Gilded Needles (Valancourt 20th Century Classics)

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1976
, the copying, scanning, uploading, and/or electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitutes unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher.

Cover art by Mike Mignola

INTRODUCTION

My first exposure to Michael McDowell came when I stumbled across the first three volumes of
Blackwater
in a secondhand bookshop in Brighton. I’m a notoriously slow reader but managed all three in three days, and behaved like a crack addict searching for the other half of the sextet. The
Blackwater
saga chronicled a tragic fifty-year period in the lives of the Caskey family, whose women bear a strange affinity for running water and whose vengeance knows no bounds. The saga played out like a gruesomely overheated Dickensian soap, and was constructed for maximum page-turning efficiency. Surely, I thought, they must be ripe for republication?

You know what it’s like when you find writing that emotionally chimes with your own feelings. I had to track down all of his other books. Bad idea. Everything was out of print. When something is scarce the asking price soars. So it was with Mr. McDowell. He would have been amused by the idea of his less-than-pristine paperbacks changing hands for big money.

“I am a commercial writer and I’m proud of that,” said the Alabama-born author. “I think it is a mistake to try to write for the ages.” But he was hailed by Stephen King precisely as “a writer for the ages”. His gothic deep-South novels appeared mainly as paperbacks in the golden age of the throwaway read, the early
1980
s, but there’s something about them that remains to haunt readers. His prose is tight and his idiomatic dialogue is shorn of folksiness. McDowell earned high praise and good sales, producing some thirty volumes including mysteries, comedies, period adventures, psychological suspensers and family epics. He also adopted aliases for two sets of pastiche novels, one featuring a gay detective.

McDowell frequently returned to the idea of matriarchal, dynastic revenge in his books, and his wonderfully chatty style made it feel as if he was imparting a terrible piece of gossip while describing all manner of disturbing events. One of his best books was
The Elementals
, in which two families fatefully clash during a summer holiday on a spit of land being slowly engulfed by tides and mournful spirits.
Cold Moon Over Babylon
is set in the harvest season of a foggy Southern town, and has a marvelous feel for its location. McDowell frequently explored the idea of being engulfed by natural forces, as levees break and seas rise, as sand pours in through the windows of an abandoned house, and he links these natural catastrophes to our own selfishness or blindness, flaws that leave dark stains on future generations. His characters are often powerless and insignificant in the face of time and nature. His novels were usually augmented by a supernatural element.

Not so in the case of
Gilded Needles
, a vivid historical tintype of old New York that forms the backdrop to a nightmarish cascade of almost Jacobean retribution. Here in an extraordinary opening scene we seem to fly over New York City, dipping down to observe lives lived in desperate circumstances. No one feels sorry for themselves; they accept their lot and make the best of what they have. Once again we have two families, the aristocratic Stallworths and the lowly Shankses, one side taking revenge against the other. The slow build-up, shifting from Gramercy Park elegance to pawnshops, brothels, opium dens and beer houses, is designed to provide immense satisfaction when it delivers the goods. The drug-dipped needles of the title come into play as both families suffer losses, proving that revenge is a dish that sates no one. And this time McDowell forgoes the opportunity to introduce any element of the supernatural, instead concentrating on producing some of his most elegant and powerful prose. The author has an uncanny ability to deliver us into a world we can scarcely comprehend now; there’s an early scene in which two children sing as they clear away a corpse in preparation for carting it off to medical students. It should appall us, but simply feels right.

It’s no surprise that, as the creator of dazzling set pieces and highly visual images, McDowell later came to write the classic comedy
Beetlejuice
, as well as collaborating on Tim Burton’s eerily beautiful animated film
The Nightmare Before Christmas
. Even when outlining horrific acts, there’s a gentility and grace to his most baroque stylings. Tragically he died shortly before his fiftieth birthday, and the world lost a unique voice that was just reaching its peak. The good news is that we have his books back again, and so an author who was once so obsessed with death has found a way to live on.

Christopher Fowler

Christopher Fowler
is the award-winning author of over
40
novels and short story collections, including the Bryant & May mysteries. His latest books are the haunted house thriller
Nyctophobia
and
The Burning Man
. He has a weekly column in
The Independent on Sunday
. He lives in King’s Cross, London and Barcelona.

Revenge is a dish best eaten cold.—Old Spanish Proverb.

