The Alchemy of Murder Read Online Free Page B

bride wore…”
    Poppycock!
    Anarchists were planting bombs, factory workers were battling for rights, courageous women were demanding the right to vote, empires were clashing around the world, but all the newspaper women in America—and there were only a few in such a lofty position—were pigeonholed into reporting news about weddings and gossip.
    Unbelievable, yet depressingly true.
    To become a detective reporter, and investigate crime and corruption, or a foreign correspondent sending dispatches from wars and revolutions at the far ends of the world, one must be a man.
    Rubbish. I was not going to spend my life writing about liver pâté, especially after my article was so well received. I had to do something to change management’s rules.
    The question was “what?”
    I considered traveling to the West and wiring stories of desperadoes and boom towns. Stagecoaches rumbled where the tracks didn’t reach and encountered fearsome Apaches where the cavalry didn’t dare go. But the Wild West had been covered by male reporters. To be noticed, I had to do something different. Mexico fit the bill—it was wild and dangerous and virgin territory.
    With my mother in tow and my meager savings in hand, I bought train tickets for the land of the Aztecs.
    What a marvelous country it turned out to be—ancient and beautiful and exotic, but also a place of political unrest and tyranny. Not long after I started sending dispatches focusing not only on the color and charm of the sunny land but on the poverty and injustices I saw, I was informed that the Mexican government no longer desired my presence in the country. *
    When I returned home I discovered that my feat didn’t convince the paper’s management that being a foreign correspondent was a fit job for a woman. To the contrary, they considered it pure luck I had not been raped and murdered by bandits and ordered me back to covering card parties attended by horse-faced society women.
    Unacceptable! Pittsburgh was too confining for a woman overflowing with ideas. On March 23, 1887, I left a note on the desk of Erasmus Wilson, the Quiet Observations columnist and my dear friend:
Dear Q.O.—I am off to New York. Look out for me.
                                                         Bly
    I left for New York with my poor mother once more in tow, but a bit wide-eyed at my exciting dream of being a real news reporter so I could change the world for the better.

Accuracy is
    to a newspaper
    what virtue is
    to a woman.
    —JOSEPH PULITZER

4
    Upon arriving in Manhattan I went straight to the New York World , my newspaper of choice for a job. Its domed citadel was on Park Row where the city’s papers gathered to make it easier to spy on one another.
    The guard protecting the World ’s newsroom off the main lobby refused to let me in after I told him I’d come to see Mr. Pulitzer about a reporting job. “You should be home cooking and cleaning for your husband,” he told me.
    I left fuming. Pushing my way in would have been futile because the guard also told me Mr. Pulitzer was out of the country.
    I soon found out it made not a bit of difference to the newspaper gods of Gotham that I had worked for the Dispatch , had quite a few good stories to my credit, and had been a foreign correspondent in Mexico. All the determination of a mule did me no good.
    After nearly four months of no job, I was almost penniless and losing weight.
    I’m ashamed to admit, but this city really put to test my stamina. I was on the verge of giving up after my purse was stolen in Central Park and I found myself stranded and about to face eviction and starvation when a picture of Mr. Pulitzer entering the World appeared on the front page of the paper. He was back. It’s a day I will never forget— September 22, 1885.
    This time nothing was going to stop me from seeing him. He was going to hire me and that was that. Besides, my parents constantly told