"...THERE IS POWER MOVING IN MYSTERIOUS WAYS.": SACRAMENTO NOIR'S JOHN FREEMAN

The latest Akashic Noir anthology, Sacramento Noir, uses the city and it's collection of writers to deliver one of the most unique in the series. It minnes it's people an unique, seemingly "nice" setting, for a a darkness beneath the surface. Many of the authors deliver a quirky perspective that never threatens the sinister tone of the genre. I had some questions to ask editor John Freeman about the book.

SCOTT MONTGOMERY: How did you get involved in the project?

JOHN FREEMAN: I loved the noir series because I think crime writing is one of the best ways to travel imaginatively, you see where societies rupture, how the map of a place and the way people live are layered but not always touching. And I love noir. So I wrote to Johnny Temple, the founder of Akashic, and I seem to remember he took a beat, as in: why Sacramento? -- but he was convinced and we agreed to do it. This was three or four years ago.  

S.M.: What makes the city work for the genre?

J.F.: A couple key elements. First, there is the feeling there of power moving in mysterious ways. It's a state capitol and the city is at once lovely and baking hot in summer but also moody, foggy, there's the confluence of two rivers there and both look like the ideal hiding place for bodies...so you feel like there's something hidden there. Add to this the fact that Sacramento's history is not exactly what it broadcasts it to be. Old Town is built atop old neighborhoods, the Mall is built where one of the oldest and biggest Japanese American neighborhoods used to be, and so there's a real opportunity for writers to show how this past is not at all past, but present. And if you live there, it is.   

S.M.: Which author surprised you the most with what they did with their location?

J.F.: That might have to be José Vadi -- he's primarily known as a writer of essays and a filmmaker, so this was a rare foray into fiction, and he completely mastered the tone of noir, the fallen/cynical style, and he used his research chops to evoke the era of the late 1940s when Sacramento had a burgeoning jazz scene. Some great clubs where Dizzie Gillespie and others played. Of course many of these clubs were owned by Japanese people before they were incarcerated, they are not simply stylish venues for music, but part of the city's ongoing sites of contention. He does a lot with that and manages on top of this all, to narrate from several perspectives, including the voice of a woman waiting for her man on the lam. Noir is so often seen from the point of view of the outsider dude, the man peering at the world skeptically, almost never from that of the person, and it's often a woman, but not always, waiting for him to show up where he said he would.  

S.M.: I was surprised how humor was an element in more stories than usual in an Akashic. collection. Is that a trademark of Sacramento writers?

J.F.: I don't know about you, but everyone I grew up with was funny. All my best friends, the track and cross country teammates I was close to. Each one of them had a way of coming back to you with a joke. I just went for a walk with my dad in East Sacramento and everyone we stopped to talk to busted his chops for 10 minutes and he did the same in turns. This is all anecdotal evidence, but in my experience, Sacramentans don't take themselves that seriously, or the best of them do not. This leads to a kind of dry wise-cracking style where humor is -- as I think it should be -- the currency of intelligence. Maybe this comes from politics and the b.s. it pipes into the air, and the way if you're around it all the time, you need to deal with it in warmly skeptical terms or you're a fool. So I think Sacramento has created a culture of sarcasm, in my experience. There's nothing quite so deadly as a humorless columnist, or a humorless politician. I grew up in the era of Pete Dexter in the Bee (he was cranky and very funny) and Wayman Tisdale playing for the Kings and Governor Moonbeam so there was always I thought a tilt to life there as lived publicly. A sense that being funny keeps you level. I never saw this in Sacramento writing per se, but it really comes out in this volume.  

S.M.: Your own story had the feel of a nineties indie movie. How did it come about?

J.F.: Oh that's a high compliment, as someone who grew up in that little heyday of indy movies. A few things happened. I saw a fatal hit and run accident once and I got to wondering about the lives of paramedics, which is partly where my main character Ramy comes from. There's also a classic short story by the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani, "Letter from Gaza," it's very short, in which a man writes to his friend in Sacramento, the friend has arranged for him to come and stay, and the letter starts off like an acceptance, but in a brief space, the man writing it explains why he cannot in fact leave Gaza. This is from 1956, and Gaza was where many of the Palestinian refugees had to go after the Nakba, or the catastrophe, as Palestinians call the partition and violent expulsion of many many people from land which had been in their families for generations. People landed in Gaza because their villages were destroyed or burned by militias. Anyway, I got to wondering in contemporary terms how that letter would go, and I imagined a man sending his son, not from Gaza, but from the West Bank, which is also being ethnically cleansed by Israel now. So there are two crimes of a sort here, an accident and a displacement, and I tried to imagine how this guy would feel in Sacramento, and thus the story unfolds, the night he is called to a hit and run and there's a body at an intersection on K. Street. 

S.M.: What do each of the three, Family Business, Collisions, and A Tale Of Two Cities, sections represent for you?

J.F.: I think we all live in our groups, even if we're outsiders in families, or chosen families; we all intersect in collisions, sometimes mild, but sometimes violent, in which the juxtaposition of lives leads to moral choices, and I think those small collisions often tell us a lot about cities, about how they run, who they expect to protect, who is entitled to what, and who has to fight for their rightful share. Out of this mix, for me, a city comes into being, asserts its particular flavor. We're living in a time of historic inequality, in which billions (plural!) is not enough for some people. So here is a portrait of life in thirteen stories in one of the cities at this time.  

S.M.:What did you enjoy most about editing Sacramento Noir?

J.F.: I loved two things -- watching the other twelve writers step outside their comfort zone and interpret noir in fresh ways. Some of them, like Jamil Jan Kochai, are real talents in the short story, but he'd never written anything close to noir, but he nailed it. Maceo Montoya meanwhile just invented a whole new slice, which is a kind of comical style based on the crimes perpetrated by the COINTELPRO program of the FBI, which was geared to infiltrating radical groups, specifically to disrupt the Communist party. His 'group' though is hardly a gang of table-thumping dissidents, they're a bunch of muralists who are far more interested -- in this story -- in impressing a woman, in making a good joke, than anything else. But somehow their very existence is a threat, enough so that a woman is sent to break them up. I thought that was brilliant. As a form there's so much potential to noir, since it begins with an assumption things are not as they should be. Who would disagree with this now? Second, I have really loved getting together with Sacramento's literary community, and it's a rich one, having these events with José and Naomi Williams and Shelley Blanton-Stroud, Nora Rodriguez Camagna, Maureen O'Leary, Janet Rodriguez, Reyna Grande, Maceo Montoya, Luis Avalos, Jen Soong, Jamil Jan Kochai, they live in all parts of the city and beyond, and getting together -- the relaunch of Cap Lit was a highlight, it's a series Valerie Fiorvanti runs with Sue Staats in Sacramento, where actors read stories -- it just filled me with a feeling of being home.