The Killer Named Gyp The Blood

I've spent much of the last few weeks with my head floating around in an imaginary version of New Orleans, editing stories for Narratively's week on the Crescent City. We have some really lovely stories up there, none closer to my heart than the one I spent entirely too long working on, about a Storyville murder that has largely been forgotten. We'll see if I can fix that. 

Ever since the first flatboat sailor came down the Mississippi, loaded with cash and rotgut whiskey, New Orleans has been wary of outsiders. On Easter Sunday, 1913, a trio of New Yorkers learned that lesson well, when they found themselves in the center of a gunfight that forever altered the nation's most famous red light district. Driving the chaos was a man named Charles Harrison, better known as Gyp the Blood.

After the shooting, Harrison got his picture in the paper, under the headline "Harrison Bad Man." The Daily Picayune described him as a cold-blooded killer with a cocaine habit and a sideline in white slavery, but the picture does not match the crimes. About thirty years old at the time, Harrison is shown as soft-featured, with a bulging nose and an awkward smile. In his left hand, this "man of evil days and black surroundings" clutches a small white dog.

"He was spruce," the Daily Picayune would later write, "even dapper in appearance, as far as clothes went, but his pale, smooth-shaven face, bulging at the eyes, caving into sunken cheeks and squaring into a brutal jaw, bore the cold, steely cast of unregenerate impulse to crime."

Gyp the Blood was a hardened criminal of the Lower East Side. Or perhaps he was a fake, a coward who killed a man to prove he wasn't scared. He was a dupe, tricked by his employers into throwing his life away. Or he was a wild man, whose itchy trigger finger caused a bloodbath, and ruined business for hundreds of law-abiding purveyors of vice.

In the photograph, all Harrison seemed to want was to show off his puppy.

If you like that, there's about 5,000 words more. Eat it up—it's juicy.

I Am A Writer And Here Are Things That I Wrote

Did you know I am a professional writer? That's right. I type up words—words just like these—and then I put them in a special, top secret order, and mail them off to companies who pay me for them. Truly, it is a wacky life.​

Lately I have been so busy writing things professionally that I haven't had time to tell you about them on this, my blog. Allow me to catch you up, in reverse chronological order, because we writers are saucy like that.​

First, I reviewed Here Lies Love​ for Howlround​, a wonderful website whose name is hard to say out loud. (It's not quite The Rural Juror​, but it's a toughie.) If you click on that link, you can see a picture of me wearing a cat. I talked about this play a bit after I saw it, and what it was like to dance next to David Byrne, but now you can see my fully-fleshed-out critical whatnots. Here is a sample:

Eight drumbeats thud out, a martial pulse that sounds suspiciously like the famous opening bass line to a Talking Heads classic. Two lovers march towards each other through the crowd, and the audience wonders—“They’re not covering ‘Psycho Killer,’ are they? They wouldn't dare!” And then the lovers kiss, the room explodes in disco, and “Psycho Killer” is a distant memory.

Until that moment, I was wondering if David Byrne was the only reason anyone had come to Here Lies Love, the former Talking Head’s new musical, which plays at the Public Theater through June 2. In the last decade, Byrne has dabbled in conceptual art, producing work like 2008’s Playing the Building, a pleasant-enough art installation in southern Manhattan that probably did not deserve the attention drawn by its creator’s name. In his eagerness to cross genres, Byrne is like a much more talented, much less irritating James Franco. Conceptual art is best left to the professionals, but rock is Byrne's beat, and Here Lies Love is a sparkling reminder of why he became a downtown icon in the first place. His name may get them in the door, but the music will make them stay.

​Pretty good, eh? If you like that, you'll love this article I wrote for the Observer​ about Europa Editions, a scrappy independent publisher whose new line of World Noir makes me so happy I could just sneeze. Seriously, I read almost nothing but crime fiction, and these guys have got the goods.

Detective Fabio Montale is having a rough week. His best friends are dead, he keeps getting beaten up, and his city is descending into, as the title of the novel he stars in suggests,Total Chaos. But he still has time for a little bass. Fennel-stuffed and grilled, maybe, with a lasagna sauce and peppers, “gently fried.” Some friends are coming over for pastis and Lagavulin and gin rummy by the sea, and they expect the copper to cook.

“I was finally calming down,” Montale thinks. “Cooking had that effect on me. My mind could escape the twisted labyrinth of thought and concentrate on smells and tastes. And pleasure.”

