My love of history started with my love of junk. Specifically, the dirt-encrusted, packed shelves of my grandparents’ garage, where one day when I was eleven I unearthed a stack of 78 RPM records. A modern kid raised in the digital world and not the LP-friendly 1970s would probably mistake those records for prehistoric Frisbees. Each one seemed to weigh as much as a brick, and some of them only had grooves on one side. My grandparents hadn’t listened to the discs since their last phonograph broke down decades earlier, so they eagerly gave me permission to clear out the sagging shelf and lug them home.
During the next months, I became obsessed with the scratchy recordings, some of which dated back to the early 1900s. A lot of these records sang the praises of rural states (usually in the South, often Alabama) that had been left behind, or warned, “Stay home, little girl, stay home.” When I learned a little about the period, I began to understand why. The early twentieth century saw a huge migration of people, from south to north, from east to west, from rural towns to urban centers. New York City bulged with newcomers. Between 1890 and 1920 its population quadrupled, mostly with European immigrants, but also with ambitious transplants from other states. The more I learned, the more I started to imagine the lives of the young women who were drawn to the big cities, the ones who refused to heed the advice of songwriters to stay at home.
In Murder in Greenwich Village, which takes place in 1913, three women are living together in a small flat: Louise, a secretary who left Altoona, Pennsylvania, with a cloud over her head and a determination to be independent; Callie, a farm girl from upstate who dreams of making it big on the Great White Way; and Ethel, Callie’s older spinster cousin, who is visiting the city for reasons neither Louise nor Callie can fathom. When Ethel is murdered in their apartment, the two young women discover the dark side of living in the big city.
Conducting her own investigation into who killed Ethel, Louises enlists the help of her friend, Otto, a songwriter who pens the kind of Tin Pan Alley songs that I found in my grandparents’ garage. But she also meets an NYPD detective, Frank Muldoon, who believes New York City would be better off without single women from the boondocks migrating there with dreams of glamour and success that too often turn to tragedy. Louise listens to his warnings with dwindling patience. Did he think nothing bad ever happened to girls in small towns and cities, even under the watchful eye of their families? If so, he had meatloaf for brains.
Muldoon doesn’t think women have any place investigating murders, either, but I suspect Louise will eventually change his opinion about that.
A year before World War I breaks out, the sidewalks of Manhattan are crowded with restless newcomers chasing the fabled American Dream, including a sharp-witted young woman who discovers a talent for investigating murder . . .
New York City, 1913. Twenty-year-old Louise Faulk has fled Altoona, Pennsylvania, to start a life under dizzying lights. In a city of endless possibilities, it’s not long before the young ingénue befriends a witty aspiring model and makes a splash at the liveliest parties on the Upper East Side. But glitter fades to grit when Louise’s Greenwich Village apartment becomes the scene of a violent murder and a former suitor hustling for Tin Pan Alley fame hits front-page headlines as the prime suspect . . .
Driven to investigate the crime, Louise finds herself stepping into the seediest corners of the burgeoning metropolis—where she soon discovers that failed dreams can turn dark and deadly…
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