Psi no more…

This is the third Emmie Reese Mystery and may be my favorite. Emmie, now an aspiring writer, finds her path to fame and fortune barred by a variety of obstacles. Her solution is to take over a lapsed literary magazine and use it to publish her own work. Since I was self-publishing my own work, a lot of her feelings and frustrations were ones I was similarly experiencing.

I think Fanny—the woman who flunked out of Emmie’s college but stayed on just the same—made a fun character. And the literary-minded captain. Also, Elizabeth makes an appearance, her relationship with Emmie now thoroughly soured. But the best part of the whole thing may be the resultant issue of Emmie’s magazine, which isn’t included in the text, but can be seen online.

The mysteries Emmie encounters in the course of the story are all fairly silly, until the last: the murder of Fanny’s French-Canadian valet. (The culprit of that crime makes a reappearance in the next novel.) Overall, a fun, quick read that was a joy to write.

There’s more on Psi no more…, including its availability, at the Harry Reese Mysteries site.

Crossings

This is my second novel, and with it I was still trying to find a balance between keeping  the mystery compelling and the tone light. I began it thinking I needed to introduce more tension into the plot, that Harry should be made to experience a certain amount of menace. But I soon realized that my tone made that all but impossible.

As with the first novel, I allowed my extensive research to lead me off on tangents. Which is why this may have been the hardest of the books to write—there was a great deal of cutting and reworking before I had something I thought presentable.

Emmie’s friend Elizabeth was introduced with this book and she’s proved to be one of my favorite characters. (I’m just finishing a new series which features her, or rather Emmie’s fictionalization of her.) Also, the episodes with Mrs. Warner came out especially to my liking, particularly this exchange with Emmie:

“Well, I mean, if someone is going to kill my husband, I think it should be me. Don’t you agree?”

I do indeed,” Emmie said. “I made the same argument myself just a week ago.”

Mr. Demming aka Larabee is another amusing character. And I was quite pleased with my construction of the crooked roulette wheel, which gives the sharp player the false sense that he’s taken advantage of the house.

There are too many slow scenes in this book, and the denouement is a bit of a weak point—somewhat rushed  and lacking the humor I’d managed to inject into that of Always a Cold Deck. But overall, I think it’s still an amusing read.

There’s more on Crossings, including its availability, at the Harry Reese Mysteries site.

The Birth of M.E. Meegs

This is the first Emmie Reese Mystery short story, and the first piece written in her voice. I spent some time imagining just what that voice would be like. First off, she doesn’t start at the beginning, but at the end. And the whole thing comes on in a bit of a rush.  

The mystery which Emmie solves has little to do with the bulk of the story—it just sort of asserts itself every now and then. It centers on a tontine, something used in many mysteries because the death of one member benefits each of the survivors, providing an author with an automatic motive. One line I was particularly pleased with was Harry’s response when Emmie asks what a tontine is:

“A tontine is a kind of primitive insurance fund, combined with a sort of lottery. And while it has many flaws as a financial scheme, as a literary device…”

My favorite parts of the story involve  Mr. Larabee’s complicated scheme to take advantage of inefficiencies with the odds offered by bookies at the horse races and the “literary sweatshop” Emmie visits out on Long Island:

I was greeted by the Ulmers’ eleven-year-old daughter, a girl of remarkable poise. Mrs. Ulmer was busily typing a manuscript that needed to make the evening mail and after welcoming me, in a very friendly manner, she returned to work. There were two other children and Mr. Ulmer, who was writing the manuscript just as his wife was typing it. The youngest child, who could have been no more than five or six, had the task of relaying the handwritten pages from his father to his eldest sister, who would quickly scan them for errors, and from her to his mother. The middle child, a little girl of seven or eight, lay on the floor with a large dictionary and would look up words when called upon by her parents or sister.

I had encountered the term “literary sweatshop” in an article in The Independent (a tongue-in-cheek piece about low wages paid to authors) and it struck me as something with possibilities. This story  is a quick, fun read and I’m very pleased with how it came out.

There’s more on The Birth of M.E. Meegs, including its availability, at the Harry Reese Mysteries site.

Crossing New York by Ferry in 1900

By 1910, there were more than a dozen bridges and tunnels crossing the East River of New York. But in 1900, there was just the Brooklyn Bridge. It carried a staggering amount of traffic, but clearly it wasn’t enough.

