K. Constantine: Pittsburgh Noir

In 1996, my husband and I were on sabbatical leaves in the south of France. And the Steelers were playing in the Superbowl. How could we miss that? I located a bar in Monaco called Le Texan. Unfortunately, the Steelers were playing the Dallas Cowboys that time around, so when we got to the bar, the place was filled with braying people in Stetsons. One drunk man stood up and said, “Did anyone ever hear of anything good coming out of Pittsburgh?” The place was too noisy for him to hear me answer.

It was a should-have-won/could-have-won loss.

Not everybody in Pittsburgh is sports crazy, but most are. Scratch a Pittsburgher and you will hear about Bill Mazeroski’s home run that won the 1960 World Series, the catch known as “the immaculate reception” by Steeler Franco Harris, the amazing year of 1979 when the Pirates won the World Series and the Steelers won the Superbowl. The Pirates, the Steelers, and the Penguins play out our personal dramas. Didn’t look possible and then he did it. Or: That show of anger was the thing that turned it around. Or: All in their hands and they got too confident. Sports provides all kinds of possible narratives. And the best one keeps being the story of the impossible, the story of the underdog fighting back and winning.

Pittsburgh has its own story: It was built around three rivers, became a thriving center for the manufacture of steel, and attracted many immigrants to work the mills. Clashes between owners and laborers are part of its history, perhaps most notably the Homestead Steel Strike in which workers fought back when their wages were cut. It didn’t work. Management won. The Carnegies, the Fricks, the Mellons lived here and spun gold. Italians, Czechs, Poles, and others sought solace in neighborhoods that were like villages within the city. The neighborhoods still carry the marks of their founding in the churches, bars, and restaurants that survive. There is Italian Bloomfield and the eponymous Polish Hill.

When the steel business faltered and died, “the smoky city” reinvented itself as a white-collar urban site, fueled by its thriving universities. It had been a place so dark with pollution in the steel days that men carried clean shirts with them to work in order to change during the day. Now you can see the hills, the rivers, the rhythmic skyline — and as the cameras are fond of displaying at sports events, the city is now glittering and beautiful.

Anybody moving to Pittsburgh learns pretty quickly that it boasts affordable prime real estate, three beautiful rivers, parks and monuments, a flourishing university and cultural life, major medical centers, and tight neighborhoods. It’s been named more than once the most livable city in America. Young people who have grown up here get antsy, though, and move away. New residents who come in for a job or a school, surprised by what they find, often decide to stay. Former residents feel tugs of longing and move back. (Contributor Stewart O’Nan has moved back; contributor Hilary Masters is one of the people who discovered the city and stayed.)

What is Pittsburgh to noir and noir to Pittsburgh? We certainly have our rough streets and grisly murders. But dark crime stories depend on something in addition to killing. The best examples of the genre revolve around private moralities and private law; they are the stories of people pushing against real or imagined oppression. In Pittsburgh Noir, as in most of the novels and films that gave the genre its name, the real story is the dark underbelly of existence, the fear and guilt and rebellion and denial in regular people: the woman buying groceries, the man grilling hot dogs. Their secret lives.

I’d like to thank Mary Alice Gorman of Pittsburgh’s Mystery Lovers Bookstore for spurring me to jump into this project. And I’d like to thank the contributors who’ve joined me.

I’ve snagged a story from the legendary (and anonymous, Pynchon-style) K.C. Constantine, as well as from Shamus Award winner Tom Lipinski and the multiple award-winning poet Terrance Hayes, who shows he can do fiction too. I invited esteemed fiction writers Stewart O’Nan, Hilary Masters, and Reginald McKnight to turn to crime, and they did so with distinctive voices and dark humor. No Pittsburgh collection would be complete without Lila Shaara, Rebecca Drake, Nancy Martin, and Kathryn Miller Haines, all publishing mysteries regularly to critical acclaim. Three stories come from exciting new voices who push the boundaries of the genre: Paul Lee, Carlos Antonio Delgado, and Aubrey Hirsch.

We’ll take you to Bloomfield, the Mexican War Streets, Forest Hills, Fox Chapel, Schenley Farms, Carrick, McKees Rocks, Highland Park (a little-known unofficial marina), Wilkinsburg, East Liberty, Morningside, Squirrel Hill, Lawrenceville, and Homewood.

Here’s to the black and gold; to the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio; to Jonas Salk and Thomas Starzl; to Primanti’s sandwiches and churches that sell pierogies; to all and everything that makes up the ’burgh.

Kathleen George

Pittsburgh, PA

March 2011

Forest Hills

You grew up next to a what ?” the sweaty girl said. Hot was supposed to be synonymous with sexy, he thought, all that imagery of damp flesh and body heat. She looked damp all right, but on her it just looked like she’d smell bad if you got too close. Her hair was big and her accent jarring; he’d been living in Atlanta for seven years, ever since college. He’d grown used to soft Southern consonants and slippery vowels. The sharp angles of Pittsburghese grated on him now, along with her sweat-darkened tank top and spiky, lacquer-hardened hair. The air inside the bar was so steamy he thought he might faint. He imagined he looked as though he’d just come out of a hot tub himself.

“An atom smasher,” he said. “It was built even before the atom bomb. They were smashing atoms together before they even knew that they could blow up the world that way.”

“Huh,” she replied, and he could tell that she didn’t believe him; people seldom did when he told them this bit about his past, but he expected more from a local.

He said, “You can see it from Ardmore Boulevard. It looks like an upside-down teardrop.”

She looked interested. “You mean the big metal ice-cream cone?”

“Exactly.”

“Wow,” she said. “I’ve seen it my whole life, and didn’t know that that was what an atom smasher looks like. Growing up next to that, you’re lucky to be alive.”

Ronnie hadn’t expected her to want to have sex with him, and he was sad to find that it was in a way a relief. He had just moved back home, and amid the shame of it all was the practical problem of having nowhere to bring women. But he’d only been back a month, and though he’d gone several times to a bar that had been good to him in the past, he hadn’t had to solve this particular problem as yet. He was not quite drunk when he returned to the house that was now partly his again. It was quiet; his parents were asleep. Thank God, he thought, and got a beer from the refrigerator.

He went upstairs to what used to be his bedroom; his parents had turned it into an upstairs den, with a large TV, a couch, and a small refrigerator. His father called it his “man cave,” and he hadn’t wanted to return it to his son. Now Ronnie was sleeping in a semifinished room in the attic, which was hot despite the window air conditioner, but he couldn’t bear the thought of living in the guest room, which had wallpaper covered in ducks. The best thing about the conversion was a deck built off the second-floor room that hung high above the backyard. Ronnie went out the sliding glass door, and eased himself into one of his mother’s old patio chairs, the kind with fat, if slightly mildewed, cushions. After a minute he got up again and brought some matches from the kitchen, and then lit two giant citronella candles that sat on the wide wooden railing. The mosquitoes here weren’t as big as the ones in Atlanta, no matter what the locals wanted to believe, but they were bad enough when they were hungry.