The Fatal Flame

by Lyndsay Faye

  It should be noted that the motivation behind the female rights movement was far more one of survival than of pique or pride or even social progress. When the women went past claiming equal intellect to mentioning that they were not allowed to inherit property fairly, or that they must work or perish, or that the only way to survive destitution was moral ruination (specifically in the sense of entering the sex trade), they received replies such as this one from the New York Christian Inquirer in 1850: “Rights imply duties, and freedom from certain duties is one of the most precious rights of women. The immodesty and rashness with which duties not assigned to them are sought by some women, give poor indication of any appropriate sense of the difficulty and importance of discharging those distinctly imposed by Providence.” The fact that countless women starved to death as a result of being denied such indecorous “duties” was mainly addressed during the time period by way of assurances of heaven and a just reward in the halcyon afterlife for humble maidens who embraced suffering in a duly Christlike manner.

  The stigma against mental health problems, as terrible as it remains at present, was still worse in the nineteenth century; I’ve endeavored to make not only mental illness but its accompanying ostracism as historically accurate as possible, which proved challenging. Additionally, I often lacked clinical vocabulary when describing various problems (it took me quite a long time on Valentine’s behalf to discover, for instance, that the contemporary slang for “high” would have been “in altitudes”). While I’m not an author who thinks that my after-the-fact opinions of my characters have any bearing on how readers view them, on an academic level, it may be of interest to know that I imagined Silkie Marsh as a sociopath, Robert Symmes as a sadist, and Mercy and her father the Reverend Underhill to suffer from hereditary paranoid schizophrenia, an illness which has a definite and tragic genetic component.

  Throughout the Timothy Wilde trilogy, I have endeavored to show all due respect for the NYPD’s ideals and practices, but I have never pretended their record is spotless, and to do so would be not merely coy but asinine. Heroes and villains and plain misguided men and women often wear the same uniforms. The shower-bath scene in which Ronan McGlynn is interrogated in the Tombs courtyard by roundsman Kildare is taken directly from a nineteenth-century woodcut illustration, seeming by its subsequent description to explicitly describe an early American form of waterboarding. Whether one defines such measures as “enhanced interrogation” or simple torture, one cannot doubt that deep pockets of grey existed in our early law-enforcement practices, as indeed they do to this very day. To acknowledge such is not to dishonor the countless heroes of the NYPD, and one hopes only that history will judge every man and woman according to their deserts rather than their reputations. One shudders to think what a contemporary biography of Captain Valentine Wilde would look like.

  During the first ten years I spent in New York, I lived a few blocks away from where Chief of Police George Washington Matsell is buried at the idyllic uptown Trinity Cemetery in Washington Heights. The gate was often locked, so I visited infrequently (though I borrowed piecemeal several wonderful character names from tombstones). But Matsell and his preoccupation with language and his Rogue’s Lexicon, his passion for understanding people and their motives, the murky bits of his history and accusations of his being a Party bully as much as a reformer and a wildly liberal apologist, are the reasons I was able to infuse these books with the language and the ethos of their time period. Here is to, unabashedly, The Secret Language of Crime, and may many more such lexicons be produced during times of tremendous struggle and social upheaval.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Writing this book was an enormous struggle. I have always been what authors term a pantser, a charming “seat-of-the-pants” term the hopelessly disorganized call themselves so they don’t feel like crying into their Top Ramen bowls and whiskey mugs at four in the morning when the words won’t come. To every single one of the friends and family who relentlessly, stubbornly believed in me during that process, I thank you. I’m not ashamed to say there were moments stretching into days when I thought this manuscript wouldn’t happen. And I am actually proud of the fact that, after the horrid mess topped 150,000 words in its first draft, you all applauded heartily as I trimmed its length with gentle chain saws.

  My gratitude to my editor, Amy Einhorn, for supporting Tim Wilde—and, in every fashion her copious brain can come up with, me personally—is immense. Additionally, I’m in perennial awe of her ability to induce me to tell the right story, and at the right moment. Thanks to her and thanks most sincerely to her brilliant team, including but certainly not limited to Elizabeth Stein, Lydia Hirt, Katie McKee, Kate Stark, Alexis Welby, and all the other lovely powerhouses who keep me afloat.

  The team of completely metal, hard-rocking ladies at William Morris Endeavor, who are the reason you might be reading this book, deserve far more than my simple thanks, for I owe them a very great deal more than that. Erin Malone, you are the Master Splinter to my Ninja Turtle, if Splinter had been smokingly hot and fashionable and not a sagacious sewer rat. (You know what I mean.) Tracy Fisher and Cathryn Summerhayes, if representing authors were an Olympic event, your team would win gold every year, and I often picture you in a two-person bobsled for this very purpose. Amy Hasselbeck, you are absolutely the tops.

  Thank you a thousand times to my foreign-language publishers, every language and every time zone, as well as to Claire Baldwin and her superlative team at Headline in the UK (who tend to keep my version of English remarkably intact). I’m continually humbled by your creative output and canny suggestions, from la belle France avec Deborah Druba et Carine Chichereau to marvelously tiny Swedish pocket editions.

  My everlasting gratitude to the Bryant Park Research Library and the entire NYC library system for helping to make the Wilde brothers the men they are. Additional historical research was of course necessary, however, and my thanks on this occasion are thus due to historians Richard Bernstein, Rosalyn Baxandall, Linda Perlman Gordon, Christine Stansell, Sean Wilentz, Timothy Gilfoyle, Jonathan H. Earle, Gustavus Meyers, Edith Abbott, and Norman Ware. Contemporary accounts (throughout the trilogy) have been my bread and butter, and I’d be ungrateful not to mention Lydia Maria Child, Ned Buntline, George G. Foster, and the countless reporters for the Herald newspaper I’ve quoted at length.

  Thank you to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and to the many, many other women—some infamous, some now-famous, some forgotten entirely—who enabled me to live as I do.

  Finally, thank you a thousand times to anyone who has ever picked up a strange book, frowned at it, hefted it, skimmed it, and thought Timothy Wilde was worth getting to know. You are each and every one of you my heroes.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Lyndsay Faye is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Dust and Shadow, The Gods of Gotham—which was nominated for an Edgar for Best Novel—and Seven for a Secret. If you were to ask her, she would say she writes hero stories. Faye, a true New Yorker in the sense that she was born elsewhere, lives in Queens with her husband, Gabriel.

  * Excerpted from George Washington Matsell, The Secret Language of Crime: Vocabulum, or, The Rogue’s Lexicon (G. W. Matsell & Co., 1859).

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