• Short Prose

• Type: Mezzobula
• Length: 23 pages

• Found in: The Listener and Other Stories (short story collection)

A Story of New York

There was a heavy sameness about them that made it difficult to report them interestingly, and as a rule they were left to the tender mercies of the "flimsy" men - the Press Associations - and no paper sent a special man unless the case was distinctly out of the usual. Moreover, a hundred and fifty meant a column and a half, and Williams, not being a space man, earned the same money whether he wrote a stickful or a page; so that he felt doubly aggrieved, and walked out into the sunny open spaces opposite Newspaper Row heaving a deep sigh and cursing the boredom of his trade.

Even now he could not enter the gloomy Tombs Prison, or cross the Bridge of Sighs leading from it to the courts, without experiencing a real sensation, for its huge Egyptian columns and massive walls closed round him like death; and the first time he walked down Murderers' Row, and came in view of the cell doors, his throat was dry, and he had almost turned and run out of the building.

Max Hensig is a 1907 mezzobula (longer than a short story, but shorter than a novella) by English author Algernon Blackwood. - AsNotedIn

Places

• Bowery, After the custom of reporters, they made their way up the Bowery and went into a saloon. Here they washed away most of the "dirty taste" left by the Tombs atmosphere.
• Chinatown - Little Italy, They went down Pell Street, and turn up dark wooden stairs into a Chinese restaurant, smelling strongly of opium and of cooking not Western. Here they order chou chop suey and chou om dong, and wash it down with fiery white whisky.
• East Village, Williams walks slowly through the malodorous slum streets that lay between the Bowery and the Tombs, dodging the pullers-in outside the clothing stores and nibbling at a bag of peanuts he caught up off an Italian push-cart en route.
• Manhattan, New York City Max Hensig is a German doctor accused of murdering his second wife by injecting arsenic.
• Sandy Hook Light, Sandy Hook Williams talks to the Quarantine doctor as they steamed down the bay in the little tug to meet an incoming liner just anchoring inside Sandy Hook.
• Town of Babylon, NY, New York Amityville was a scattered village some twenty miles away on Long Island, where Dr Hensig had lived and practiced for the last year or two, and where Mrs Hensig No 2 had come to her suspicious death.

Food

• Gin Fizz Cocktail