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Noir anthology tells tales of a changing Boston

By Gaveliers, The Gavel Media Team, on November 1, 2009 10:32 PM

By Matthew Gavin, Culture Editor -

A shadowy world of fast-talking private eyes and alluring femme fatales is left behind when a hardboiled genre meets a hardened city in the anthology, Boston Noir. This latest installment to a series of noir anthologies, published by Akashic Books, features 11 original short stories by different writers edited by Dennis Lehane, the author of such Boston-based novels as Mystic River and Gone, Baby, Gone.

“Each story represents a different neighborhood,” Lehane says. “Because we’re all individual writers with very different takes on the city — Itabari Neri’s Roxbury is not Don Lee’s Cambridge which is not John Dufresne’s Southie — the depiction of the city as a whole is much more varied than if you’d seen it through the eyes of one writer.”

Lehane’s own contribution, entitled “Animal Control,” is set in his local haunt of Dorchester, and echoes the sentiments of his earlier works as a story of social isolation. It tells of a man who discovers companionship in the form of canine left for dead, infusing his life with a newfound solace within the confines of his neighborhood. This underlying motif of searching for oneself within an imposing communal identity serves as precedent for the anthology as a whole.  In the introduction, Lehane shuns the stylized trimmings conventionally attached to the genre, instead referring to noir as a “working-class tragedy.”

“One of the recurrent themes of noir has always been the search for home,” Lehane writes. “Not home in the physical sense — though that does happen — but in the irrational, emotional sense.”

Many of the tragic characters of Boston Noir are explicit departures from well-worn, stoic archetypes the likes of Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade and Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe — they are everymen and women lost in the shuffle of a city struggling to find its identity in the face of modern-day gentrification and change.

“Boston’s no longer easily classified as simply a city comprised of Brahmin strongholds vs. the Irish ones,” Lehane says. “That may be the Boston I knew and grew up in, but it’s a vanishing world these days. And the world that has replaced it is so much more diverse and interesting in a lot of ways.”

Author and contributor Russ Aborn says that Boston Noir is a kind of darkly comedic reflection of the city’s storied past.  His own story, “Turn Speed,” is about a bank robbery pulled off by a crew of bawdy, workaday guys that reflect the kind of eccentricity ingrained in Boston’s legacy. “There have been some wild stories that have come out of Boston that were true,” Aborn says.

Boston’s history indeed has its fair share of notable characters and events that maintain an indelible presence in its collective memory.  In 1950, a group of gunmen committed what was hailed as the greatest heist of the 20^th century in The Great Brinks Robbery.  Downtown Boston played host to the unsolved Blackfriars Massacre of 1978, in which five men were killed execution-style in the basement of the Blackfriars Pub. The Winter Hill Gang became the preeminent organized crime faction of New England in the wake of the Irish Gang Wars of the 1960s and notorious mob boss, James “Whitey” Bulger, remains on the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list.  Racial tensions gripped the city in 1989 after Charles Stuart murdered his pregnant wife and sent law enforcement officials on a wild goose chase for a conjured African-American suspect — then jumped off the Tobin Bridge when he was labeled as a person of interest.

“Boston just has 300 plus years of history — lots of goings-on to this day,” Brendan DuBois says, author and contributor to the anthology. “It’s the perfect setting for noir.”

DuBois’ story, “The Dark Island,” breaks convention as it takes noir out of the city streets and sets it against the backdrop of the historic islands of Boston Harbor. The missing shoe box of a soldier forms a new case for investigator Billy Sullivan, a stolid figure who, with his laconic quips and penchant for wearing a fedora, induces a formulaic resemblance to the private eyes of the film noir of Hollywood’s Golden Age.  Riding in a skiff through the murky waters of the harbor, Sullivan is told that he knows his islands well and replies, “They all have a story.  All have legends.”

So too do the stories and authors of Boston Noir relate their own neighborhood stories — their own legacies.  They voice a kind of nostalgia — a communal lamentation found not in a roguish socialite’s welling eyes or behind the opaque glass of a private investigator’s office door — but in the everyday strife of a city’s people.

“That’s the paradox of the new Boston — what’s lost has, in many cases, been taken; what’s left is what people can’t sell,” Lehane states in the introduction. “Noir is a genre of loss, of men and women unable to roll with the changing times so the changing times instead roll over them.”

The stories of Boston Noir form a tapestry of an adjusting city that can’t be easily summated. There are frustrations of glass ceiling corporate ladders within Financial District high rises; a search for a sense of belonging among the row house facades of Beacon Hill; familial bonds strengthened in the blue-collar streets of North Quincy.  The anthology is as intricately diverse as Boston itself — it characterizes a city faced with inevitable change still clinging to its past — a city with a future where, Lehane says, “whatever will be will be.”