Prologue At Midnight

On a dark winter’s night, seven children huddled around a grate on Mulberry Street. Each in turn, for the space of a minute or so, sat directly upon the iron grid to enjoy the warmth of the steam escaping from the underground furnace that heated the headquarters of the New York police. Barely clothed in filthy, formless rags and with faces and exposed skin dark with grime, they seemed only rickety shadows in the unlighted street, a coven of degenerate goblins. A shrill argument arose among the children whether a girl, who carried a wheezing infant in her arms, ought to be allotted a longer time upon the grate, but before the squabblers could come to any decision, their debate was drowned out by the sudden tolling of all the bells in the city.

The Year of Grace
1881
had become the Year of Grace
1882
.

Not far away, in the cellar of a rotting building on Grand Street stood a stale-beer shop, a place so low that it was not even distinguished by a name. Impoverished, fallen, criminal, and diseased men and women there consumed flat beer that had been discarded by Bowery saloon keepers the night before as no longer fit to serve. The customers drank uncomplaining until they were insensible to the cold without and their misery within. The shop was run by a mute black man, who dispensed beer all night long into pottery mugs that had never been washed. In this close room, where a small coal fire served to fill the place with choking smoke without warming anyone, men raved against God, the women who had betrayed them, the authorities who had imprisoned them, the Democratic machine which had failed to set them free, and whomever else could be brought to enfeebled mind. The women, most of them mercifully unconscious, had folded themselves up into the dark corners, or sat with their heads pressed against the cold sweating walls. The purchase of two draughts at a cent each allowed them the privilege of remaining in the room until dawn. Ragged children fought beneath the tables, and the monkey of the consumptive organ grinder swung from the enraged to the stupefied without prejudice, and added his piercing chatter to the welter of incomprehensible voices.

Two sullen men, only that morning released from Blackwell’s Island, sat gambling near the door of the shop. A slight pause in the turn of their greasy cards when the church bells began to ring was all the notice that was accorded the New Year in that unhappy place.

Not far away, in the cellar of a house on Mott Street, three young women wearing striped dresses and ecstatic smiles initiated a shy friend into the mysteries of opium-smoking. The giggling novice placed the tarlike bolus on the flattened end of the
yen hock
, which she had mistaken at first for a knitting needle, and turned it in the flame of the green fairy lamp. She glanced around her at the impassive dreamers, only half of them Chinese, and nervously whispered to her companions, “You cert that we’re safe here?” When the New Year’s bells penetrated that crowded, smoky, silent room, they were incorporated into a hundred lassitudinous dreams, a hundred visions of gray and blue.

A quarter of an hour before—on the other side of police headquarters from heathen Mott Street—a hansom cab had drawn up before an unobtrusive brick facade on West Houston Street and a veiled face framed with raven-black hair had peered anxiously out. The driver confirmed the address for his passenger, but drove away before her timid knock had gained her entrance into the house.

“Maggie sent me,” she whispered to the severely dressed, severely featured woman who had opened the door. The veiled lady was an actress who half an hour before had received great applause for her portrayal of the titular heroine of
Ada the Girl Scout of the Sierras
at the National Theatre on the Bowery.

At the foot of the darkened stairs, the actress hesitated. Then, another young woman, prettily blond and in a gay red dress, appeared on the landing above and, waving a candle, beckoned her with soothing reassurances. “You’re Dollie!” she exclaimed. “Oh such beautiful hair, such beautiful hair!”

Now the actress lay on a narrow iron bed in a tiny room on the fourth floor of the quiet house. She grasped and twisted the thin coverlet in agitation. Blithely humming, the pretty blond woman drew the thin curtains across the window and poured more coal upon the small fire in the grate. She turned gracefully with a smile, and in a cheery voice asked the actress if the laudanum had yet taken effect.

The actress’s reply to the abortionist was lost amid the New Year’s bells.

Not so very far from the quiet house where the pretty blond woman in the red dress pursued her lucrative trade was the Bowery, nearly impassible with revelers, though their number this Saturday night seemed not much greater than upon any other. Vendors of pasties and hot corn and fresh oysters screamed louder than those celebrating, and new tunes pounded out on spavined pianos poured from every other doorway. Rollicking music from the German bands alternated with the pop-pop of the shooting galleries and the rasping cries of the crippled and blind beggars who lined the walks. Boys who worked in bookshops for eight dollars a week kept festive company with young milliners, but were snubbed by the clerks who made a thousand dollars a year, boarded in houses in the west Twenties, and had come to the Bowery with their landladies’ daughters. Italian families promenaded with stately pride along the lower Bowery and turned around only when they met their German counterparts walking south. Newsboys and bootblacks, never sufficiently protected against the cold, often frail and just as frequently found with cigars in their mouths, lounged on corners, raced through the street in pursuit of some fight supposed to be taking place a couple of streets away, or thronged the entrances to the variety theaters. When the New Year bells rang, the music, the hundreds of cries and shoutings, the thousand boisterous happy conversations on the Bowery blended and welled into one monstrous cheer for the passing of the old year and the beginning of the new.