The kitchen is an escape for this harried gumshoe, but Total Chaos, part of author Jean-Claude Izzo’s Marseilles trilogy, is not mere escapist literature. Mr. Izzo used detective fiction to shine a light on France’s rugged southern port and the corruption that turned his stunning hometown into one of the most dangerous cities in Western Europe. The city loved him for it, and when he died in 2000, Marseilles’s bookstores closed their doors and filled their shop windows with Mr. Izzo’s pioneering novels.

​Pretty heavy stuff? So heavy that maybe you'd like to read something about sports? Or, since this article is on The Classical, perhaps I should say sporps. I write about the proposed Flushing Meadows MLS stadium, and why handing it over to one of English soccer's many billionaires is a totally unfun idea.

This is the dead period in the English Premier League. The title race ended weeks ago, with Manchester United claiming their eleventy-millionth championship in honor of retiring rage-legend Sir Alex Ferguson. At the end, there was nothing left to wonder about but whether or not Wigan Athletic will escape relegation. Coming as it does with the start of spring, this annual tepid period carries a pleasant taste of the English countryside—village greens and quiet pubs and all the other stuff Ray Davies just couldn't get out of his system. But for Manchester City, who will finish second this year, it is a time of seething discontent.

Last May, the blue half of Manchester won its first title since 1966, in five minutes of madness that made the madcap end to the 2011 baseball season look contrived. (Relive it here, accompanied for good or ill by the musical stylings of The Verve.) Manchester City won the FA Cup the year before, and will try for it again this weekend, taking on hard-luck Wigan in a match as well balanced as Goliath vs. David’s asthmatic younger brother. With all their recent success, the placid American fan would expect them to be happy. “You can’t win them all,” we tell them, naively. But if City loses on Saturday, a dapper gent named Roberto Mancini will probably be out of a job. The Premier League is no place for sentiment.

And in a league where a bad season is rewarded with relegation, there is no such thing as rebuilding. (Jeff Fisher, for instance, would not have lasted in England.) Sheikh Mansour, City’s doe-eyed billionaire owner, has dumped nearly half-a-billion pounds into the club, and has no interest in passing a springtime afternoon over a pint of bitter, wistfully crooning, “Wait ‘till next year.” The Premier League system is a mad one, driven by greed unheard of in American sports. So it is maybe or maybe not a good thing that it appears to be on its way to Flushing.

​What's that? You want more? Well I just remembered that I never linked to my Richard Foreman profile on here. Lordy, have I been slacking. It's got a pretty good lede:

One morning last month at the Public Theater, Richard Foreman was having trouble with rage. On a stage crowded with pillows, stuffed animals and string, an actor droned through a monotone monologue. He made it halfway through before Mr. Foreman, the last standard-bearer of the 1970s avant-garde, stopped him in the middle of a line about “incalculable rage.”

“What’s another word for rage?” Mr. Foreman asked the room. “Rage sounds weak.”

“Fury?” suggested the actors. “Ire? Wrath?”

“Maybe it needs another leading word. Not incalculable rage. Black rage?”

The actors offered more suggestions—“blind rage,” “mad rage” “octopus rage”—but their director’s attention had shifted to the lightboard. As the actors waited, he conferred with his staff of 10—some Public employees, some interns—flipping through light cues and eventually casting the theater into darkness. By the time the lights were sorted, and he had settled on “incalculable rage … Rage!” it was time to break for lunch.

Stop The Brooding! A Plea For Happy TV Cops

I'm a budding Miami Vice​ fan, and in 2013 that means that, eventually, your father will give you the complete Crime Story​ on DVD. A short-lived Michael Mann joint that premiered in 1986, Crime Story​ was stylish, ambitious and—as soon as it was pitted head-to-head against Moonlighting​—doomed to fail. Two things struck me about the show's movie-length pilot. First, "Runaway" is an awesome theme song. Seriously. Take a look:​

Features Del Shannon - Runaway

But I was even more pleasantly surprised by the relationship between Lt. Mike Torello—played by the expertly mustachioed Dennis Farina—and his wife. ​Namely, they had one. In the first few episodes, they fight about, the screw a bit, and they decide to have a kid. It's honest, everyday stuff—and a nice contrast from the nihilistic battle against crime that occupies the rest of Torello's waking life. Of course, it doesn't last.

