The notorious inhabitants of London's criminal underworld are all in a day's work for Mog, the printer's apprentice, who prints their "wanted" posters. A real-life meeting with a convict entangles Mog in a secret scheme in this suspenseful tale.

The time is the Depression years of the 1930's, the dirty thirties as they were then called. The place is the town/village of Nelsonville, Dutchess County, New York. The characters, Leroy Andrew Bridges, the printer's devil and editorial assistant employed by the Nelsonville Times, a weekly newspaper published in the aforesaid town/village of Nelsonville. Guy S. Bailey, the editor and publishers of the Times, a disabled veteran of the Great War, presently undergoing treatment for his injuries in a hospital in Virginia, the linotype operator, Clayton F. Lewis or Lewis Clayton Funk, best known as Clay, the only man Leroy knows of with two different names, and Will, for Willard or William, Barnes, the printer-compositor of the paper and Mrs. Belle Bailey, wife of the editor and publisher Guy S. Bailey and who, in the absence of her husband, is carrying on the family printing and publishing business, and many others. Those characters and many others play their parts in the story that ends up in a gory episode in the old abandoned quarry out on the Old Sharon Road.

Set in New York's notoriously corrupt Tammany Hall era following the Civil War, The Printer's Devil follows Ambrose Kelly, a type-setter for The Tribune. Ambrose has come far in life since his impoverished youth, when he supported his mother and siblings as a bare knuckles fighter. In 1870, Ambrose's dreams are shattered when his wife Maeve and son Edward are run down by a beer wagon. Suspecting murder, Ambrose is intent on tracking down the killers. He arranges for his disabled niece Addie to move in and care for his three year old daughter Nola. Ambrose believes his wife and son were killed because of his side trade in acquiring old books for wealthy patrons. But there may be a different cause - strong-arm work he did for Tammany Hall as a young man. Boss Tweed faces investigation and Ambrose knows that Tammany wouldn't hesitate to silence potential witnesses. Ambrose receives unexpected help from Maisie Rourke, his little sisters' childhood friend. The 19th century equivalent of a call girl, Maisie knows everyone from Samuel Clemens to Jay Gould to George Vandermeer, the shipping magnate who originally commissioned the search for St. Mathew's gospel. After three attempts on Ambrose's life, his former boss Horace Greeley sends him to the Ottoman Empire as a correspondent, enabling Ambrose to track Vandermeer. After discovering Maisie's skill at art, Greeley hires her as Ambrose's illustrator. Together, they follow Vandermeer from Constantinople to a Georgian monastery to the Caspian to Cairo and Luxor and Abyssinia in a deadly race to find the gospel first. Meanwhile, Nola is kidnapped and Addie, though deaf and mute, must search New York alone. While Ambrose wards off his enemies and protects his family, he also must settle his confused feelings between grief for Maeve and Edward, a budding romance with Maisie, and attraction to his niece (by marriage) Addie, who reminds him so much of Maeve.

A young pre-teen gets into trouble and a school yard fight. Thinking his street fighting actions caused a murder, he ran away from everything. During the years on the horse race tracks, he became a street wise, tough kid who, with his white hair and big smile, would be taken for “the child next door”. His travels would take him over the country, into jail, and finally to the friendship of a giant newspaper owner. An entirely new life would begin and his adventures left no stone unturned. Keywords: Race Track, Dropout, Mentor, Fighter Negotiator, Travels, Trainer, Computer Renovation, Trouble, Newspaper

In Metropolis on the Styx,David L. Pike considers how underground spaces and their many myths have organized ways of seeing, thinking about, and living in the modern city. Expanding on the cultural history of underground construction in his acclaimed previous book, Subterranean Cities, Pike details the emergence of a vertical city in the imagination of nineteenth-century Paris and London, a city overseen by hosts of devils and undermined by subterranean villains, a city whose ground level was replete with passages between above and below. Metropolis on the Styx brings together a rich variety of visual and written sources ranging from pulp mysteries and movie serials to the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and the novels of Marcel Proust, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Elinor Glyn to the broadsheets and ephemera of everyday urban life. From these materials, Pike conjures a working theory of modern underground space that explains why our notions about urban environments remain essentially nineteenth-century in character, even though cities themselves have since changed almost beyond recognition.Highly original in subject matter, methodology, and conclusions, Metropolis on the Styx synthesizes a number of critical approaches, periods of study, and disciplines in the analysis of a single category of space—the underground. Pike studies the built environments and the textual and visual ephemera (including little-known or unknown archival material) of Paris, London, and other cities in conjunction with canonical modern literature and art. This book integrates a rich visual component—photographs, movie stills, prints, engravings, paintings, cartoons, maps, and drawings of actual and imagined subterranean spaces—into the fabric of the argument.