ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It was years ago that I first chanced upon an 1897 article about some faked murder relics found in a sleepy neighborhood of Queens. From that peculiar beginning came this book—but it couldn’t have been written without the love, patience, and encouragement of my wife, Jennifer, or the inspiration of my sons, Morgan and Bramwell. My great thanks also go to Marc Thomas for all his help in the twenty-first century while I was off traveling in the nineteenth.

I am especially grateful to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation; the generous support of a Guggenheim Fellowship was vital in the creation of this book.

My many thanks as well to my agent, Michelle Tessler, and my editor, John Glusman; their wise guidance in the book’s early stages led to my pursuing New York’s newspaper wars as a key part of this story.

Finally, this book is deeply indebted to many librarians. My particular thanks go to the staffs of the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, Portland State University, and the Multnomah County Library. The soul of this book is probably in room 100 of the NYPL, where I found many of the thousands of newspaper articles I used from the case, and where many more stories slumber and wait to be found. When I first stopped by to see the famed NYPL “Librarian to the Stars,” David Smith, he had a surprise for me: “You just got me in time,” he said. “I’m retiring in a couple of days.” And so he was. I suppose I was his last new author and new book in a four-decade career of assisting everyone from Jimmy Breslin to Colson Whitehead. I hope that this book does his old library proud, and that he gets some good beach weather for reading it.