Badge [fiction]

This is my Idea, but you can steal it if you want…

Crane, looking Hollywood-ready

THE GERM: Listening to the audiobook of Satan’s Circus, a non-fiction account of the seedy side of NYC in the early 1900s. The book was about the trial of a crooked cop named Becker, accused of killing a gambler in 1912.

Early in Becker’s career, he arrested a woman, Dora Clark, whom he accused of being a prostitute.  She was in company with young author Stephen Crane and a couple of chorus girls.

At the time, Crane was newly minted celebrity. His Red Badge of Courage hit the best-seller lists just the year before.

Crane stuck up for the woman at the time of arrest, and did so continually through two trials, including Clark’s suit against Becker for false arrest.

GERMINATION: I did a bit of research of Crane, and realized that this celebrity began a fascinating period of his life that lasted the last few years before his early death.

More research led me to enough highlights to fill a short novel, or long film.

WORKING TITLE: “Badge”
FORMAT:  Novel (and, I suppose, eventually a film)
GENRE:  Period Drama
PREMISE:  Brief intense life of a journalist who was forced to live up to what he wrote.
SETTING: 1896-1900, New York City, Cuba, spa in Germany
CHARACTERS:

• Stephen Crane, young author who’s allowed success to go to his head
• Dora Clark, simple-minded prostitute caught up in a public scandal
• Theodore Roosevelt, crusading, but pragmatic, police commissioner
• Cora Taylor, a happy hooker he meets in Florida
• Joseph Conrad; H. G. Wells; William Randolph Hearst

FOR STARTERS:

The story begins at the sensational trial of a corrupt cop accused of falsely arresting a prostitute, Dora Clark. Yellow journalists are swarming the courtroom, blowing out of proportion every tawdry detail.

The reason they’re there at a relatively meaningless trial is the presence of the star witness.  He is Stephen Crane, 25, a handsome and successful novelist who took the nation by storm with his Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage.

Because Crane is sticking up for a known prostitute, police detectives try to dig up dirt on him. It’s revealed that Crane  lives in a brothel with a married woman and has drug paraphernalia in his room.

To try to turn attention away from him and back on the policeman, he claims those items were given to him as part of his research into the seedy underbelly of the Bowery.

Crane has a meeting with police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt, who warns him to back off from testifying. There’s no doubt that the arrested woman made her living as a prostitute, Roosevelt argues.

But Crane counters that the woman was not plying her trade at the time she was nabbed. Regretfully, Roosevelt will have to side with the policeman, no matter how questionable the arrest was, or how corrupt the policeman.

Crane attacks the policeman and the whole police force for the corruption that runs rampant and wonders why Roosevelt lacks the courage to clean up the force.

Roosevelt calls Crane’s own courage into question, asking him if he’d ever had to face gunfire. Crane said he hadn’t, and turned the question back on Roosevelt.

Teddy admitted that he hadn’t either. Still, Becker had, and to attack a policeman who is carrying out his duties, Roosevelt concludes, is a sign of cowardice.

The subsequent scandal (which tarnishes Crane’s reputation), combined with veiled threats by members of the police force, causes Crane to flee the city and travel the world in a vain attempt to outrun his own conscience.

Hired to serve as a war correspondent in Cuba, he sails for Jacksonville, Florida, where he meets and falls in love with a free-spirited prostitute named Cora Taylor.

En route to Cuba, his ship is wrecked in a storm and he’s cast adrift at sea for 3 days. He returns to Jacksonville, where he’s nursed back to health by Taylor, and writes a short story about his experience.

With the threat of war, travel is restricted, so Crane and Taylor return to New York to sell some stories and raise money. He’s hired by Hearst as a foreign war correspondent.

Before long, he’s recognized by a policeman. As the cop moves in for an arrest, Crane leads him on a chase into the subway system. He and Taylor eventually slip out of New York City, knowing he’ll never be able to return.

Reporting from the field, or close to it

They leave for Europe, where Crane reports on the Greco-Turkish war. He files his dispatches far from the battlefield, for he can’t abide the noise and bloodshed.

After a peaceful interlude in England, where “the Cranes” live a scandal-free existence, until he is re-assigned to report on the U.S. invasion of Cuba.  Crane meets back up with TR, who is positively giddy to finally be under fire.

Crane gets caught up in the ‘glory’ and forgets his impartiality in the heat of the moment. He offers to be an adjutant, running dispatches for the Colonel.

After the war is won, Roosevelt cites Crane for bravery and invites  him back to the U.S., but Crane can’t go back to the city he once loved.

He returns to his lover, and together they travel to Europe looking for a cure for his Consumption, finally settling in the Black Forest, where he died at age 28.

NOTE: If you’d like to develop this Idea further, just leave a Comment and claim it.

Advertisement