THE MIDNIGHT BAND OF MERCY
By Michael Blaine
Soho. 372 pp. $25
In the 1890s, some New Yorkers decided that the city's immense cat population of more than 400,000 was unbearable; maybe it was the nighttime meowing that sent them over the edge. On the morning of Sept. 12, 1893, several cats -- a baker's dozen to be precise -- were found murdered, their corpses neatly arranged together on the street. In the ensuing days more dead cats were found in similar neat groupings. This rash of "felincides" was perfect fodder for the wildly competitive newspapers of the era, whose reporters scurried about seeking urban tales to feed the insatiable presses of Pulitzer, Hearst, Bennett and other lords of Park Row.
The perpetrators were soon unmasked. A New York Herald reporter spied a woman carrying a basket containing a dead cat and reeking of chloroform. On her breast she sported a gold star badge with the words "The Midnight Band of Mercy." The group had taken upon itself the task of exterminating any feline caught on the streets past eight in the evening. Talk about a harsh curfew.
This gem of urban lore -- recounted in M.H. Dunlop's Gilded City, a marvelous history of turn-of-the-century New York -- forms the kernel of an intriguing new novel, The Midnight Band of Mercy, by Michael Blaine. At liberty to fill out the story in ways that reporters or historians could not, Blaine uses the incident to weave a vast, conspiratorial tale of murder, exploitation and greed connecting doers of evil, men of the cloth and women of charity.
For his tale, Blaine creates Max Greengrass, a young, struggling newspaperman earning a paltry living working for the New York Herald. His reportorial ambition is fueled by deep economic need; his wages are pegged to the number of copy inches he can churn out as a "space-rater."
As the book opens, Greengrass stumbles across four of the infamous dead cats and dreams that his find will produce a treasure trove of copy inches. By the time he is done pursuing his story, 370 pages later, readers will have traveled at breakneck speed from a downtown boarding house to a mansion on upper Fifth Avenue, from the dark tenements of the Lower East Side to the then bucolic Staten Island, from a basement black-and-tan on Bleeker (so named because of its mixed-race clientele) to the tony Metropole on 42nd, from inside the offices of the powerful Howe and Hummel law firm on Center Street to a publisher's roost on Park Row.
It is unquestionably an entertaining romp through New York of the 1890s. All Blaine needs to complete his realistic portrayal is to add a scratch-and-sniff page. (Don't laugh: Oxford University Press did just that with a series of history books.) But though Blaine's well-researched depiction of life in that era is engaging, his skill as a storyteller does not match his ability as a verbal landscape artist.
The story is neither fish nor fowl. As a mystery, it does not hold up well. Blaine fails to produce much in the way of dramatic tension, except for a few passages such as one in which Greengrass becomes a burglar. Some actions, such as the payment of an immense bribe to the hero, are simply baffling. And, most frustrating, Blaine is stingy in providing clues, or they are so well hidden as to be found only in a second reading, so that the mystery becomes more opaque to readers unwilling to work hard. The result is that at the end of the book, when Greengrass tells his paramour, "At least you know what happened," one wonders if the publisher resorted to the use of italics because we are still not sure.
The writing is stylistic and the scene setting lavishly accomplished. Blaine is a wonderful tour guide of old New York, but the characters he creates to inhabit this lost world are, on the whole, one-dimensional and lacking in genuine motivation. For example, Greengrass's sizzling hot romances are hard to buy. Their occurrence with two women in his boarding house is too convenient and his conquest far too easy, especially for the era. We understand why Greengrass would lust for his two beautiful housemates, but why they would reciprocate is never made clear. It's a bit of male fantasy, as is Blaine's continual focus on a particular appendage of his protagonist's anatomy -- all of this years before Freud enlightened us to its meaning.
Great time travel but, in the end, a flawed tale. •
James McGrath Morris, author of "The Rose Man of Sing Sing: A True Tale of Life, Murder, and Redemption in the Age of Yellow Journalism," is currently writing a biography of Joseph Pulitzer.
