A True Account of Love, Murder, and Madness in Gilded-Age San Francisco
Starred review from January 6, 2025
In this masterful work of true crime, Krist (The Mirage Factory) wraps a detailed portrait of a booming late-19th-century San Francisco around an engrossing account of a scandalous murder. In 1870, a woman named Laura Fair shot her lover, prominent attorney A.P. Crittenden, aboard a ferry from Oakland to San Francisco. Krist begins the narrative with a retelling of the murder from Fair’s perspective. Crittenden was on the boat with his wife, Clara, whom he’d been promising to divorce for seven years; fed up with his lies, Fair shot him through the heart. The narrative then rewinds to recount the lives of Fair and Crittenden before the killing and to illustrate the social climate of San Francisco, which had recently grown from a “raucous and untamed frontier town” into the nation’s 14th-largest city. With residents and city leaders aspiring to more growth and greater sophistication, Fair’s actions came under intense scrutiny, prompting the prosecution to call for the death penalty. Krist recreates Fair’s two trials—she was eventually acquitted on grounds of temporary insanity—with meticulous research and a novelist’s flair for drama. This top-shelf blend of history and entertainment is as edifying as it is exciting. Agent: Eric Simonoff, WME.
Starred review from March 15, 2025
A tale of mad love, murder, and the rough-and-tumble mores of early San Francisco. Krist, known for histories that hang on crimes and catastrophes, here turns to the booming Gold Rush era in San Francisco. His protagonist is the somewhat hapless Alexander Parker Crittenden, who, after graduating from West Point and deciding that army life wasn't for him, drifted west to California and, in an inspired moment, immediately won a seat in the new state legislature by a walloping 258 votes. He accomplished little apart from writing a law "banning court testimony by persons of African or Native American descent involving a white defendant." That he'd left a young wife and six children behind didn't cramp his freewheeling bachelor ways. Eventually they reunited, and he made and lost fortunes as a lawyer and speculator for the next two decades. He also acquired a lover along the way who, for reasons that Krist explores, did him in. Of her trial, Krist writes, clergy sermonized, editorialists chided, and civic leaders urged that "for a city eagerly trying to establish its name as a mature, orderly, and law--abiding place, the kind of violence and depravity exemplified by Laura Fair's crime demanded the severest punishment." Into this courtroom procedural, with its wealth of juicy revelations (not least that one of Crittenden's sons was also smitten by Fair), Krist brings in other storylines that touch on racial justice and injustice, Victorian-era ideas of propriety and impropriety, and the effects of a boom-and-bust economy on the people who flocked to San Francisco to seek fortunes and often to reinvent themselves. A bonus is the presence of Mark Twain, who wove Fair's murder trial into his 1873 novelThe Gilded Age, several years after; as a newspaper breathlessly reported, he had been seen walking down a city street under the influence of "Hasheesh." A lively, richly detailed social history that ably brings together many narrative strands.
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