San Francisco Noir 2: The Classics Read online

  This collection is comprised of works of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors’ imaginations. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Akashic Books | ©2009 Akashic Books

  Series concept by Tim McLoughlin and Johnny Temple

  San Francisco map by Sohrab Habibion

  ISBN: 978-1-933354-65-1

  E-ISBN: 9781617752247

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2008925933

  All rights reserved | First printing

  Akashic Books | PO Box 1456 | New York, NY 10009

  [email protected] | www.akashicbooks.com

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the stories in this anthology. “A Watcher by the Dead” by Ambrose Bierce was originally published in the San Francisco Examiner (December 29, 1889); “The Third Circle” by Frank Norris was originally published in the San Francisco Wave (August 28, 1897); “The Black Hole of San Francisco” by Mark Twain was originally published in the Virginia City (Nevada) Territorial Enterprise (December 29, 1865); “South of the Slot” by Jack London was originally published in the Saturday Evening Post (May 22, 1909); “The Collector Comes After Payday” by Fletcher Flora was originally published in Manhunt (August 1953), © 1953 by Fletcher Flora; “Souls Burning” by Bill Pronzini was originally published in Dark Crimes (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1991), © 1991 by Bill Pronzini; “The Second Coming” by Joe Gores was originally published in Adam (August 1966), © 1966 by Joe Gores; “Knives in the Dark” by Don Herron was originally published in Measures of Poison (Tucson, Arizona: Dennis McMillan Publications, 2002), © 2002 by Don Herron; “Invisible Time” by Janet Dawson was originally published in Once Upon a Crime: Fairy Tales for Mystery Lovers (New York: Berkley Prime Crime, 1998), © 1998 by Janet Dawson; “The King Butcher of Bristol Bay” by Oscar Peñaranda was originally published in Seasons by the Bay (San Francisco: T’Boli Publishing, 2004), © 2004 by Oscar Peñaranda; “Deceptions” by Marcia Muller was originally published in A Matter of Crime (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987), © 1987 by Marcia Muller; “Street Court” (excerpt) by Seth Morgan was originally published in Homeboy (New York: Random House, 1990), © 1990 by Seth Morgan; “The Numbers Game” by Craig Clevenger is printed by permission of Craig Clevenger; “The Woman Who Laughed” by William T. Vollman was originally published in The Rainbow Stories (New York: Atheneum, 1989), © 1989 by William T. Vollman; “Ash” by John Shirley was originally published in Dead End: City Limits (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), © 1991 by John Shirley.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The editor extends a warm thanks to the following for their advice and support: Robert Mailer Anderson, Willis Barnstone, Karl Marx Bauer, Amy Beasom at Elsewhere Books, Andy Bellows, Chiam Bertman, Steven Black, Mary Bonds, Donna Joy Brodman, Carl at the Ha Ra, David Corbett, Elizabeth Gand, Geoffrey Green, Elaine Katzenberger, Ed Kaufman and the gang at “M” is for Mystery, Kevin Killian, Diane Kudisch at the SF Mystery Bookstore, Johanna Ingalls, John Law, Stacey Lewis, Julie Lindow, Mr. Lucky, Eddie Muller, Jim Nisbet, Ingrid Nystrom, Aaron Petrovich, Peter Plate, Richard Poccia, Erika Schmidt, Laura Sheppard, Mark Andre Singer, Faye Snowden, Rebecca Solnit, Domenic Stansberry, Gent Sturgeon, Lisa Sutcliffe, Johnny Temple, Paul Yamazaki, Frederick Young, and as always, Chris and Alex.

  Careful now. We’re dealing here with a myth. This city is a point upon a map of fog; Lemuria in a city unkown. Like us, it doesn’t quite exist.

