Moments In Crime

In the Shadow of Gotham

Just wanted to thank Minotaur for the opportunity to blog here this past week – as well as all of you who stopped by to read my posts. 

If you’d like to read more about my book – including an excerpt and some book discussion questions – please visit my website www.stefaniepintoff.com.  

Until next time …  

Dining Alone

I’ve blogged this week about the food, the architecture, and the general spirit of the times in turn-of-the-last-century New York.  It’s a different time and place from the city we know today – and yet much is still familiar.  

But as I sit alone in a local coffeeshop this morning, writing this blog, I'm reminded of one aspect of the times that is strikingly unfamiliar.   

I couldn't have done this so easily in 1905. 

To the right, you'll see a picture of ladies - each one sitting alone, eating her lunch - at the Green Teapot Tea Room on Lexington (the picture was taken in 1906):     

Similar tea rooms proliferated all over the city in the early 1900s to provide women a place to lunch.  That was because -without a male companion - they would not be permitted into many of the city's restaurants.  

The policy seems grounded in the fear of prostitution:  restaurants claimed they wanted to make sure respectable women patrons were protected by a male escort – and also to keep out any prostitutes themselves.

There were exceptions, of course.  Well before 1905, Delmonico’s had relaxed its rule on unescorted women:  before dinner, a woman might enter alone; at dinnertime, a male companion was required.   

But there remained the issue of whether dining alone would be considered respectable.  As late as 1904, society matron Mrs. Burton Harrison described how "a well-bred young woman" couldn’t "dine unchaperoned in a restaurant ... without falling in caste.”

Fortunately all this has changed, and now my example merely illustrates the assumptions about gender and class that were at play in 1900s New York. 

And now back to my morning coffee ...   

Dinner Out

A few months ago, a friend of mine reminded me what my book was all about. 

Not that I’d forgotten, exactly.  After all, I was feverishly drafting my second in the series, immersed in its plot and character developments.  And I’d told her all about In the Shadow of Gotham – its grisly murder, its focus on early criminal science, and of course my detective’s own story. 

But she also wanted to know if I incorporated any of the glamorous parts of old New York:  the society parties, the theater shows, and especially the food and restaurant scenes. The answer is yes (as well as its grittier aspects, like saloons, gambling dens, and brothels).  

Her question reminded me that for a historical novel, these details are important. They're part of the social history of the times – and also fun to read and write about! 

For some of that research, I look to New York City history books or the extensive collections of the New York Public Library and the New York Historical Society – where I can view photographs, browse menus,  and generally gain a solid feel for those turn-of-the-century restaurants that no longer exist. 

And for the restaurants that do exist?  

Well … there’s nothing like field work. 

Earlier this spring, I visited two restaurants in lower Manhattan that I’ll consider as possible settings for Simon Ziele’s future adventures.  Both were thriving businesses in 1905, plus they offered one personal advantage:  they were sure to please my almost-eight-year-old daughter. 

Lombardi’s, the first pizzeria in New York City, opened in 1905 at 53 ½ Spring Street (on the north end of Little Italy).  It actually got its start as a grocery store in 1897, when its tomato pies – essentially tomato and mozzarella cheese on bread – became popular with Italian workers who bought them by the slice for lunch.   

Now, it’s located a block down the street in a new location run by friends of the original Lombardi family.  But its original 1905 coal-fired brick oven made the trip, too.   And its walls are filled with photographs of the original restaurant. 

Veniero’s Pastry Shop and Caffé on East 11^th Street started in 1894 as a billiard parlor – one that just happened to serve pastries and coffee (laced with sambucca).  The pastries thrived and overtook the pool tables; today it remains in the same location, owned by the same family.  

Since a lot of the original details remain – including the marble floors, wood mirrors, and tin ceilings – it’s easy to imagine being part of the early-twentieth-century clientele who dined there. 

Will Simon Ziele ever have a slice of Lombardi’s pizza?  Or visit Veniero’s for a pastry and coffee?  

He might – especially since he’s a huge coffee aficionado with a weakness for visiting the coffee shops that filled the city by 1905. 

Meanwhile, if you're in NYC, my daughter highly recommends the butter cookies at Veniero's.  

Spirit of the Times

As a writer of historical crime fiction, I read the newspapers a lot – but I’m usually a hundred years behind the times.  That’s because my new mystery series about Detective Simon Ziele is set in New York just after the turn-of-the-last-century.  

To capture the spirit of those times, I look at many resources, but I find nothing to be more helpful than a contemporary newspaper, which offers a virtual snapshot of the interests and concerns of a particular community. What were the headlines? What made the police blotter? Who was in the society column? What shows were reviewed in the arts section? And what products were advertised regularly?

When I read what my characters would have, I can better understand their world-view.