Half a mile west of the Bowery, in front of the recently constructed New York Hospital on Fifteenth Street, a young woman in drab demure attire walked arm-in-arm with her sister, a schoolgirl dressed in a bright green frock, a red jacket with fur trim, and a round fur hat with felt ribbons streaming down the back. Just when they had come within sight of the lamps of Satan’s Circus—Sixth Avenue—they unlinked. The older girl dropped into a brick recess of the building on the corner and the schoolgirl stepped into the harsh light of the busy avenue and stared about her tentatively. She scanned the faces of passersby for a few moments and at last pulled on the sleeve of one middle-aged gentleman whose pace had slowed as he approached her.

“Please mister,” she said, in a high plaintive voice, “I’ve been separated from my sister. Can you help me to find her again?”

The New Year’s bells began to ring, but before they had left off the schoolgirl and the middle-aged gentleman were proceeding to a furnished chamber on Greenwich Avenue where the child thought it possible that the elder sister was waiting. The woman in drab attire emerged from her hiding place and continued her monotonous circuit alone.

Only just beyond earshot of the traffic along Satan’s Circus, in rooms on the first floor of an old mansion, two men stood with their backs to the fire in a carved marble hearth, talking in low voices. The older man was tall and imposing, with white hair and piercing blue eyes. His companion was young and handsome, with short brown hair and a thick brown beard. They were father- and son-in-law and had spent the last evening of the year in this club patronized by Republican lawyers and judges. The clock on the mantel behind them chimed midnight; they turned to look at it, and in the moment of turning the bells of the church across the street began their celebratory peal. The two men shook hands with one another and then moved to the center of the room. The other dozen Republicans there laid aside their papers and their conversations and stood. They all shook hands, engineered small smiles, and wished their fellows the best for the coming year. The old man, at the end of a brief speech, expressed the certainty that
1882
would see the Democrats hounded from office and deprived of all influence in the city.

Along Fifth Avenue and around the fashionable squares uptown, where men and their wives still strolled about, the bells rang with particular beauty and clarity in the cold night. Everyone paused and smiled graciously to strangers who happened to be near. After the gentlemen had tipped their hats and the ladies had murmured well-bred wishes for the coming year, they all passed on toward home.

In the Fifth Avenue Hotel, the management had laid on a special supper. At half past eleven, when the doors to the dining room were opened, three hundred-odd guests charged through and were seated as they might at the thirty tables laid for twelve. An English duchess found herself beside a gentleman who boasted of having killed seventeen Seminoles on the shore of Lake Okeechobee, and across from a female advocate of free love. The duchess’s titled son conversed with a confidence man whose right eye had been shot out by the Mexican police. At midnight thirty waiters appeared, each bearing a platter with a steaming roasted pig atop it. A United States senator toasted the new year with champagne and he was seconded in a babel of languages and accents.

A few streets away, in a second-floor window of a little slice of a house on gray and dreary Gramercy Park, stood a robed lady, her face harshly illumined by a guttering candle on the sill. One arm was raised and she impatiently fingered the drapery. She stared at the men who passed on the walk below, as if watching for one in particular.

Just as the bells of the Episcopal church on Fourth Avenue pealed the New Year, a young smooth-shaven man carrying a large black leather bag hurried up from the direction of Third Avenue. He glanced up at the window, signaled to the lady there, and expeditiously mounted the steps. The woman disappeared from the window and only a few moments later opened the door to admit the eagerly awaited hairdresser.

For the Irish woman wandering the Battery, whose infant had just perished in her arms; for the Italian merchant who had just sold his last morsel of tainted horse meat to the squatters living in shacks on the hilly wasteland above Eightieth Street; and for all those in between: for the poor whose poverty was such that they would soon die of it, for the criminals whose criminality was no final guarantee against the poverty they tried to escape, for the mildly prosperous and moderately respectable, for the moderately prosperous and very respectable, and for the very rich who needn’t trouble themselves with respectability, the year of Our Lord
1882
was begun.

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