  —Ambrose Bierce

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  PART I: BARBAROUS COAST

  AMBROSE BIERCE

  North Beach

  A Watcher By the Dead

  1889

  FRANK NORRIS

  Chinatown

  The Third Circle

  1897

  MARK TWAIN

  Portsmouth Square

  The Black Hole of San Francisco

  1865

  JACK LONDON

  South of Market

  South of the Slot

  1909

  PART II: SHADOWS IN THE FOG

  FLETCHER FLORA

  Lower Market Street

  The Collector Comes After Payday

  1953

  BILL PRONZINI

  Civic Center

  Souls Burning

  1991

  JOE GORES

  San Quentin

  The Second Coming

  1966

  DON HERRON

  Nob Hill

  Knives in the Dark

  2002

  PART III: ISLE OF BROKEN DREAMS

  MARCIA MULLER

  Golden Gate Bridge

  Deceptions

  1987

  OSCAR PEÑARANDA

  Manilatown

  The King Butcher of Bristol Bay

  2004

  JANET DAWSON

  Union Square

  Invisible Time

  1998

  PART IV: DESOLATION ANGELS

  SETH MORGAN

  Outer Mission

  Street Court

  1990

  CRAIG CLEVENGER

  The Sunset

  The Numbers Game

  2009

  WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN

  Tenderloin

  The Woman Who Laughed

  1989

  JOHN SHIRLEY

  The Mission

  Ash

  1991

  About the Contributors

  INTRODUCTION

  CHASING SHADOWS

  San Francisco is a town made for noir. Long before Hammett’s muse seduced him with fog and mist to pen The Maltese Falcon, European explorers and Christian missionaries had already laid the groundwork for the genre. Just ask the Ohlone indigenous peoples. The city’s history is a shadowy one. It is founded upon the spilling of blood.

  From its origins as a frontier boomtown to its ascent as an imperial financial giant, the city of Saint Francis has served as an inviting home to all manner of transgression and villainy. Drawn to the romantic landscape by the lure of possibility, millions have flocked here to cast their stakes in the hope for prosperity, pleasure, and a personal freedom seldom dreamed of elsewhere. Following the imperatives of manifest destiny, the city’s pioneers engaged in fraud, larceny, kidnapping, and murder. The prospect of gold led many to their demise while establishing a terrain ruled by the human passions. Frank Norris so beautifully captured this in his classic novel McTeague, later transformed into the epic film Greed, by legendary director Erich von Stroheim. It is a classic tale of dreams gone awry. The avaricious appetites of the story’s characters lead them into a spiral of destruction where the possibility of redemption is completely vanquished. By the tale’s end, our antiheroes are left with only two possible options: jail or the grave. What could better illustrate a noir sensibility?

  With the release four years ago of the first volume of San Francisco Noir, we brought together a team of seasoned writers to compose original works that gave the reader a sinister sense of the city. The success of that volume was encouraging and we have returned with a new task at hand: to present a collection of classic reprints, some hitherto buried by the passage of time, which depict a town riddled by inequity from its very beginnings.

  While tracing San Francisco’s extensive noir canon, one essentially creates a bridge between past and present. The literary meets the historic in a lyrical weaving of narratives. Sociopolitical landscapes intersect with personal and collective histories, bringing to light forgotten fragments of the past. Noir serves as an oracle, a lo
oking glass with which we reconnect with the vast continuum of events that have shaped the city’s topography and the character of its citizens.

  Noir is the language of politics without ideology.

  The flowering of tragedy has taken many forms over the course of a century. Let us follow a timeline to better observe the recurring themes and significant patterns that emerge. Issues concerning race, class politics, identity, human rights, and the effects of industrialization correspond to the ebb and flow of San Francisco’s history. Writers have explored the infernal underbelly of city since the California Gold Rush. Samuel Adams Drake, in his novel The Young Vigilantes, painted a picture of the harsh conditions of Barbary Coast living during the 1800s. In the shadow of the Civil War, shanghaiing flourished in the city and brought into existence an underworld culture of “crimps,” “boatmen,” and “vigilantes.” This traffic in human flesh was to set the stage for modern noir fiction. Mark Twain, meanwhile, offered a satirical yet hellish portrait of the San Francisco criminal justice system in his short piece included here titled “The Black Hole of San Francisco.” The birth of “noir journalism” was born, paving the way for future classics such as Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song. It is interesting to note the use of Twain’s language in this piece. As strongly anti-imperialist and progressively minded as he was, he too was touched by the way racism was embedded within the vernacular. A prison house of language made it possible to deny agency to persons of color and hence view them as something less than human. This problem is reflected in a few of the other stories in our collection as well. Even critical thinkers of the time could succumb to the prevailing prejudices.

