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Review: San Francisco Noir 2: The Classics. Edited by Peter Maravelis. NY: Akashic Books, 2009.
ISBN-13: 978-1-933354-65-1

Michael Sedano

The City, as its devotees object, should never be called ‘Frisco. The term offends the sensibility of loyal San Franciscans, or something classic Chronicle columnist Ralph J. Gleason must have written long ago. Similarly, stuff that isn’t classic shouldn’t be called “classic,” as does the subtitle of Akashic’s San Francisco Noir 2, The Classics.

To me, “classic” suggest a pair of standards. First, age. Second unusually distinctive quality. It’s not enough that a piece have age, nor even mere quality. Memorability, distinctiveness, adaptation to a particular readership, any combination marks the boundary between merely good old stuff and something Classic with a capital “C”.

These values might not be readily apparent, as in Mark Twain’s “The Black Hole of San Francisco,” from 1865. It’s an uninteresting satire of a courthouse so devoid of justice it emits horrible smells. Editor Peter Maravelis wisely hides this third, following two other old pieces, Ambrose Bierce’s “A Watcher by the Dead,” from 1889’s North Beach, and Frank Norris’ “The Third Circle,” set in 1897 Chinatown. They are entertaining work, not necessarily each writer’s most notable, and charitably allowing a huge stretch to comprehend including the Twain piece at all.

These are, however, old. Hence, the oxymorons “unappreciated classic” or “classic-in-waiting” come readily to mind to account for such editorial decisions as skipping ahead from Dahiell Hammett’s 1925, “The Scorched Face” to 1953’s “The Collector Comes After Payday,” by Fletcher Flora.

Two thirds of the collection comes from a roster of noted late 20^th century writers. After the mid-century stop, Maravelis skips ahead 11 years to 1966’ “The Second Coming” from Joe Gores, then to Marcia Muller’s 1987 “Deceptions.”

Akashic and Maravelis have put together a worthwhile anthology, despite the less than felicitous subtitle. Two stories frame the quality well.

In his ’53 piece, Fletcher Flora reflects the machismo and incipient violence of his era. The male criminal enjoys slapping around his trophy wife. Frankie lives the 1950’s fantasy life. A 120-pound weakling and born loser, Frankie’s luck turns around completely. He gets rich, gets the girl, enjoys wealth on the seamy side until he falls for a younger woman. Frankie’s last gasp exits a .38 hole in his chest, his irony the abused wife finally finding her backbone.

By 1987, Marcia Muller has a woman investigator tracking down a missing woman, a possible suicide. But it appears a plan by a clever woman looking to continue her life under someplace else. A park ranger is the victim, lured and abandoned by the missing woman. Her irony is being found hacked to pieces in an old cistern, the betrayed paramour’s revenge. The murderer himself plunges to his last gasp after pursuing the female dick to a dead end, where her lucky desperation produces the killer’s fatal stumble.

One story merits special notice, Janet Dawson’s 1998 story of children in peril, “Invisible Time.” A tense nightmare of two homeless children surviving on the streets around Union Square. Greta, a ten-year old girl takes care of her 5-year old brother Hank. Homeless after their alcoholic mother abandons them after one hard knock after another, the children steal or eat leftovers from lunchtime trash barrels. It’s a no happy endings story, truly frightening. Dawson has one of the best lines in the book, when, after expressing Greta’s growing desperation, “She was doing the best she could, but she didn’t know how long she could keep it up.” Avoiding the skid row of the Tenderloin and South of Market region, remaining in Union Square, the nicer area north of Market. Then comes gem of pure beauty:

"Greta couldn’t remember when Mom left. A few weeks, a month, two months, it didn’t matter. After a few days, the hours all ran together, like a stream of dirty water chasing debris down the sewer grate. She only remembered that it didn’t used to be like this.”

A classic metaphor line like that more than enough compels reading more Dawson. And the other writers, too. The familiar ones. For instance, the Hammett. Although not noir per se, I would like more readers to laugh at Hammett’s hilarious bronco buster short story from The Continental Op II.

There is one jarring note that still bugs me. There’s a story with a Chicano character, John Shirley’s 1991 “Ash.” But the Chicano’s weird. Not just a street weird-o, a Santero, or a Santeria apparition of some strange sort.  I’ll be embarrassed to learn Shirley’s a nom de plume of a Mexicano a todo dar, but from the looks of this character, either I haven’t been to Frisco for too long, or Shirley needs to learn more about Chicanos before dropping one into the middle a story. Ash, a middle-class guy has been laid off due to the current recession. He meticulously plans to stick up an armored car. When the heist goes south, the Chicano appears, the crook gets tangled up with the street person, the crook plugs the guard. The murder sends the robber into a psychedelic episode that ends only when Ash, the character, ends, at the bottom of an elevator shaft. Strange ending to an odd story and a fitting final page in an excellent collection.

If only they hadn’t stretched matters and called it “Classic.”

Foto Plactica at UCR – Inauguration of UCR’s Tomás Rivera Flor Y Canto Archives.

The elevator ride to Special Collections leads to Tomás Rivera Library’s top floor, but opens onto an anonymous dark hallway. A few turns and I’m at the twin glass doors. The entry corridor is lined on both sides with matted photographs mounted on the wall. (Click images to enlarge.)

