We recently gave away five-hundred advanced copies of The Gods of Gotham to reading groups. Here, Lyndsay Faye tells us how she used public libraries to research her historical crime novel:
It’s all well and good for an author to announce “I shall create a story based upon the very first copper stars of the New York City Police Department” until the moment arrives when she recalls she knows nothing whatsoever about the topic.
Such was the position I found myself in before embarking on research for The Gods of Gotham. Soon enough, I’d learned that the star police were formed in 1845, and that they patrolled through the murk and the muck of America’s grittiest slum: the Five Points, at which Charles Dickens himself shook his head in awe after touring the wretched place.
But of course, much more information was necessary, and so I began a six-month intensive research period in order to understand the world I’d be reconstructing. Better for me to have to look up the occasional fact every twenty minutes than to stop every other word and flip open a history book. My mission was to inhabit 1845 Manhattan, and so I dove with eyes wide open into our local library system.
Original sources are my illicit drugs, and so I began at the New York Historical Society. There I discovered a diary written by an early roundsman named William Bell. While facts and dates are important, of far greater interest to the novelist is the daily grind, the sights and smells and sounds the copper stars would have experienced, and the diary was dated 1850—pure research gold. Bell was a pawnshops inspector, but on the side he arrested vagrants and assisted a mentally ill man he found in the City Hall Park fountain, and once was sent to a watery bog at Seventeenth Street that had swallowed five neighborhood pedestrians alive.
Next I set out to study what New Yorkers themselves would have been reading: the news of the day. I encamped myself at Bryant Park Research Library’s microfilm department and read The Herald newspaper back to front for the year 1845. Advertisements for Turkish leeches and hair tonics, ringworm soap and haberdashers—I soaked it all up like a sponge. Editorials raging about Irish immigration were common, and ineffectual politicians cursed to the skies. Afterward, I had a very clear picture of what the average New Yorker’s cultural opinions were, an invaluable aid to writing. And all thanks to the library archives that helped make my book a viable slice of history.
Lyndsay Faye lives in Manhattan and is working on the sequel to The Gods of Gotham.
Have you or your reading group read The Gods of Gotham? Let us know what you think.