  It is significant to note that the post–Civil War era noir writers share similar threads of thinking in regards to the human condition. A dialectic between free will and determinism roams throughout their narrative structures. The persistent question arises: Do humans have any say in their own fate? The great satirist and storyteller Ambrose Bierce was a master at cultivating moody atmospherics that threatened to overtake his protagonists. In his short story “Beyond the Wall,” he describes a desolate, foggy, and mysterious geography bordering on the supernatural. A man in a carriage struggles against the elements to reach his destination, only to realize upon arrival that the ailing friend he has come to visit has gone mad. In the Bierce story we’ve chosen for this volume, “A Watcher by the Dead,” he experiments with claustrophobia, pitting human endurance against the morbidity of an enclosed space. Protagonists are seen gambling against the sanity of a fellow human. Bierce’s macabre sensibility reveals a psychopathology rooted as much in naturalism as in the supernatural.

  As noir entered the twentieth century, the engines of industrialism provided the backdrop for the themes of identity crisis and class division. Jack London’s “South of the Slot” shines brightly as it prognosticates noir’s interest in doppelgängers, split personalities, and the rough and tumble of the streets. First published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1909 and reprinted here, it also uncannily foreshadowed the General Strike of 1934, where suppressed class tensions led to battles in the streets of San Francisco between workers and the state apparatus. The post–world war era ushered in elements of anxiety and despair that cut deep into the fabric of culture. Works we have selected by Fletcher Flora and Joe Gores illustrate the destruction of the social contract. With the advent of the cold war, all bets placed during the New Deal were off. The militarization of the homeland led to the systematization of censorship, the beginning of the prison-industrial complex, Hollywood blacklisting, and the repression of individual liberties. Noir mirrored the damage.

  By the time of the information explosion, a newer generation of writers arrived to herald the appearance of a wholly plutocratic era. Bill Prozini’s story explores the ferocity with which urban living has ravaged those forced to the margins. Oscar Peñaranda’s writings meditate upon the dashed hopes and dreams of immigrants living in the diaspora and how they manage to survive. His portrayal of life in San Francisco’s Manilatown offers insight into a complex community that once thrived on the edge of Chinatown and North Beach. Janet Dawson looks at the fracturing of the nuclear family in her modern take on Hansel and Gretel called “Invisible Time.” She asks if it is possible for innocence to exist in the face of brutality. William T. Vollmann has sought to find beauty in what most people would consider the grotesque. Prostitutes, serial killers, multiple personality types, and the marginalized populate his tales. (Through an alchemy of heart, his charcoal drawings of Tenderloin prostitutes have offered a rare view of the humanity to be found in the unlikeliest of places.) John Shirley takes an infernal ride and follows the doomed, and the newly doomed, upon their journey into the furnace of the inner city; reality warps as sanity and madness merge to form their own twisted logic. Craig Clevenger traverses the wastelands of suburbia with a razor tongue, cryptically decoding the lives of his characters with a vengeance. He has created an “algebra of noir,” an urban “book of the dead,” that navigates the twilight realm where lost souls, both living and dead, await their final dissolution.

  We see San Francisco reflected in these tales. A city haunted by the specters of its past—a past that is quickly fleeting, leaving little trace as it disappears into oblivion. Perhaps the final vestiges of this town will someday be found in this handy little volume of pulp. Enjoy it while you can, before it, too, returns to dust.

