An excerpt from The Gods of Gotham by Lyndsay Faye (available March 15, 2012).
1845. New York City forms its first police force. The great potato famine hits Ireland. These two seemingly disparate events will change New York City. Forever.
Timothy Wilde tends bar near the Exchange, fantasizing about the day he has enough money to win the girl of his dreams. But when his dreams incinerate in a fire that devastates downtown Manhattan, he finds himself disfigured, unemployed, and homeless. His older brother obtains Timothy a job in the newly minted NYPD, but he is highly skeptical of this new “police force.” And he is less than thrilled that his new beat as a “copper star” is the the down-and-out Sixth Ward—at the border of Five Points, the world’s most notorious slum.
One night while making his rounds, Wilde literally runs into a little slip of a girl—a girl not more than ten years old—dashing through the dark in her nightshift . . . covered head to toe in blood.
Chapter 1
When I set down the initial report, sitting at my desk at the Tombs, I wrote:
On the night of August 21, 1845, one of the children escaped.
Of all the sordid trials a New York City policeman faces every day, you wouldn’t expect the one I loathe most to be paperwork. But it is. I get snakes down my spine just thinking about case files.
Police reports are meant to read “X killed Y by means of Z.” But facts without motives, without the story, are just road signs with all the letters worn off. Meaningless as blank tombstones. And I can’t bear reducing lives to the lowest of their statistics. Case notes give me the same parched-headed feeling I get after a night of badly made New England rum. There’s no room in the dry march of data to tell why people did bestial things—love or loathing, defense or greed. Or God, in this particular case, though I don’t suppose God was much pleased by it.
If He was watching. I was watching, and it didn’t please me any too keenly.
For instance, look what happens when I try to write an event from my childhood the way I’m required to write police reports:
In October 1826, in the hamlet of Greenwich Village, a fire broke out in a stable flush adjacent to the home of Timothy Wilde, his elder brother, Valentine Wilde, and his parents, Henry and Sarah; though the blaze started small, both of the adults were killed when the conflagration spread to the main house by means of a kerosene explosion.
I’m Timothy Wilde, and I’ll say right off, that tells you nothing. Nix. I’ve drawn pictures with charcoal all my life to busy my fingers, loosen the feeling of taut cord wrapped round my chest. A single sheet of butcher paper showing a gutted cottage with its blackened bones sticking out would tell you more than that sentence does.
But I’m getting better used to documenting crimes now that I wear the badge of a star police. And there are so many casualties in our local wars over God. I grant there must have been a time long ago when to call yourself a Catholic meant your bootprint was stamped on Protestant necks, but the passage of hundreds of years and a wide, wide ocean ought to have drowned that grudge between us, if anything could. Instead here I sit, penning a bloodbath. All those children, and not only the children, but grown Irish and Americans and anyone ill-starred enough to be caught in the middle, and I only hope that writing it might go a way toward being a fit memorial. When I’ve spent enough ink, the sharp scratch of the specifics in my head will dull a little, I’m hoping. I’d assumed that the dry wooden smell of October, the shrewd way the wind twines into my coat sleeves now, would have begun erasing the nightmare of August by this time.
I was wrong. But I’ve been wrong about worse.
[Read the full excerpt of The Gods of Gotham by Lyndsay Faye]
It might be the most widely recognizable phrase in the Sherlock Holmes canon, barring that business about “whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth” (which Holmes did say), and “Elementary, my dear Watson” (which he didn’t say). The statement is so loaded with the pungent Victorian scent of melodrama and succinctly rendered spookiness that when reading it—somewhere between the ages of around twelve and twenty, as is often the case—one sees the usefulness in fainting couches.
[No, you did not miss the US premiere of the BBC’s Sherlock Season 2. Some of us watched the UK feed and were anxious to discuss it. Believe me, we’ll be doing so again on May 6, when it premieres on 
I like testosterone. Always have. If you like your testosterone served piping hot, with more than a splash of Tabasco, a creamy dollop of ultraviolence, and a healthy slice of goggle-wearing, tin car-driving, machine gun-wielding steampunk pie for dessert, look no further than this film.
I’ve never downloaded an electronic book.
Edward Hardwicke, known to fans round the globe as the second actor to play Dr. John Watson in Granada Television’s beloved Sherlock Holmes series, passed away due to cancer at the age of 78 on the 16th of May, 2011. A former pilot officer in the Royal Air Force, he is survived by daughters Kate and Emma, stepdaughter Claire, and his second wife, Prim Cotton.
or the End of a Perfectly Good Moustache.jpg)
I'm one of the very few Sherlockians I know possessed of a rabid aversion to deerstalkers. When I think about the iconic chapeau of our personal hero, I get an expression on my face not dissimilar to Keith Olbermann's moments before the glasses are torn off and Camera Three gets a wet lensful of disdain. 
