The Fringe of Society

Ink-stained moralist Martin Drake, monarch of the morning daily The Record, crusades for Prohibition while nursing a clandestine thirst that burns his throat like swallowed cinders. Across the civic chessboard stalks Ned Medford, brewers’ bagman and state-house puppeteer, whose gaze lingers lecherously on Drake’s porcelain-pure wife Esther. One dusk-shuttered parlour scene—Medford’s gloved hands clamping Esther’s waist, Drake bursting in—detonates the plot: the publisher drowns suspicion in bootleg gin, his vow of abstinence shattered on marble bar-tops. Medford, scenting ruin, dispatches plug-uglies to hustle the editor into a warehouse tomb; enter Tip O’Neill, ink-slinging knight-errant, who drags his boss from a coffin of newsprint and exposes the booze-ring’s ledger of graft. Esther, desperate to clear her name, confronts Medford in his rococo lair; Drake arrives like an avenging paragraph, fists flying, chandeliers crashing, till Medford lies pulped beneath a ticker-tape snowfall of incriminating headlines. Marriage re-set in boldface, Drake’s paper rolls off presses wet with absolution.