Gary Krist has mastered the remarkable craft of painting nonfiction portraits of cities—New Orleans, Chicago, L.A.—through intricate and expansive profiles of their more fascinating inhabitants. His last book, The Mirage Factory, presented L.A. with the help of controversial film director D.W. Griffith, infamous aqueduct engineer William Mulholland, and celebrity evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. His latest, Trespassers at the Golden Gate: A True Account of Love, Murder, and Madness in Gilded-Age San Francisco, showcases the enormous changes rending San Francisco from the gold rush to its centennial celebration in 1876.
The book is told through the lens of a virtually unknown adulterous couple: the married lawyer A.P. Crittenden and his mistress, Laura Fair. After decades of runaround, Fair eventually dispatched Crittenden with the aid of a Sharps pepperbox pistol.
I recently caught up with Krist, born, raised, educated (Princeton), and still living in New Jersey. We spoke over the phone, and he told me he was peering from a high-rise across the Hudson at New York City, the subject of his next book.
How did you discover these fascinating characters?
I knew I wanted to do a story about San Francisco after the Los Angeles book, but it [had to transpire] earlier because of the gold rush. I was looking around for somebody who came very early and stayed through the 100th anniversary of the founding of the city. I have this period where I’m just reading voraciously. I’m reading biographies. I’m reading general histories. I’m reading memoirs. And I came across this hurricane that really seemed to play into a lot of the social issues that were going on, not just in San Francisco, but in the whole country after the Civil War, about feminism and things like that.
You know, it was just an amazingly brazen crime, and it created this national media circus that involved people like Susan B. Anthony and Mark Twain.
At that point, what was still missing to tell your tale?
You can have the most interesting and relevant story, but the kind of book I write is very ground level: I have to have scenes. I have to have dialogue and stuff like that. And I can’t make that up, so I’ve got to find it in the historical record. And so, before deciding to tell this story, I have to find out how well-documented is it. And it turned out that it’s incredibly well-documented: I had more original documents than for any other book I’ve written.
What was the eureka moment, when you realized you could use these two people to tell your story?
I think it was when I started reading about the reactions that the rest of the country was having and how this became kind of a fulcrum of what was going on, not only in the country, but particularly in San Francisco. In 1870, San Francisco was very much trying to shed its early reputation from the gold rush days as this wild, socially chaotic, lawless place. And so here was their opportunity. They have this high-profile crime where this wanton woman slays her adulterous lover, and we’re going to show the world that we’re not that place anymore. We’re going to make an example of her.
When you were in the process of doing the research for the book, was it already obvious to you that this had become a kind of lightning rod, if you will, for the women’s independence movement?
There was so much interest from the suffragists, after the war—that was when we now know as the first wave of feminism. And I think [Fair] was made into a kind of icon. Obviously they wanted to be careful about not approving of what she did—murder—but they saw her as a figure of a powerful woman who did what she had to do, out of desperation in a world of mistreatment by men. So she was an imperfect icon. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton came out and interviewed her and talked to the press and said, This woman is being persecuted; she deserves to be tried in front of a jury of her peers.… But her jury is an all-male jury. So it really was a very early feminist case.
Certainly, in reading the book with a contemporary eye, it’s hard to imagine the verdict could have been anything other than she had been terribly abused.
With the [initial] guilty verdict, everybody from the New York Times to the San Francisco Chronicle was saying, Oh, everybody agrees with this verdict. Meanwhile, I was reading personal letters from people in other collections, saying, Oh, she was unfairly treated. So the newspapers were definitely pushing a line that was not really accurate. And I think there was a lot more sympathy for her, in the San Francisco populace, even the first time around.•
Tom Zito is a serial entrepreneur. He came to California to report a piece on startups for the New Yorker, but launched a company instead. In addition to the New Yorker, he has written for the Washington Post, Esquire, Rolling Stone, Playboy, Cosmopolitan, Life, Newsweek, and many other publications, and has started eight companies.