Because the TV gods demand sacrifices, the Torello's happy partnership goes on the rocks quickly, and they're broken up by episode ten. This is a shame not just because Dennis Farina has the kind of sad-guy face that makes you want to give him a hug, but because there are nearly no good cop marriages on TV, and I think that's a shame. Let's consider some candidates for happiness:

• Vic Mackey, The Shield​. What starts as a surprisingly durable marriage—able to survive the pressures caused by two autistic children and Mackey's incredibly bald head—eventually cracks under the weight of his sadism. I'm surprised it lasted that long.
• Kima Greggs, The Wire​. When we meet Kima, she and her longtime girlfriend Cheryl are happy in a very realistic way. Because it's The Wire​, that can't last. Over the next five season, they have ups and downs—mostly downs. It's an honest depiction of a relationship dying, but that's not what I want. I want one that's thriving.
• Hank Schrader, Breaking Bad​. Hank's marriage has been held together by the strongest adhesive imaginable: a fiendish duct tape of denial and borderline behavior. The marriage endures, but it's certainly not happy.

I realize that being a cop's husband or wife is famously difficult. The irregular hours, constant danger, and likelihood that your loved one will turn into this guy​ make it difficult to keep a marriage going. But not impossible. I don't know cops, but the law of probability states that somewhere in the United States, there is a cop with a good marriage. Somewhere. One of them.

Put that guy on TV. ​

I want just one show where the cop's home life is not a major source of conflict. Where difficulties arise and are dealt with like adults. Where nobody goes to bed angry. Basically, I want Tami & Coach, but they solve murders. Only one TV detective that I can think of—and I've been thinking of this for fifteen or twenty minutes!—comes close. Who may it be? Let's play a little guessing game.

He and his wife bicker, but he only rarely gets kicked out of the house. He rides his kids hard, but they respect him—even though they seem to get raped, abducted and (nearly) murdered all the time. ​He's bald, burly and angry, and he really, really doesn't like men who don't respect women. Ladies and gents, I give you Elliott Stabler:

If that's the happiest cop on TV, I think we can do a little better. ​

Dammit, Maisie Dobbs, You Let Me Down Again

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Few pieces of art stay mindblowing for long. A great TV show is only red hot for a season or two. ​A favorite band releases dud albums. Most novels sag in the middle; most great movies let us down in the end. And a play that's brilliant one night may be flabby the next. It's no surprise. Brilliance is a passing thing.

We live in an era of media glut. Hollywood may be making less movies than ever before, and the major publishing houses may be spewing out less fiction, but music, TV and small-scale theater is as fertile as a farmer's daughter in the springtime. (I'm not sure what that means, exactly, but it's an appealingly filthy image.) This means we don't have to be satisfied with anything less than brilliant entertainment. Once a piece of amusement becomes less than perfectly satisfying, we can discard it, and move on to something else, like a bored Roman emperor ordering a pair of gladiators killed so he can skip ahead to the next fight.

It's hedonistic. It's fun.​​ And there's nothing sadder than having to move on to the next thing.

There is an acute sense of disappointment tha comes when we realize that, shit, this thing I like isn't perfect any more. I've written about it before as regards television, and this weekend I encountered it again, this time in print.

I'm in a dry stretch as far as fiction goes. My preferred vice is crime fiction, and aside from the relentless pleasure that comes from reading Ed McBain, I haven't read anything truly wonderful since I picked up Larry Block's When The Sacred Ginmill Closes​ last summer. This is partly a problem of genre. A devotee of a form that lends itself to formula can hardly be surprised when he goes months or years without stumbling over something original. But I'm not looking for a reinvention of the form. All I wanted was something well-written, amusing and fresh—something that didn't have to do with serial killers.

(As an aside, is there anything less interesting than a serial killer? I can enjoy it once in a while, but in general, they're just crackpots. Crazy people do crazy shit. Where's the fun in that? Stories about serial killers aren't even really murder mysteries—they're butchery, and it makes me yawn.)​

​On vacation this weekend, a book called Maisie Dobbs​ caught my eye. A mystery starring a plucky young woman in 1920's London, whose only weapon is keen observation and an empathetic sense forged in the trenches of World War I France? Might it possibly be a real detective novel, and not a suffocating cozy mystery? The praise quote on the front—from the New York Times​, no less!—told me to "be prepared to be astonished." I decided to take the chance.

