John S. Moore

John Schuyler Moore is the embodiment of the Gilded Age’s paradox: brilliant and hollow, socially glossy and morally restless, artist and reporter, insider and outsider. One moment he stands in his polished suit in a drawing‑room, cocktail in hand; the next he is crouched over a murder‑scene, sketch‑pad balanced on his knees, coal soot in his hair, the grisly corpse before him. He likes fine whiskey, elegant company, the quick flash of insight; he fears the demons of his past, the bottle’s pull, and the possibility that the darkness he investigates could swallow him whole. Yet in that very tension lies his power. He does not pretend to be perfect. He simply tries to be the man who will tell the story—one line, one drawing, one truth at a time. And in the murky streets of New York in 1896, that may be all the difference between silence and justice.