"I write love stories." So said renowned crime writer James M. Cain about his work, and the quotation is invoked in Cleveland Noir, the latest entry in the venerable Akashic "city noir" anthology series. "These stories are no different," write editors Michael Ruhlman and Miesha Wilson Headen in their introduction. "The plots of virtually every one teeter explicitly on this fulcrum: erotic love, romantic love, love of a brother, love of a son or daughter or a mother, love of baseball, love of the church."
Strictly speaking, all of the above is true, but the tales that populate Cleveland Noir are essentially about the haves, the have-nots, and the never-wills. Even the titles for each sub-section of stories suggest division, whether you're rich or downtrodden, lucky or damned: "City Center," "Outliers," "The Trendy," "The Heights."
Fittingly enough, the closest the collection comes to a true love story is Paula McClain's opening "Love Always," in which an almost-romance between two women on the skids gets cut short by crime and tragedy. Otherwise, Cleveland Noir sticks to the tried-and-true pillars of noir: revenge, greed, and sexual perversity, topped with generous helpings of death.
As is de rigueur for the city noir series, each story is informed by life in the city's individual districts. Parma is characterized by casual racism and homophobia that hounds the gay half-Native American teen in Sam Conrad's abrasive, unsettling "Jock Talk." The developing community of Tremont offers no protection to the protagonist in D.M. Pulley's "Tremonster," as she stumbles upon past crimes that no amount of gentrification can whitewash. And of course, anyone who ventures downtown can't help but notice Municipal Stadium — the subject of Susan Petrone's wryly conspiratorial "Silent Partner," in which an investigation into the death of a player fifty years previously leads to a sinister explanation of why the New York Yankees have been so dominant (and to a Clevelander, what could be more odious than the Yankees?).
The anthology's best moments arrive when writers find unexpected emotional footholds within the genre's constraints. Dana McSwain's "Bus Stop" imagines a journalist who can meet dead girls on the anniversaries of their deaths, compelled to acknowledge lives everyone else has forgotten — until a discovery condemns him to share their fate. Abby L. Vandiver's "Sugar Daddy" plunges into rough-and-tumble East Cleveland as a crooked cop attempts to help a former girlfriend bury a body, only to face consequences he hadn't counted on. Michael Ruhlman's own contribution, "The Ultimate Cure," is the collection's most conventionally noir entry: two hard-luck loners meet in a bar and begin plotting a scheme that, naturally, goes sideways in all the wrong ways.
The anthology's weaker entries lean too heavily on unsurprising twists and cover-ups rather than the lived texture of the city itself. But Cleveland Noir is at its best when its writers burrow into specific neighborhoods and let the geography do the dark work — rendering a city that, like all great noir settings, holds its secrets close and gives them up only at a cost.