Baltimore Noir

She looked at Charlie for support, but her husband was loping up the stairs, two at a time. The door to Ivanhoe’s room banged open and then she heard Charlie cry: “My God, Ivanhoe-the window!”

Thank heaven for the battlements, everyone said later. The big, pretentious, sturdy stucco battlement which supported the Maryland flag was the spot where Ivanhoe had landed a mere eighteen inches under his bedroom window. The boy had enough cuts to require thirty stitches at GBMC, but the plastic surgeon assured them that scarring was unlikely.

Other scars were a different matter. Even though Hodder began burbling out apologies, rapidly, when faced with the long end of the Beretta, Jeannie had been on the verge of doing something unthinkable, but Hortense had managed to gently detangle her shaking fingers from the weapon. Hodder fled the house without so much as a goodbye. Hortense made Jeannie sit down and drink whiskey, and Walter, the new guy at Charlie’s company, paid off the rest of Sister Natalie’s fee plus a thousand in keep-quiet money. All the while, Charlie cradled his small bloody son in his arms, crying softly alongside him as they all waited for the ambulance to arrive.

Charlie wanted to have Hodder arrested on charges of attempted manslaughter, but their lawyers said the best they could do was charge him with trespassing and possibly wiretapping. It took a good year for the case to come to trial in Baltimore’s beleaguered courts. Hodder ultimately received a three-month sentence that his lawyer managed to have converted into community service.

While Hodder picked up discarded soda cans along the Stony Run, Hortense Underwood used the phones to ensure his name was even muddier than the creek’s bottom. The preppy real estate agent no longer had a job at the Mount Company, nor would Coldwell Banker, the Hill Company, Long and Foster, nor any of the other big firms in the city, hire him. In fact, the agent who ultimately sold 100 Goodwood Gardens that winter was Hortense’s daughter-inlaw, the only one who agreed to the couple’s desired asking price-ten percent below what they’d paid the earlier year.

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

RAFAEL ALVAREZ is the son of a Baltimore tugboat engineer. The author of numerous “Orlo & Leini” tales, Alvarez published a people’s history of the Archdiocese of Baltimore in 2005.

JACK BLUDIS is a lifetime resident of the Baltimore area who lived his early years in Pigtown. He was a finalist for both the Shamus and Anthony Awards for Best Short Story in 2004, His novel Shadow of the Dahli was a Shamus Award finalist in 2005.

TIM COCKEY spent his wonder years in Baltimore, living in the Cockeysville, Garrison Forest, and Roland Park neighborhoods. He has published five novels featuring Fell’s Point undertaker Hitchcock Sewell-the infamous “Hearse” books. He now lives in New York City.

DAN FESPERMAN has lived in Baltimore for more than twenty years, with detours to Berlin and other points abroad as a foreign correspondent for the Baltimore Sun. He is the author of The Warlord ’s Son and three other novels, two of which have won Dagger Awards from the British Crime Writers Association.

LISA RESPERS FRANCE is a native “Baltimoron” who owes her love of the written word to her parents, Gary and Patricia, for tirelessly shuttling her back and forth to the Enoch Pratt and Baltimore County public libraries during her early years. A former reporter at the Los Angeles Times and the Baltimore Sun, she is currently a writer and editor in New York City and can often be found hauling a cooler filled with Maryland crab meat up Interstate 95.

JIM FUSILLI is the author of the award-winning Terry Orr series, which includes Hard, Hard City, winner of the Gumshoe Award for Best Novel of 2004, as well as Closing Time, A Well-Known Secret, and Tribeca Blues. He also writes for the Wall Street Journal and is a contributor to National Public Radio’s All Things Considered.

ROB HIAASEN is a native Floridian who moved to Baltimore in 1993 to become a staff writer for the Sun When hungry for stories or mussel chowder, Hiaasen drifts into Fell’s Point, which may or may not have an apostrophe.

LAURA LIPPMAN has lived in Baltimore most of her life and she would have spent even more time here if the editors of the Sun had agreed to hire her earlier. She attended public schools and has lived in several of the city’s distinctive neighborhoods, including Dickeyville, Tuscany- Canterbury, Evergreen, and South Federal Hill. She is the author of ten books, including the Baltimore-centric Tess Monaghan novels.

SUJATA MASSEY graduated from Johns Hopkins University and worked as a reporter at the late but great Baltimore Evening Sun before turning to a life of crime fiction. She is the author of nine novels, most recently The Typhoon Lover She enjoys living in Roland Park, though she has pledged never to take up gardening or drive a Humvee.

BEN NEIHART lived in the “landmark” Marylander apartment building in the Charles Village neighborhood of Baltimore for three years during the mid-1990s. He is the author of the books Hey Joe, Burning Girl, and Rough Amusements and his work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, Travel & Leisure, and the Baltimore Sun. He currently lives in New York.

DAVID SIMON is a former crime reporter with the Baltimore Sun and the author of Homicide and The Corner, two works of narrative nonfiction. He is also a writer and executive producer of HBO’s The Wire.

CHARLIE STELLA played Strat-O-Matic baseball as a kid, until his father put him on a twelve-step program to rein in his addiction. In Stella’s world (Strat-O-Matic), the Orioles beat his Mets in seven back in ’69 (when he was thirteen).

MARCIA TALLEY is the Agatha and Anthony Award winning author of six novels featuring amateur sleuth Hannah Ives, set in Annapolis, Baltimore, and other locales around Maryland’s scenic Chesapeake Bay. She is author/editor of two star-studded collaborative serial novels, Naked Came the Phoenix and I’d Kill For That, and her short stories have appeared in more than a dozen collections.

JOSEPH WALLACE has written more than fifteen books and dozens of articles on topics as diverse as baseball, natural history, medicine, and the invention of the light bulb. “Liminal” is his first piece of published noir. He’s grateful to Laura Lippman for requesting it, especially since he’s a lifelong New York Mets fan with vivid memories of the 1969 World Series.

ROBERT WARD was born and raised in Baltimore and now lives in Los Angeles, where he writes fiction, screenplays, and television dramas. He is the author of six novels, including Red