True Tales From the Annals of Crime and Rascality

A quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore: gang war in Chinatown, an avuncular counterfeiter, the New York court system, the life of a beat cop. McKelway takes his time, but he's seldom less than urbane and informative, and he gets the facts from people who know. Style old-fashioned, but it smells less of mold than of real history. Originally published in The New Yorker, starting in 1933.

These are more-or-less true crime reports written for the New Yorker and therefore have a style more light and witty than serious and scholarly. To me the most interesting is study of Mock Duck a.k.a. Mock Sai Wing, a leader of the Hip Sing Tong in New York's Chinatown.