I'm coming quite late to this party. The first in a ten book (so far) series, Maisie Dobbs​ was published in 2003. Lots of people have heard of, read and loved this series—as my bookseller informed me, it's her mother in law's favorite. If Jacqueline Winspear's work had passed me by, it's just because I make a habit of avoiding mystery novels written by people with names like Jacqueline Winspear, for fear that I might be wandering into another Agatha Christie trap. 

Have I mentioned lately how much I hate cozy mysteries?​

But Maisie Dobbs​ is no cozy, and it charmed me immediately. The hero is plucky, but not insufferably so—a battle-scarred nurse who has put every shilling she has into a detective agency, and spends much of the book's first hundred pages pinching pennies. (I like my detectives realistically broke. Every PI novel starts with a complaint about how little work the snoop is getting, and yet he never has trouble paying for his car, women, or booze.) Her first investigation is peppered with hints of a traumatic past—hints that make us interested in Maisie without slowing down the action. The book is quiet, mannered and grim, and I found myself getting my hopes up. "This is brilliant," I thought, "and there are nine more in the series!" And then, around the hundred page mark, the narrative comes to a howling halt.

As if not confident that her heroine was holding our attention, Winspear decides to dive into young Maisie's origin story, leaping back to the day of her mother's death, some decades before. Maisie is taken into service by a kindly, progressive London Lady, and what follows is chapter upon chapter of wheezing Upstairs, Downstairs​ action that is as deflating as one of the more predictable storylines in Downton Abbey. ​What was fresh turns sour, and the pages of my attractive little Penguin edition, I find, begin to turn much more slowly.

It was around the third chapter in Lady Rowan's London house that I began to feel it creeping in. Disappointment had returned. I'm still going to finish Maisie Dobbs​, and if the ending is more Sherlock​ than Downton​, I'll probably pick up the sequel, in hopes that it avoids dallying around the Christie-fied manner house that I loathe so much. But the balloon is popped. This isn't going to be My New Favorite Thing. I'll have to move on to the next bit of culture.​

The Great Whatsit, And The Evil of Mike Hammer

The last month or so, I've been obsessed with Kiss Me Deadly, an adaptation of a Mickey Spillane novel that might be the rawest crime movie this side of The Killing. I wrote about it. Now you read about it.

I’m a crime fiction addict—honestly and unrepentantly—but I’ve found that some of the classics of the genre fail to get me high.  Raymond Chandler called Philip Marlowe “neither tarnished nor afraid . . . the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.” That’s nice enough for Phil, but I always found it disappointing. What’s the point of a tough-talking PI if his hardboiled shell conceals a center of sickly sweet Cadbury cream?

Film adaptations of detective classics tend to amplify their hero’s moral side, making his snark into little more than bluster. No matter how hard Sam Spade might crack wise, we know that Bogie would never really do the wrong thing. Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye is the exception to this—his Marlowe is truly laid back right until he becomes a killer—but it was made in the ’70s. For years, I have hungered for a film adaptation from pulp’s golden age that did justice to the fact that, to be a private detective, you have to be a motherfucker.

Park Slope's Littlest Looter

As the national guard contains looting on Coney Island, and thousands of police amble across lower Manhattan, making sure the inhabitants of the Chaos Zone don't get too rowdy, a very tiny, very adorable crime wave has swept the hitherto peaceful confines of storm-spared Park Slope.

I was in line at the Associated Supermarket on Fifth Avenue earlier this evening, replenishing my larder after a few days hiding from the rain. (Oh God, how I fear the rain.) A rather cute four year-old stood in front of me, clutching a tiny purse and looking every bit like a woman out running errands. Playing casual, she wandered over to the candy section, fingered a pack of Bubble Tape and then glanced at her mother.

And then came...the crime!

Little Miss Dillinger unzipped her purse, picked up the Bubble Tape, and slipped it in. She lost her cool when the zipper wouldn't close, and was trying to force it shut when Momma noticed.

"Put that back. Come on."

She put it back.

"You little sticky fingers. Come here. God, and you've got all that Halloween candy at home."

"There's no more Halloween candy! There's no more Halloween candy!"

About this time, the little girl started crying. I don't think it won any sympathy from Mom, but she avoided prosecution.