  Peter Maravelis

  San Francisco, CA

  November 2008

  PART I

  BARBAROUS COAST

  A WATCHER BY THE DEAD

  BY AMBROSE BIERCE

  North Beach

  (Originally published in 1889)

  I

  In an upper room of an unoccupied dwelling in that part of San Francisco known as North Beach lay the body of a man, under a sheet. The hour was near nine in the evening; the room was dimly lighted by a single candle. Although the weather was warm, the two windows, contrary to the custom which gives the dead plenty of air, were closed and the blinds drawn down. The furniture of the room consisted of but three pieces—an armchair, a small reading stand supporting the candle, and a long kitchen table supporting the body of the man. All these, as also the corpse, seemed to have been recently brought in, for an observer, had there been one, would have seen that all were free from dust, whereas everything else in the room was pretty thickly coated with it, and there were cobwebs in the angles of the walls.

  Under the sheet the outlines of the body could be traced, even the features, these having that unnaturally sharp definition which seems to belong to faces of the dead, but is really characteristic of those only that have been wasted by disease. From the silence of the room one would rightly have inferred that it was not in the front of the house, facing a street. It really faced nothing but a high breast of rock, the rear of the building being set into a hill.

  As a neighboring church clock was striking nine with an indolence which seemed to imply such an indifference to the flight of time that one could hardly help wondering why it took the trouble to strike at all, the single door of the room was opened and a man entered, advancing toward the body. As he did so the door closed, apparently of its own volition; there was a grating, as of a key turned with difficulty, and the snap of the lock bolt as it shot into its socket. A sound of retiring footsteps in the passage outside ensued, and the man was to all appearance a prisoner. Advancing to the table, he stood a moment looking down at the body; then with a slight shrug of the shoulders walked over to one of the windows and hoisted the blind. The darkness outside was absolute, the panes were covered with dust, but by wiping this away he could see that the window was fortified with strong iron bars crossing it within a few inches of the glass and imbedded in the masonry on each side. He examined the other window. It was the same. He manifested no great curiosity in the matter, did not even so much as raise the sash. If he was a prisoner he was apparently a tractable one. Having completed his examination of the r
oom, he seated himself in the armchair, took a book from his pocket, drew the stand with its candle alongside and began to read.

  The man was young—not more than thirty—dark in complexion, smooth-shaven, with brown hair. His face was thin and high-nosed, with a broad forehead and a “firmness” of the chin and jaw which is said by those having it to denote resolution. The eyes were gray and steadfast, not moving except with definitive purpose. They were now for the greater part of the time fixed upon his book, but he occasionally withdrew them and turned them to the body on the table, not, apparently, from any dismal fascination which under such circumstances it might be supposed to exercise upon even a courageous person, nor with a conscious rebellion against the opposite influence which might dominate a timid one. He looked at it as if in his reading he had come upon something recalling him to a sense of his surroundings. Clearly this watcher by the dead was discharging his trust with intelligence and composure, as became him.

  After reading for perhaps a half-hour he seemed to come to the end of a chapter and quietly laid away the book. He then rose and taking the reading stand from the floor carried it into a corner of the room near one of the windows, lifted the candle from it and returned to the empty fireplace before which he had been sitting.

  A moment later he walked over to the body on the table, lifted the sheet, and turned it back from the head, exposing a mass of dark hair and a thin face cloth, beneath which the features showed with even sharper definition than before. Shading his eyes by interposing his free hand between them and the candle, he stood looking at his motionless companion with a serious and tranquil regard. Satisfied with his inspection, he pulled the sheet over the face again and returning to his chair, took some matches off the candlestick, put them in the side pocket of his sack coat, and sat down. He then lifted the candle from its socket and looked at it critically, as if calculating how long it would last. It was barely two inches long; in another hour he would be in darkness. He replaced it in the candlestick and blew it out.