Seven for a Secret

by Lyndsay Faye

The NYPD was founded in the year 1845, during a period of violent social upheaval and political rancor. Citizens decried the formation of a “standing army,” and despite their lack of uniforms, the copper stars were greeted with hostility and mistrust. Due to the simultaneous occurrence of the Irish Potato Famine, the city was struggling to accommodate far more immigrants than its rustic infrastructure could support. While some tenant farmers and their families fled starvation in Ireland and continued west upon arrival in the United States, many remained in Manhattan, and it soon became clear that the Democratic Party would be courting their votes—and to that end, made efforts to assist them in finding work and housing. In the absence of a social net apart from the direst of grim public institutions, politicians wisely realized that their constituents needed help more than they needed policy rhetoric, and many destitute families were aided by the system of cronyism that later made Tammany Hall synonymous with corruption and graft.

  During the period that Chief of Police George Washington Matsell headed the copper stars, the language spoken by New Yorkers was changing almost daily. Phrases culled from British thieves’ cant intermingled with German, Dutch, Yiddish, and other immigrant languages to form “flash,” a child of many mother tongues spoken primarily by the poorer classes and the more nefarious denizens of the ghettos where they were forced to live. Matsell, fascinated by social trends and a man ahead of his time, took it upon himself to record this “language of crime” as an aid to his green star police, and as an eccentric cultural document directed at the Fifth Avenue dandies whose slumming expeditions caused slang’s spread to the wealthier neighborhoods. While he approached the study of flash from the point of view of a policeman, Matsell found himself reluctantly admiring the vernacular that proved so “appropriately expressive of particular ideas,” and fans of the English language today will find its many branches of slang no less evocative, adaptable, and organic.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  During the periods when I’m alone at my kitchen table, trying to siphon words from my brain onto a laptop screen with a bendy straw, it’s of paramount importance to know that there are people cheering me on. My amazing husband, Gabriel, my wonderful family back West, my incredible NYC posse of artists and dreamers and benign lunatics, my worldwide Sherlockian Mafia—they all play a major role in encouraging me to sit-down-and-write-it-for-God’s-sake. I couldn’t accomplish my bookish endeavors without their support.

  Amy Einhorn takes dodgy manuscripts and turns them into marvelous books, and it’s an absolute delight to roll up my sleeves and wash my hands and dive into literary surgery with her. Thank you, Amy, not only for your skills as an editor, but for liking the crazies in my head enough to spend so much time with them. The rest of the team at Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam, including but certainly not limited to Alexis Welby, Victoria Comella, Gina Rizzo, Lydia Hirt, Kate Stark, and Elizabeth Stein, are the best allies a girl could hope for—not to mention the best company.

  I’m at a loss for words as to how amazing my amazing agent, Erin Malone, happens to be—she’s that amazing. Until such time as books can support animated gifs about my feelings, I’ll simply say: thank you, you’re amazing. One day, we will have the technology. I owe a very great deal to Tracy Fisher and Cathryn Summerhayes, who are responsible for spreading Tim Wilde about the globe. To the rest of WME, including Amy Hasselbeck among many others, thank you so much for all the many ways you help me, God knows I need it.

  Many thanks to Claire Baldwin and her entire Headline battalion for being utter peaches. And thank you to all my other wonderful foreign publishers for your interest in a scrappy young American copper star.

  My research for this book began, as ever, at the New York Public Library, and its librarians have been nothing save dedicated and insightful. While I rely to a great extent on primary sources, historians always light my path for me, and in this case works by Edwin G. Burrows, Mike Wallace, Tyler Anbinder, Timothy Gilfoyle, Leslie M. Harris, Carol Wilson, Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, Jenifer Frank, and David Grimstead made me understand just how widespread and horrifying a practice the kidnapping of free blacks was in the antebellum North. Thank you also to Richard B. Bernstein and to my French language translator, Carine Chichereau, for on multiple occasions keeping egg off my face. As to the atrocities my primary sources endured, I cannot fathom how they found the courage to write them down, and I am deeply indebted to them for their biographies.

  Finally, thank you to my readers. My early-draft readers, my new readers, my American readers, my overseas readers, my e-readers, my shiny hardcover readers, and my used-paperback readers. You’re why we do this. Thanks for letting me tell you a story.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Lyndsay Faye is the author of critically acclaimed Dust and Shadow and The Gods of Gotham—if you were to ask her, she would say she writes hero stories. Faye, a true New Yorker in the sense she was born elsewhere, lives in Manhattan with her husband, Gabriel.

  1Excerpted from George Washington Matsell, The Secret Language of Crime: Vocabulum, or, The Rogue’s Lexicon (G. W. Matsell & Co., 1859).