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and cabarets. But it was just this side-street world, whose denizens gazed yearningly at the blazing lights of Broadway, that interested Runyon. For all his tough-mindedness, Runyon was a sucker for little people with hopelessly big dreams; he wrote about them with a pathos Winchell never could have mustered. In fact, he christened the block behind the Palace Theatre “Dream Street.” There, he wrote, “you see burlesque dolls, and hoofers, and guys who write songs, and saxophone players, and newsboys, and newspaper scribes, and taxi drivers, and blind guys, and midgets, and blondes with Pomeranians, or maybe French poodles, and guys with whiskers, and nightclub entertainers, and I do not know what else.” And all of them “sit on the stoops or lean against the railings of Dream Street, and the gab you hear sometimes sounds very dreamy indeed. In fact, it sometimes sounds very pipe-dreamy.” It is no coincidence that after this epic evocation, Dream Street Rose, the living soul of the street, tells the narrator a tale about a young woman—herself, in days gone by—in the mining town of Pueblo, Colorado, another burg full of stranded souls dreaming of the big strike that will set them free.

It is a crucial part of Runyon’s mystique that it is almost impossible to say where life ends and literature begins. You cannot read the Broadway stories without imagining Runyon himself as the all-knowing, deadpan narrator—the fellow who modestly says he “gets about.” Runyon, of course, got about. Keeping approximately the same hours as Winchell or Tex, he would emerge from LaHiff’s or the Forrest in the early afternoon, join the crowd at Jacobs Beach, and then wander inside to his table immediately to the right at the front of Lindy’s, the “Mindy’s” of his stories. Lindy’s was to Runyon what Texas Guinan’s clubs were to Winchell: the place where the stories he wanted to hear were told. Runyon would sit there for hours with Nils T. Granlund, or with Carnera or Dempsey, or with various small-time gangsters, or with Arnold Rothstein, the model for the Brain.

Rothstein, who controlled the poker games and the floating craps games along Broadway and elsewhere in the city, was a legendary figure in Times Square, a soft-spoken and mysterious character who seemed accountable to no one. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald names him Meyer Wolfsheim and recounts the widely believed tale—since discredited—that he had fixed the 1919 World Series. Fitzgerald’s Rothstein is a silken monster who proudly shows Nick Carraway his cufflinks: “finest specimens of human molars,” he brags. Indeed, the dark revelation at the heart of the novel is that Jay Gatsby works as a bootlegger for Wolfsheim and owes his entire fortune to him. In Rothstein are concentrated all the dark forces that lie below the wild gaiety of Fitzgerald’s novel.

Runyon, by contrast, was friendly with Rothstein, as he was with Al Capone, Owney Madden, Frank Costello, and virtually every other important hoodlum of the day; and he turned them all into “characters.” Runyon knew very well what they were, but he had too dim a regard for legitimately constituted authority to judge them according to their deserts; besides, he had business transactions with several of them. Runyon and a few of his buddies were with Rothstein in Lindy’s the night of his death—one of the great set pieces of the journalism of the day. Rothstein used Lindy’s as his telephone booth, and one night in 1928 a call came in for him. Rothstein listened, nodded, put down the phone, handed his gun to a friend, and went out into the night. Everyone sitting there knew that he had become a hunted man after failing to pay a quarter of a million dollars in gambling debts. It was a moment of the kind of high stoicism Runyon cherished in his Broadway characters—a moment when Times Square turned into the O.K. Corral. Several hours later, Rothstein, riddled with bullets, stumbled out of the elevator of a Central Park West apartment building. He lived for several days, refusing to breathe a word about his assailant.

TIMES SQUARE IN THE Roaring