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Texas Guinan ultimately became such a byword for Broadway nightlife that she starred in her own movie, Queen of the Night Clubs, in 1929, and enjoyed several stints as a celebrity journalist. Her column, “Texas Guinan Says,” appeared daily in The Graphic. She put three dots between her items, just like Winchell, producing the same breathless, jazzy sense of experience caught on the fly. She tossed off a rapid-fire sequence of cracks and tough-guy asides: “There are far too many women who act like they were born in revolving doors—they are so dizzy and keep going around in circles.” And she was a name-dropper to put anyone but Winchell in the shade, managing to include, in the space of about 250 words, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Benito Mussolini, Primo Carnera, David Belasco, Heywood Broun, and Ethel Barrymore— although, to be fair, it’s unlikely that Wilson, who died in 1921, visited any of Tex’s clubs.

Tex comes down to us today chiefly through the works of Damon Runyon, the other and more lasting bard of Broadway in the nightclub era. Runyon’s girlfriend Patrice Gridier was in Tex’s chorus in 1925, though it is safe to say that he would have gravitated to Tex’s clubs in any case. Tex was a natural-born goddess of Runyon’s scruffy Olympus. One of his most famous stories, “Romance in the Roaring Forties,” written in 1929, concerns not only Tex but Winchell, whom Runyon normally treated as somewhat below his level of regard, but who served perfectly as a Broadway type. Runyon barely deigned to disguise his characters: “Romance in the Roaring Forties” opens in the “Sixteen Hundred Club” of “Missouri Martin,” “an old experienced doll” known as “Mizzou” who “tells everything she knows as soon as she knows it, which is very often before it happens.” The story concerns a gossip columnist named Waldo Winchester who falls in love with Billy Perry, the girlfriend of a gangster named “Dave the Dude,” whom Jimmy Breslin, in his luminous but hallucinatory biography of Runyon, identifies with the Mafioso Frank Costello. The story’s narrator treats Waldo as an unaccountable idiot for having placed his life in jeopardy over a girl; and Mizzou tells Billy that she is “a little sap” for falling in love with a starving newspaperman when “everybody knows that Dave the Dude is a very fast man with a dollar.”

“Romance in the Roaring Forties” is, like so many Runyon stories, a kind of extended joke, because the violence for which the reader is being continually prepared not only never occurs but collapses into rank sentimentality. Rather than obeying his initial impulse to murder Waldo, Dave arranges for him to marry Billy because, he tells the narrator, “I love her myself so much that I wish to see her happy at all times, even if she has to marry to be that way.” And then, when it turns out that Waldo is already very much married and was only trifling with Billy, rather than murdering Waldo a second time, Dave turns around and marries Billy himself. Dave has a heart of gold; and he is still, of course, a ruthless killer. The story never loses its hard-boiled edge because we know perfectly well that marriage will not “reform” Dave. And it probably won’t reform Billy, either. But of course only a sap would suggest as much to either.

Runyon’s Broadway, like Winchell’s, was a comic rather than a tragic place, a place full of wild incident, a place where the normal human motives are much easier to read because the citizens prefer to do without the usual layers of hypocrisy. It is a very far cry from the Broadway of Julian Street or Rupert Hughes—not because the place has degenerated, but because it has become impossible to imagine a morally superior alternative. Some combination of Prohibition with the generational contempt for received proprieties has so completely discredited conventional norms of behavior that an honest cynicism, combined with the threadbare sentimentality of a dying hood who falls in love with a lame dog (another Runyon tale), has become the