Manbeck’s ‘Disappearance of Patricia Murphey’ is a hardboiled Heights thriller
In the early 1930s, the recently opened Patricia Murphy’s Candlelight Restaurant on Henry Street was a nice, picturesque eatery with white tablecloths and waitresses in gingham dresses that was known for its fluffy popover pastries. And within walking distance was the luxurious Hotel Margaret, one of the grand hotels of Brooklyn Heights.
Neither one of these places was a likely starting-out point for a missing persons case that ended in a murder. But they’re the locations for the opening scenes of “The Disappearance of Patricia Murphey,” the second novella in former Brooklyn Borough Historian John B. Manbeck’s “Brooklyn Heights Crime Series.”
No, “Murphey” is not a misprint. The main character is Patricia Murphey, a rebellious Philadelphia “Main Line” girl who chooses to study at the then-new Brooklyn College, which was then in temporary quarters on Adams Street. As for restaurateur Murphy, she also appears as a character in the book. To complicate matters, there’s also a Sgt. Murphy of the NYPD who investigates Murphey’s disappearance.
The action begins when Murphey storms out of Patricia Murphy’s after her mother, who is staying at the Margaret with her husband, asks whether she has let her new boyfriend touch her sexually. Patricia’s father – a rough, crude businessman with little education and underworld connection – fears that his daughter has been kidnapped into “white slavery,” a now-obsolete term for abducting women and forcing them into prostitution.