A Treasure Trove: A Guest Post by Gary Krist
This comprehensive true crime narrative paints the portrait of an infamous crime and the people involved, all set against a vivid and vibrant backdrop. Author Gary Krist has penned an exclusive essay for us on his research process and writing Trespassers at the Golden Gate, down below.
Hardcover $32.00
Trespassers at the Golden Gate: A True Account of Love, Murder, and Madness in Gilded-Age San Francisco
Trespassers at the Golden Gate: A True Account of Love, Murder, and Madness in Gilded-Age San Francisco
By Gary Krist
In Stock Online
Hardcover $32.00
The sensational, forgotten true story of a woman who murdered her married lover in Gilded Age San Francisco and the trial that epitomized the city’s transformation from raucous frontier town into modern metropolis—from the New York Times bestselling author of Empire of Sin
The sensational, forgotten true story of a woman who murdered her married lover in Gilded Age San Francisco and the trial that epitomized the city’s transformation from raucous frontier town into modern metropolis—from the New York Times bestselling author of Empire of Sin
For a narrative nonfiction writer, the process of deciding what story to tackle next is always a challenge. During that uncertain but (for me) strangely exhilarating time, many ideas are called, but few are chosen. And there’s a reason for that. For a story to be viable as the germ of a book, its overall outline has to be, first of all, as compelling and dramatic as possible. But even the most compelling and dramatic storyline will remain an inert synopsis unless I can bring it to life on the page with plenty of novelistic elements (pungent dialogue, vivid scenes, richly evocative descriptions). And since I try to hold myself to strict standards of scholarship, I don’t have the freedom to invent and embroider; I’ve got to find all of those details in the existing historical record—in sources like letters, memoirs, court transcripts, and newspaper reports of the time. If that kind of source material isn’t available in abundance, the idea won’t work for me, no matter how striking it may sound in summary.
Of course, when I first stumbled on the Laura Fair/A.P. Crittenden murder, I recognized it immediately as an extraordinary true-crime story: In November of 1870, a young, beautiful, and somewhat notorious woman (serial divorcée Laura Fair) fatally shoots her longtime adulterous lover (prominent lawyer A.P. Crittenden) while riding the public ferry between Oakland and San Francisco, right in front of the victim’s wife and children. The resulting court case made lurid headlines nationwide, eventually drawing into its orbit legendary figures like Susan B. Anthony and Mark Twain. Great story, right? But the question was: Could I find the source material I’d need to create an immersive and fully textured narrative?
The answer, fortunately, was yes. In fact, I found the richest supply of primary source material I’ve ever had in my entire writing career. Not only did I discover a full transcript of Laura Fair’s infamous trial, running to hundreds of pages of juicy testimony, I also unearthed a treasure trove of letters. There were intimate letters between Fair and Crittenden (included as evidence in the trial), heartbreaking letters between Crittenden and his wife Clara about their son’s death in the Civil War (in the University of Washington’s Digital Collections), and countless gossipy letters to and from various Crittendens discussing the family’s numerous woes (in the huge Crittenden Family Papers collection at the University of Michigan). In fact, I eventually had details on what my main characters were doing nearly every day at times. Most enlightening was comparing A.P.’s letters to his wife with those to his mistress—and discovering just how audaciously he was lying to both!
I hope that my access to this wealth of primary source material has resulted in a nonfiction book that—as the old saying goes—reads like a novel. As a former fiction writer, I know how important it is for readers to experience the places, personalities, and events of history in as direct and unmediated a way as possible. And for a narrative nonfiction writer, that means spending lots of time digging around in the archives for those all-important novelistic elements. Like the gold and silver mining I write about in the book, it may not be a glamorous task, but it can turn up treasures.
