The
decade of the 1890s was in many ways a warm-up for the Twentieth
Century. The United States was becoming urban and industrial. New
York was emerging as the great American city, filled with splendor and squalor. Electric lights were already cutting into
the night. Telephones
were ringing. Millions
of immigrants were arriving. Fortunes
were made and lost, and it was all reported in brash, partisan
newspapers. The record of those times was written and has been
preserved in what would come to be known as “yellow journalism”. In the midst of it all, a freelance reporter
named Max Greengrass is trying to establish himself – and nail
down a regular job – with the New
York Herald.
Max didn’t believe in anything and was proud of it. Ideas blinded you. At the same time, he envied people who had names for themselves:
Anarchists. Methodists. Zionists. Free-silver
fanatics. Gold bugs. They could share delusions and church
suppers. There was no name for what he was.
--from “The Midnight Band of Mercy”
Scandal
and sensation seemed to be everywhere in 1893, along with an
economic crisis that became known as the Panic of ’93. Max’s best bet to win some column-inches in
the next morning’s Herald could be a row of dead feral
cats carefully placed on the sidewalks. Investigation
of “catricide” led Max to a group of socially-prominent ladies
seeking to do good for the city as the Midnight Band of Mercy. But then, execution of the cats became entangled with a double
homicide, further entangled with corrupt politicians, shyster
lawyers and ultimately there appear connections running from
the street gangs and the upper crust.
Michael Blaine has placed his fictional characters
in a well-researched time and place, giving The
Midnight Band of Mercy a powerful authenticity. Max Greengrass is a Jewish immigrant estranged
from his parents but still close to his sister Faye – a dance-hall
performer with a beautiful young son of uncertain fatherhood. He lives in a Manhattan boarding house and
is romantically involved with two of the female residents. His journalistic activity puts him in contact
with all of 1893 urban humanity, from nasty street kids to
cops and millionaires. He falls or walks into dangerous situations – Blaine
allows his protagonist to be beaten to a pulp several times – but
emerges to earn the respect of his newspaper colleagues.
Michael
Blaine’s first novel, The Desperate
Season, was a taut and violent story of a mental patient’s
descent into violence. The
setting is a rural community similar to the one in which Blaine
lives in Delaware County. In The
Midnight Band of Mercy Blaine continues to extend his skill
in depicting action, violence and psychological subtlety. He
also is successful in weaving history and fiction. The
midnight band prowling the streets of 1893 Manhattan ritualistically
slaughtering the city’s cats was an actual group of ladies,
documented in the pages of the Herald but never fully
understood.
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