So what would Simon Ziele have read about this week in 1905?  While much was different, the articles about hit-and-run drivers and rude subway riders are strikingly familiar (though not the police's response!):  

• The national news was dominated by the Russo-Japanese war, centering on major Russian defeats and President Teddy Roosevelt's efforts to broker peace 
• “Shots to Stop an Auto”:  After an automobile hit a six-year-old boy and tried to drive away, the driver was shot at numerous times – by a policeman.  
• The city approved an expansion of the 14^th Street subway.
• The New York Life Insurance Company publicly disclosed the salaries of its officers; the top salary was $100,000. (According to one inflation adjuster I checked, that’s akin to almost 2.4 million dollars in today’s money). 
• Police continued to investigate the theft of stolen diamonds from Tiffany’s. 
• A “subway rusher” described as a “small, well-dressed gentleman” injured a woman and knocked down several children, prompting Captain Byrne to consider posting officers at each station to protect the public. 

Research like the above may never make it onto the pages of my novel. 

But you see, my goal isn’t just to incorporate much that’s true from 1905.  It’s to capture the spirit of the times in everything I invent. If I do that well, then my readers will always feel grounded in my story’s era – even when all that carries them is the flight of my own imagination.

Who is She?

Striking.  Distinctive.  Mysterious.  Evocative of the earlier place and time of my novel’s setting.  She’s an attention-getter who attracts unsolicited comments everywhere I go – all of them favorable.  I have Minotaur’s David Rotstein – who garnered no less than three Anthony award nominations this year for best cover art – to thank for choosing her to grace my book cover. 

But for all the wonderful comments that she generates, most people can’t quite place her.  In fact, “who is she?” is the common refrain I hear from readers. 

“She,” of course, is the Angel of the Waters who presides over Bethesda Terrace in Central Park.  In Rotstein’s creation, she is a dark figure bathed in light, yet clothed in ice; reaching out, yet remaining aloof as cold snow swirls around her.  Her neoclassical beauty might appear anywhere, and yet a quintessential turn-of-the-century New York building rises up behind her.  

Her creator, Emma Stebbins, was the first woman to be commissioned to create a major work of art in New York City.  Stebbins wanted to celebrate not only Central Park, but also the new Croton Aqueduct that fed the fountain and also gave New York City its first dependable source of clean drinking water.  So Stebbins’s Angel carries a lily (the symbol of purity) in one hand and reaches out with the other, forever blessing the water of the lake – which represents all New York’s fresh water supply. 

Yet she was reviled when she was first unveiled in Central Park on June 1, 1873 -- exactly 136 years ago today.  The New York Times said:  “All had expected something great, something of angelic power and beauty.”  Instead, they derided her:  she looked like nothing more than a “servant girl” from the rear, and a “girl jumping over stepping stones” from the front.  In short, “the revulsion of feeling was painful.” 

That's a 19th-century sentiment I don't share.  Her realm in Central Park is one of my favorite places in all of New York City.  That's why I set one of my key chapters in the book around her.  

Today, she’s one of the most photographed fountains in the world – a celebrity who has appeared in shows from Ransom to Bullets over Broadway, Angels in America to Enchanted, and countless others.  And I’m thrilled she has a starring role on the cover of my debut novel, In the Shadow of Gotham.  

Blogging This Week: Stefanie Pintoff

STEFANIE PINTOFF is the winner of the first Minotaur Books/Mystery Writers of America Best First Crime Novel Competition. A graduate of Columbia University Law School, she also has a Ph.D. in literature from New York University. Pintoff lives with her husband and daughter in Westchester County, New York. Visit her Web site at www.StefaniePintoff.com.

Dobson, New York, 1905.

Detective Simon Ziele lost his fiancée in the General Slocum ferry disaster—a thousand perished on that summer day in 1904 when an onboard fire burned the boat down in the waters of the East River. Still reeling from the tragedy, Ziele transferred to a police department north of New York, to escape the city and all the memories it conjured.

But only a few months into his new life in a quiet country town, he’s faced with the most shocking homicide of his career to date: Young Sarah Wingate has been brutally murdered in her own bedroom in the middle of an otherwise calm and quiet winter afternoon. After just one day of investigation, Simon’s contacted by Columbia University’s noted criminologist Alistair Sinclair, who offers a startling claim about one of his patients, Michael Fromley—that the facts of the murder bear an uncanny resemblance to Fromley’s deranged mutterings.

But what would have led Fromley, with his history of violent behavior and brutal fantasies, to seek out Sarah, a notable mathematics student and a proper young lady who has little in common with his previous targets? Is Fromley really a murderer, or is someone mimicking him?

This is what Simon Ziele must find out, with the help of the brilliant but self-interested Alistair Sinclair—before the killer strikes again.

With this taut, atmospheric, and original story of a haunted man who must search for a killer while on the run from his own demons, Stefanie Pintoff’s In the Shadow of Gotham marks the debut of an outstanding new talent, the inaugural winner of the Minotaur Books/Mystery Writers of America Best First Crime Novel Competition.