The dramatic Oscar Acosta images greet me on my left. The shot of Tomás Rivera with Ybarra-Frausto and Hinojosa-Smith holds the initial space of the right wall. The photos are hung with ample wall space between them so each can hold its own focus of attention. At 19” by 13”,  viewers can stand back and take in the full frame with easy comfort. Research Librarian Gwido Zlatkes has labeled each image. He smiles pointing to the photo of rrsalinas. Gwido, a research librarian to the bone, wanted to know more about these Chicana and Chicano writers. Somehow, the ex-Tecato poet has joined the family of a recent Mexican president, Salinas-Gortari. Gwido makes a quick trip to the word processor and in a moment rr rejoins his own clan.

Dr. Melissa Conway, Head of Special Collections & Archives does the introduction. I’m preceded to the lectern by Elihud Martinez, a wonderfully informative talk on Miguel Leon-Portillo’s work in Nahuatl philosophy, the term, “flor y canto” and its place in understanding chicano literature and the brief moment of the floricanto movimiento that began with the 1973 USC gathering.

After my time on the platform—the performance was videotaped—the audience adjourned to a side room for chocolate, café, pan and conversation. Doña Rivera was elegantly charming. Meeting her today, after photographing her late husband in a candid moment thirty-five years ago brought me an unexpected sense of completion.

Michael Sedano

Abraham Rodriguez.
NY: Akashic Books, 2008.
ISBN-13: 978-1-933354-56-9

What do you do when a barefoot woman in a wet minidress sneaks up the fire escape? If you’re a male writer with writer’s block, you start writing inspired prose. If you’re a male painter with painter’s block, you start painting superb new work. If you’re a burned-out ladies man and you wake up with that woman naked in your bed, you wonder if she’s an alcohol-induced hallucination, roll over and go back to sleep.

Until you wake up and she’s still there, her minidress drip-drying in the shower, and you still can’t remember where she came from.

That’s the basic set-up and some of the outcome of Abraham Rodriguez’ unlikely detective story, South by South Bronx. The woman is real. She’s fled a mysteriously powerful operative-- maybe he’s CIA? At any rate, he’s a killer who’s just slaughtered the woman’s lover and wants to capture millions of dollars the dead lover consigned to the woman. That the killer planted the woman in the lover’s business only to have the woman double cross the killer instead, adds exciting complication to the story of the artists helping this lady in distress.

Add into this mix of characters a disaffected cop, good friends with the dead guy, the dead guy’s brother, and their crime family, and Serpico-like alienated from other cops. When the powerful killer drafts the detective to track down the woman and the money, you have a convoluted and parallel chase, one that couples a reader to another question--with an easy answer: what do you do when a great new noir mystery novel falls into your hands?

Read it voraciously. Turn every page anxious to learn the next complication and plot twist. Odd stuff. Humor. Paranoia. A great "summer read" any time of the year.

Although presented as a sex object to open the story, this woman’s no fool. There’s that pistol in her purse, for example. She’s fully aware of the killer’s power and manages to play the artists against the killer against the cop. The cop, meanwhile, distrusts his own motives only a little less than he mistrusts the powerful outsider’s motives. Moreover, the cop is busy playing his own game against the killer, against his dead friend’s family, and is after the money for himself. Or is he? Much of the pleasure of noir fiction comes from conflicting expectations like those played out here, and the fact something is happening every minute to keep the story advancing.

If you, as am I, are not a New Yorker and don’t know what “Bronx” refers to, Rodriguez does the favor of drawing out the exposition with language, characterization and setting. In West Coast terms, this part of New York City is what East L.A. is to El Lay. Except substitute Puerto Ricans for Chicanos, and give characters public transportation instead of cars. And fire escapes.

Rodriguez provides ample local color to make the novel a treat for the ears as well as the imagination. Rodriguez constructs a grammatical style built on sentence fragments and mid-thought irruptions that suggest the jumpiness of various characters’ moods and intentions. The author peppers the earlier pages that way, then as the story matures, uses the style sparingly for good effect. More obvious is his typographical convention, a serif font for the story of the woman and the artists, a sans serif for the detective’s side of the chase. Rodriguez trusts his characters and uses “he said, she said” tags sparingly, interchanging conversation to narration, from third to first person, keeping the reader oriented and on edge. It all works to propel the story to a satisfyingly tidy finish. It’s a good mystery, so enough said.

Publisher Akashic Books opened the 2008 book with an April through May splash, so hopefully your local bookstore has copies in hand for you. Visit the publisher’s webpage for purchase information if your local independent bookseller somehow is out of the loop or uninterested in your money. I like how Akashic defines itself on its webpage, “reverse-gentrification of the literary world.” Abraham Rodriguez’ third novel certainly offers proof of the sincerity of Akashic’s claim.


Note. A couple weeks ago, I reviewed Roberto Bolaños' The Savage Detectives. Several writers expressed perplexity that I seem not to have revered the writer his due. Asi son las cosas, but maybe I'm the only one impatient with the late writer's work. For instance, I came across the following in an email from Media Bistro:

MONDAY JUN 09, 2008
OMG, I Forgot to Write a "Hot Galleys of BookExpo" Post!
I knew there was something I forgot to include in last week's BookExpo America coverage...

So, yeah, everybody wanted to get their hands on FSG's thick galleys for 2666, the posthumous novel from Roberto Bolaño—in fact, I heard rumors that every single mockup of the three-volume slipcase edition of the 900-page novel that went on display in the FSG booth was swiped by eager readers (who would eventually discover that their ill-gotten gains were filled with blank pages).


Nine hundred pages, three volumes? Uau, talk about magnum opus. At any rate, here we are, the second Tuesday of June 2008. Until next Tuesday, thanks for visiting La Bloga.

ate,
mvs

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