Tales of Two Cities

Murder and mayhem are probably not the first thingsthat come to mind when most people think of theTwin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul.

What comes to mind may be snow emergencies and subzerotemperatures; Eugene McCarthy, Paul Wellstone, and Jesse"the body" Ventura; Dylan, Prince, and The Replacements; theGuthrie, Theatre de la Jeune Lune, and Heart of the Beast; TheWalker, Cathedral of St. Paul, and The Mall of America; MaryTyler Moore, Tiny Tim, and F. Scott Fitzgerald; Lake Harriet, LakeComo, maybe even Lake Wobegone, which, depending upon whoyou talk to, may or may not be real.

But not crime.

Everyone here has an opinion about what makes the citiesdifferent from each other and what ties them together. A type ofsocial shorthand has developed over the years. Minneapolis is hipand St. Paul is working class. St. Paul is the political capital, Minneapolisis the cultural capital. St. Paul was built by timber moneyand Minneapolis from grain. There is some truth in these generalizationsbut the people who live here know it's not as simple asthat and it never has been.

You don't have to look hard to find the darker underside.

St. Paul was originally called Pig's Eye Landing and was namedafter Pig's Eye Parrant—trapper, moonshiner, and proprietor of themost popular drinking establishment on the Mississippi. Traders,river rats, missionaries, soldiers, land speculators, fur trappers, andIndian agents congregated in his establishment and made theirdeals. When Minnesota became a territory in 1849, the town leaders,realizing that a place called Pig's Eye might not inspire civicconfidence, changed the name to St. Paul, after the largest churchin the city. The following verse appeared in the paper shortly after:

Pig's Eye, converted thou shalt be like Saul.Thy name henceforth shall be St. Paul.

St. Paul was a haven for cons on the lam in the 1920s and '30s.Bad guys across the country knew about the O'Connor system. Acriminal could come to St. Paul, check in with police chief JohnO'Connor, and walk the streets openly, as long as he or she promisedto stay clean. Ma Barker, Creepy Alvin Karpis, Baby Face Nelson,and Machine Gun Kelley spent time in the cities. The systemfell apart in the early '30s, about the time that Dillinger shot hisway out of his Summit Avenue apartment.

Across the river, Minneapolis has its own sordid story. By theturn of the twentieth century it was considered one of the mostcrooked cities in the nation. Mayor Albert Alonzo Ames, withthe assistance of the chief of police, his brother Fred, ran a cityso corrupt that according to Lincoln Steffans its "deliberateness,invention, and avarice has never been equaled."

As recently as the mid-'90s, Minneapolis was called "Murderopolis"due to a rash of killings that occurred over a long hotsummer.

Every city has its share of crime, but what makes the TwinCities unique may be that we have more than our share of goodwriters to chronicle it. They are homegrown and they know theterritory—how the cities look from the inside, out. Some havebuilt reputations on crime fiction, others are playing with thegenre for the first time, but all of them have a strong sense of thisplace and its people.

Bruce Rubenstein, Gary Bush, and Larry Millett illuminatethe past—the Irish cops, politics, radicals, and mob guys.

David Housewright, K.J. Erickson, and Mary Sharratt observecultures colliding and the combustion that friction can cause. PeteHautman and Judith Guest show us how amusingly dangerous lifein the cities can be. Quinton Skinner, William Kent Krueger, andEllen Hart illustrate what we're all capable of when lives are onthe line.

In these original stories we see representations of the past,the present, and perhaps even a glimpse of the future. Maybe asimportant, we see who we are—Midwesterners, Minnesotans, andresidents of the Twin Cities. We hope you enjoy reading these storiesas much as we enjoyed putting this collection together.

It has been seven years and three printings since Twin Cities Noirwas first published as one of an acclaimed series of noir titles fromAkashic Books. In this expanded edition we are delighted to addthree brand-new short stories from three talented authors.

Peter Schilling Jr., novelist and film critic, contributes "16mmBlues," a tale as tasty and addictive as a bag of buttered popcorn.In John Jodzio's "Someday All of This Will Probably Be Yours,"a girl does what a girl has to do. Really, can you blame her? TomKaczynski's "Skyway Sleepless" is a metaphysical/metaphoricalgraphic story set in the downtown Minneapolis skyway systemwhere the past, present, and future collide.

The Twin Cities continues to be a vibrant community of writersand we are pleased to be a part of it once again with this...