Greetings! And a word (or two) from the author . . .
Greetings! If you've found your way to All Things Pretty, then you may already know a bit about Pretty and I. If you happened to just stumble onto our little slice of the internet, then I bid you welcome. This blog is intended to be a repository for content, news, and discussions relating to Pretty, a novel from the East Harlem cycle. In the future, I hope to be able to shed a bit more light on some of the real-life characters in the book, and to discuss historical facts about some of the goings-on in and around New York City in the late 1920s and 1930s which inform the narrative, as the novel is set in an around East Harlem and the Bronx of the Roaring Twenties and Depression-era Thirties (with that in mind, the blog's background is currently a captivating shot of the Little Italy of East Harlem around the beginning of Prohibition, facing south near 114th or 115th street and First Avenue). I'll also use the blog to post links, news and updates as to when and where the book will be available for sale and other developments.
Many of you may be wondering what prompted me to write about the East Harlem of almost a century ago, and I myself often wonder about that very same thing. My interest in racketeers and Prohibition probably began around the time that my parents decided that I needed more religion in my life. I was shipped up to Fordham Prep for high school and it was there that I overheard a few classmates talking one day about a book that they were reading in English class. It was a novel set in and around the neighborhoods where I lived. I was intrigued. The book was E.L. Doctorow’s Billy Bathgate and it was my introduction to the Jewish racketeer Dutch Schultz. Years later, I discovered Paul Sann’s Kill The Dutchman!, which introduced me to the real Dutch Schultz. Sann’s book was a revelation, like a time-machine to a different New York.
I moved on to college and law school and eventually began practicing law. I began writing in my spare time about the golden age of men’s style and Hollywood cinema - the 1920s and 1930s - at a blog that I created and curated, An Uptown Dandy. This led to work for magazines like The Rake and websites such as A Suitable Wardrobe on some of the stylish figures (both famous and infamous) of the era. Eventually, I published a photographic history of these stylish gamblers and gangsters called The Best Dressed Man In The Room (the title was taken from a line by then-Police Commissioner Lewis Valentine directed toward the nattily-attired “Pittsburgh” Phil Strauss in 1934). Around that time I began thinking about writing a series of novels about the Puerto Rican experience in East Harlem. My original idea was a cycle of stories, with the first novel exploring the Puerto Rican migration from the island beginning in the 1920s; the second focusing on the Puerto Rican immersion into local politics in the 1960s and 1970s; and concluding with a story about the epidemic of drugs and violence that ravaged the neighborhood in the 1980s and 1990s.
However, as I began looking into the history of the neighborhood, it seemed to me that a realistic story about East Harlem in the 1920s needed to also focus on Prohibition; the Little Italy of East Harlem; and the Jewish-American population that lived in much of the area west of Third Avenue. With that in mind, I thought a good vehicle for a novel would be the early history of the early Joe Noe- Arthur Flegenheimer partnership, from which the Schultz organization blossomed, and two incidents in particular - the Fifth Avenue shoot-out with New York City police detectives near 102nd street that resulted in the death of Danny Iamascia and the highly-publicized arrest of the Dutchman, and the broad daylight drive-by shooting near Joey Rao’s Helmar Social Club at 107th street by elements of the Vincent Coll gang at the height of the Schultz-Coll gang war.
Fast forward a few more years and the first novel in the cycle is complete. While I have come away from the experience with a newfound appreciation for the art of writing, I would also like to think it’s a decent freshman effort – which may be a bit of wishful thinking on my part! Nevertheless, it is my sincere hope that you will enjoy the novel.-Dan Flores
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