Rebecca In Peril, and Only Captain Planet Can Save Her Now

​The Long Island flim-flam-fellow behind giving Rebecca her final curtain—or is it?!—has been arrested on Long Island. And here, perhaps, I should make some joke about Long Island already being a prison to begin with, but I'm feeling a bit lazy even for that kind of lazy humor. Onward we press—with the news!

"To carry out the alleged fraud, Hotton faked lives, faked companies and even staged a fake death, pretending that one imaginary investor had suddenly died from malaria," reiterated the United States Attorney Preet Bharara. "Ultimately, Hotton’s imagination was no match for the FBI which uncovered, with lightning speed, his alleged financial misdeeds."

Truly, the FBI should always be depicted as some kind of fraud-fighting superhero supergroup. If Preet Bharara were a member of the Captain Planet team, which one would he be? Fire, I bet. Seems like a fiery guy. And, I did not realize this, but the closing credits for that 90's classic start with the unbeatable credit, "Original Idea By: TED TURNER." Between Chipper, Cap'n P, and the Gulf War, the 90s were really Big Ted's decade, eh?

And a note to Mary E. Galligan, the acting assistant director of the New York FBI—fraud is not the only crime that is plaguing Broadway. The strip also has a terrible problem with belabored metaphors, and you are not helping!

Ms. Galligan said  Mr. Hotton “wrote, directed and starred in the work of fiction he took to Broadway,” adding that a “convincing portrayal on stage can earn you a Tony” while “a convincing act that fleeces a production’s backers can earn you a prison term.” 

The Times piece ends with a quote from Ben Sprecher's beleaguered lawyer, who insists his client is "totally committed to bring Rebecca to New York." Poor, poor Ben Sprecher. Totally committed may be the right phrase.

Off Broadway And The Five Decade Headache

I'm planning a long post for either later in the week or later today about the history of the term "off off Broadway," and the fact that it is an indisputably awful mouthful. Look forward to it—my trenchant analysis and amateurish research will both amuse and disgust you.

In the meantime, I turned up a May 5, 1957 Times article which appears to be the first time the paper used the term. At the end of a long article complaining about the woes of Off Broadway producers:

One steady observer of off Broadway drama suggested that what was needed was off-off Broadway. As a matter of fact, there is a troupe that calls itself the "Way Off Broadway Players."

Since this was the Old Gray Lady's first use of the phrase, they had yet to settle on the house style, which calls for capital Os when it's used as a noun or an adjective—"An Off Broadway producer," "Off Off Broadway is flourishing,"—but teeny-weeny Os when it's serving as an adverb—"The play was performed off Broadway." Oh, and never hyphenate it.

Anybody who doesn't own the Times Manual of Style and Usage is a chump.

More interesting than these five decade old copy-quibbles is the fact that the complaints of Off Broadway producers have not changed at all—they are still caught between artistic ambition and the nightmarish realization that, "the path to quality is paved with producers' greenbacks."

A few quick figures illustrate the situation. In 1953, a play, "Climate of Eden," was opened for $500. Today the average cost is between $7,000 and $15,000, with $20,000 no longer unusual. The revival of "Johnny Johnson," which ran for seventeen performances, cost $40,000. One of the most experienced off-Broadway producers estimated recently that of approximately 600 off-Broadway productions in the last five years, not more than twenty had made a profit.

That forty grand, internet inflation calculators will tell you, is over $300,000 today. It's been a long time since producing off Broadway was cheap.

Various scourges are blamed. The producers of the '50s criticize the rent charged by theater owners—as high as $800 a week in Eisenhower-bucks—they rage about Actors' Equity wage demands—$40 to $70 weekly—and they complain that competition among the thirty or so Off Broadway houses has forced them to raise standards and spend money in desperate hope that their show will be a hit and transfer to Broadway. "Each producer," reporter Murray Schumach tells us, "clings to the hope that his project will be another 'End as a Man,' 'The Iceman Cometh,' 'The Threepenny Opera,' 'Way of the World,' 'Uncle Vanya' or 'Purple Dust.'"

Those titles reflect one thing about the Off Broadway of old that surprised me—a heavy reliance on "the vastness of literary public domain, where prestige is high and royalties non-existent." This was a day when new plays could find a home on Broadway, and didn't need to take refuge below Fourteenth Street. What was on stage might have been old fashioned, but the front of house headaches have hardly changed at all.