The first steam ferry service across the East River was initiated by Robert Fulton in 1814. By 1900, numerous ferries crossed from half a dozen ferry terminals on Manhattan to terminals in Brooklyn and Queens. In the Google map I created for my book Crossings, I added most of their routes. 

The ferries carried both people and horse-drawn carriages and wagons. There were three cabins on the modern ferries of 1900. On the main deck, a cabin was provided for each sex. Most likely it wasn’t modesty that necessitated providing a women’s cabin, but rather the appetite for cigar smoking among men. It was taken as a given that women didn’t smoke. But if by chance a woman did, she could go to the unisex upper-deck cabin. 

Between the two main-deck cabins, an open area ran the length of the ferry. This is where horse-drawn vehicles made the voyage. You can see horses in the first image.

Most of the freight that moved in and out of New York went by water. There was just one railroad freight line into Manhattan, and no line at all between Brooklyn and Queens on Long Island and the mainland. But there were small freight rail lines that served their factories. To move their freight cars to and from rail heads on the mainland—most often in New Jersey—they used barges laid with track known as car floats. These were loaded and unloaded at specialized docks. Then a tugboat would haul the barges to a similar dock at their destination.

Vice Dens of the Eastern District

The article at left appeared on the front page of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle of November ^th, 1900. Of course, there was no recent upsurge of vice in the Eastern District, just an upsurge in pious morality. The scolds were on the march and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle was hopping on the bandwagon. These periodic eruptions of civic censure had become a prominent feature of life in New York after the Civil War. The apparatus du jour was the Committee of Fifteen, a group of self-appointed guardians public morality.

The Eastern District comprised Williamsburg, Greenpoint, and Bushwick. Much of the article is taken up by the reporter’s first-person account of visits to various vice dens. What it amounts to is a lot of suspicions about gambling and prostitution. But what he finds just as troubling is the mixing of the races. This is a perfect example of how Southern racists had managed to export their fear and loathing of African-Americans northward.  The Eagle regularly referred to African-American neighborhoods  as “negro colonies.” In fact, African-Americans made up barely 1% of Brooklyn’s population in 1900, and the percentage had actually fallen over the previous decade.

While there was plenty of gambling and prostitution going on, the author seems peculiarly inept at finding any proof of it. The various vigilante committees and their investigators generally did a better job. But for them, too, racism, xenophobia, and classism featured large. This is well documented by Jennifer Fronc in her book New York Undercover.

The politicians and police were generally forced to take up the mantle for a time. But they had learned how to set the public against the scolds. They used what’s now called triangulation to appear as the reasonable center between the extremes of wantonness and puritanism.  In the spring of 1901, the police began strictly enforcing the widely unpopular state law against the selling of liquor on the Sabbath. This law had a number of loopholes and enforcement had typically been lax. But instead of targeting the seedy Raines Law hotels, the police took on the German dance halls of Williamsburg. These places catered to middle-class families at a time when the weekend lasted from Saturday evening until Monday morning. Saturday night was the one night the average person could have some fun and not be facing a 10- to 12-hour workday the next morning. Though  the halls were closed Sunday, where they erred was in staying open past midnight on Saturday. So the police clamped down and turned another group of upright citizens against the crusaders.

The hypocrisy is best summed up by an episode involving Michael Minden. Minden owned a variety of hotels and saloons, and there is little doubt gambling was an important part of his business. His hotel at the top end of Broadway in Williamsburg was raided. No one was found to be actively gambling, almost certainly because he’d been tipped off by a friendly precinct captain. However, a roulette wheel and some other bits of gambling gear were seized. Without any actual evidence of gambling, the case against him was dismissed. Then, a while later, Minden’s lawyer went to court and successfully sued for the return of his roulette wheel.

Useful Maps, ca. 1900

I'm one of those people who love maps. And I've come across all sorts of interesting maps in my research.

The most interesting of all is a perspective map of Buffalo from 1902, which the Library of Congress has put up in a zoomable version.

What you see at right is a corner of the city along the waterfront. That's maybe 2% of the map. The buildings are rendered with such detail that many are identifiable from photographs. There are a lot of perspective maps from the period, many in the Library of Congress's Cities & Towns collection. But I've never seen another with anything like this level of detail. It's like a Google Street View from 110 years ago.

If you want to see how people got about, you need a map like this Rand McNally 1897 map of Brooklyn. The red lines are the street car routes, and the dashed lines in the river are the ferry routes.

