But perhaps one of the more interesting developments in Baltimore’s recent literary history is the large number of crime writers that have emerged-many of them from the daily newspaper, the Sun, and most of them represented in this volume. No one is sure why Sun writers so often turn to homicide, fictional and factual; the theories are speculative at best, if not downright libelous. But it happens that Sun reporters have won the Edgar, Anthony, Agatha, Nero Wolfe, Macavity, Shamus, Barry, John Creasey, and Steel Dagger awards for their novels and short stories. Very fitting for a newspaper where James M. Cain once worked.

But then, to live in Baltimore-Bulletmore, Murderland, according to one famous piece of graffiti-is to be aware of killing; we have not enjoyed the sharp declines in homicide rates achieved by cities such as Boston and New York. We remain steadfastly in the top five, per capita, year in and year out. Statistically, two people died while I was working on this foreword.

Baltimore also has an odd geographic distinction. It is one of only two major U.S. cities that lies in no county. (St. Louis is the other.) Landlocked on every side but one, which is water, it cannot expand or annex. Squeezed this way, it is a perfect setting for noir, which depends on an almost Darwinian desperation among its players.

The Centers for Disease Control will tell you that Baltimore is the off-and-on capital of syphilis, but the true local malady is nostalgia, a romanticizing of our past that depends on much glossing and buffing, as if our history was just another set of marble steps to be cleaned. I have never forgotten listening to two colleagues at the Sun discuss the racism inherent in our celebration of the habits and attitudes of the Eastern European immigrants who helped to make Baltimore a great city. “Ask Thurgood Marshall how fondly he remembers Baltimore,” one said of the late African-American Supreme Court justice, who grew up here. “Ask him if any waitresses every called him hon