"Winter is grim"

Minnesota noir

Aug 17th 2006 | MINNEAPOLIS
From The Economist print edition

Why do the Twin Cities produce so much literary gore?

AARON LANGER is having a busy day. An elderly Jewish nursery-owner has been killed by a bullet to the head and another man has been shot, abducted, tied to railway tracks and literally frightened to death. Before writing his report, the detective pauses to admire the Minneapolis skyline. “It was a pretty city,” he muses. “Not the kind of place you'd expect to produce such a killer.”

Ah, but it is. The killers of “Live Bait”, a novel by P.J. Tracy, are not unusual for the city, nor are they especially savage. “Twin Cities Noir”, a book released this year, assembles twisted tales from 15 other writers, and at least seven more in recent years have published crime novels set in the same place. In the minds of local authors, at least, the adjacent cities of Minneapolis and St Paul produce an uncommon number of murderers, gangsters, pimps and other low-lifes.

Minneapolis, with its gleaming skyscrapers and wide boulevards, hardly looks noirish. It has murders, although not as many as Milwaukee and Kansas City, which produce much less crime fiction. And it is certainly not as lethal as John Sandford, one of the region's most successful and prolific writers, imagines. If it were, the population of Minneapolis would be considerably lower.

Minneapolis and St Paul do, however, have a lot of people working in two professions that favour the same clipped, direct style that is the stock-in-trade of mystery novelists. One is advertising, which has groomed at least four writers. The other is journalism. The Twin Cities have two major newspapers, the St Paul Pioneer Press and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. The latter, as the fictional detective Rushmore McKenzie puts it, “often seems to be written by closet suspense novelists”. As a former journalist, David Housewright, who created the character, ought to know.

Then there is the weather, which is splendidly atmospheric. The Twin Cities have hot summers and wildly erratic autumns and springs—a gift to mystery writers in search of colour. Winter is grim. As Brian Freeman, who has published a crime novel set in Duluth, in northern Minnesota, explains: “What is there to do during those long winter months beside sit inside and think dark thoughts of murder and mayhem?”

The Twin Cities gorey and noir?
Pale compared to Otter Tail County.
Blanc and boring compared to Fargo.

56572 extends an invitation for the Economist writers to visit.
Come in January.
We'll think of something to do.
Perhaps take you out on the ice
In the dark
To a darkhouse
Where we can spear
And think of other things to do
Besides fish.
Bring a book
And a flashlight.