This is from the David Rumsey Map Collection, perhaps the largest available online. But there are dozens of smaller collections, many at state and municipal library sites.

 
Topographical maps from the U.S. Geological Survey offer fairly precise information about an area. For instance, the portion of the map at right is from 1898. I found it at the University of New Hampshire. It shows an area of Brooklyn between Prospect Park and Sheepshead Bay. In less developed areas like this, the USGS maps show individual buildings.

Interestingly, most maps of the period show the area's streets already laid out. But from this we can see it was still open ground. And from what I've read in newspapers of the time, some was still wooded.




Real estate atlases offer another interesting point of view. A number of these are online, including Baist's Real Estate Atlas of Surveys of Washington, D.C.  at the Library of Congress.

The close-up at left is of an area between G & H Streets, NE. The pink buildings are masonry, the yellow wood-frame. H Street is at the top of the image. Cabbage Alley, which I've labeled, was one of many inhabited alleys in Washington. The poor, mostly African-Americans, resided in the alleys. The dwellings were primitive at best and the bane of public health officials. And though the politicians and the press managed to ignore them for years, the map makers recorded them in detail.

A day at the races under the Percy-Gray Law

To understand how horse racing was conducted in New York in 1900, you first should know that the state constitution of 1895 forbade "pool selling, bookmaking, or any other kind of gambling". Sounds pretty unequivocal, doesn't it?



And yet, the photo at left illustrates a betting pavilion at a New York track. Kings Views of Brooklyn 1905 identifies it as being at Sheepshead Bay (I've seen the same photo identified as being at Gravesend.)

In fact, the period 1895-1908 was one of the golden ages for New York horse racing, and on-track betting. This amazing hypocrisy was due to the Percy-Gray Law, passed by legislature in 1895. How it could create a loophole large enough to allow flagrant gambling when the state constitution unequivocally forbade it was a mystery that required some research.

 The Percy-Gray Law described itself as "an act for the incorporation of associations for the improvement of the breed of horses and to regulate the same; and to establish a State racing commission." It was passed at the behest of racing interests gave the established jockey clubs a monopoly on racing.

Reading the first 16 sections, it's hard to see how this law allowed what's going on in the photo above. For instance, section 9 states that race track owners "shall cause to be properly posted in conspicuous positions upon the grounds whereon such races are held, printed notices or placards in large and legible type, which notices or placards shall be to the effect that all disorderly conduct, pool-selling, book-making or any other kind of gambling is prohibited."

Even a first reading of section 17 doesn't offer much illumination.

§ 17. Any person who, upon any race-course authorized by or entitled to the benefits of this act, shall make or record, directly or indirectly, any bet or wager on the result of any trial or contest of speed or power of endurance of horses taking place upon such race-course, shall forfeit the value of any money or property so wagered, received or held by him, to be recovered in a civil action by the person or persons with whom such wager is made, or by whom such money or property is deposited. This penalty is exclusive of all other penalties prescribed by law for the acts in this section specified, except in case of the exchange, delivery or transfer of a record, registry, memorandum, token, paper, or document of any kind whatever as evidence of any, such bet or wager, or the subscribing by name, initials or otherwise, of any record, registry or memorandum in the possession of another person of a bet or wager, intended to be retained by such other person or any other person as evidence of such bet or wager.

The secret lies in the fact that this was interpreted as meaning that the sole penalty for accepting a bet at a race course was forfeiture through civil action. The key bit being, "[t]his penalty is exclusive of all other penalties prescribed by law for the acts in this section specified." Thus criminal penalties were negated, provided no record of the bet was passed between parties. And as far as I can tell, there were no civil actions taken under the law, probably because there was no record of the bet having been made.

I spent a fair amount of time trying to establish just what the mechanics of betting under this bizarre regime. Ironically, one of the few descriptions I've found comes from the scolds themselves. The World's Work published an article in 1906, "Horse-Racing and the Public", which describes a visit to Gravesend.

Picking up information from that and similar articles, and various newspaper articles, I believe the way the bookies avoided passing a record of the bet is that the bettor gave the bookie his entrance ticket along with the wager. The bookie recorded the bet under the ticket stub number, then gave the bettor back the ticket, which did not itself have a record of the bet.

It all ended when the scolds took over the statehouse and passed the Hart–Agnew Law 1908. This killed the loophole and the horse racing courses died a not-so-slow death. The course at Brighton Beach moved on to auto racing for a period.