, and Peter Kirby walks us to the very edges; Brad Smith escorts us to the Montérégie, off the island but still in the shadows.

Each neighborhood is different and, of course, each Montrealer (Montrealais) is different, making up the pieces of the mosaic of our city. Some are bright and shiny, others are dark and somber, but all have a shadow in the noir.

2017 marks Montreal’s 375th birthday and we’re pleased to add this collection to the literary life of an amazing city.

John McFetridge & Jacques Filippi

Montreal, Quebec

August 2017