"Cleveland is a working-class town, though its great institutions were founded by twentieth-century robber barons and magnates . . . It's this mix of the wealthy and the working class that makes this city-an urban center of brick and girders surrounded by verdant suburbs-a perfect backdrop for lawlessness. Cleveland has certainly seen its share of high-profile crime. Eliot Ness, Cleveland's director of public safety in the 1930s, hunted unsuccessfully for the 'torso murderer' who killed and dismembered twelve people in Kingsbury Run, the area now known as the Flats, then populated by bars, brothels, flophouses, and gambling dens. The famous disappearance of Beverly Potts in the early 1950s on Cleveland's west side made national headlines. The sensational murder of Marilyn Sheppard in Bay Village and the imprisonment and eventual acquittal of her husband, the surgeon Sam Sheppard, became the basis for a popular television drama The Fugitive . . . The noir stories in this volume hit all these same notes, and their geographies reflect the history of the city and its politics, its laws, poverty, alienation, racism, crime, and violence"--Page 4 of cover.
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