Having "ransacked the world" for "every aspect of detective literature," one William J. Flynn presented his compliments to the public on the first page of the first issue of a new magazine, Flynn's, issued weekly by the Red Star News Co., Manhattan. Onetime Chief of the U. S. Secret Service, Editor Flynn promised to go "far back into the recesses of his own life for thrills and action; those early days in New York when he himself set his feet on the downtown pavements and met the shock of the lawless." All this and more for ten cents per week. In his ransacking, Editor Flynn had accomplished the seemingly impossible task of discovering "a wholly new writer whose prolific brain can evolve and depict fresh, sparkling detective situations"—a man comparable, in Editor Flynn's mind, to Poe, Gaboriau, Wilkie Collins, Conan Doyle. This rare being was none other than Richard E. Enright, Police Commissioner of New York City, a man whose "own career demonstrates that men are much like milk—'the cream comes to the top.'" Young and ambitious, Enright began as a railway telegraph operator, became "just a cop" in Manhattan, was "the first and only man in the entire police history of the world" to rise from "the bottom" to his present exalted position. Commissioner-Author Enright's maiden "thriller," Vultures of the Dark," was featured in Flynn's. The New York World: "To read that 'Fifth Avenue stretched its lancelike length in mirrored sheen,' to read of a party that was 'a modernized version of a Bacchanalian revel with a pseudo-Egyptian setting,' and of a kiss that was 'ambrosia, sipped from a rare chalice' . . . almost any reader might be pardoned for thinking the Commissioner had been an author all his life."
"Gonegaga"*
In The Forum for October, one George Henry Payne reported a conversation which he had had with a foreigner whom he called "Mr. Gonegaga" : GONEGAGA: "There is Mr. Hearst's morning American. I understand that thoroughly. The international bankers have taken away all the money from the people and yet—and that is what puzzles me—the people seem happy. How is that?" PAYNE: "Very simple. The international bankers have not taken absolutely all the money—they have left the plain people a small amount, but enough to buy Mr. Hearst's three New York papers, his two Chicago papers, his two Washington, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Detroit, Atlanta, Rochester papers, his 16 magazines, and still enough money to go and see his eight expensive historical movies. Why should they not be happy? . . ."
GONEGAGA: "Ah, yes! then The New York Times, which defends the capitalist class, is really Mr. Brisbane's favorite paper?"
PAYNE : "Not his favorite paper, but one undoubtedly that he reads religiously. In fact everyone reads the Times."
GONEGAGA: "Even the Progressives?"