Oakley M. Hall Bücher

"When three beautiful young feminists come to San Francisco in 1892 to advocate suffrage for women and temperance for men, the burly city built by miners and railroad men offers them fierce resistance. Known as "The Trey of Pearls," the trio of chaste and pretty suffragettes align themselves with the church of the local super star preacher. But when their famous advocate, Reverend Devine, is found murdered, Ambrose Bierce and his indomitable sidekick Tom Redmond uncover a different kind of "liberation." To discover who killed Devine - and who is threatening the Pearls - Tom and Ambrose must navigate the heavy seas of free love, the politics of a minister's harem, and the secrets of California's rough and ready frontier past. As Tom gets closer to the truth, the murder count builds, and the tension erupts into a standoff between the Trey, a fraternity of saloon toughs, and, from somewhere in the shadows, the murderer."--BOOK JACKET.

In this compulsively readable mystery, the hero is the historical figure Ambrose Bierce, William Randolph Hearst's star reporter and San Francisco's most celebrated writer at the turn of the twentieth century. Bierce is asked to investigate the disappearance of a Hawaiian princess attached to the entourage of King Kalakaua, who is slowly dying in the Palace Hotel's Royal Suite. As Bierce and his prot&eacuteg&eacute, Tom Redmond, search for the missing princess, San Francisco plays host to a throng of Hawaiian royal courtiers and counselors embroiled in a swirl of political intrigue surrounding the successor to the throne. Intelligent, gripping, and often very funny, this wonderfully tangled tale of murder and mystery is sure to satisfy. "Oakley Hall has one of the finest prose styles around: tough, agile, but tinged with a sepia hint of gentlemanly elegance. It's a tool perfectly suited to bringing to life the San Francisco of the 1890s, at once gilded and rough hewn, brawling and refined." (Michael Chabon, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay")

Think of your fiction like a clock, a marvel of mainsprings and wheels, pinions and pendulums. It's an extraordinary organization of diverse elements, channeling energy and tension into the regular coordination of action and reaction, rotating gears and moving hands. Oakley Hall , writing teacher emeritus, invites you as his apprentice to study fiction's inner workings, the pegs and screws upon which a good story depends. You'll find the elements of fiction examined and illuminated, with insights into how they must interact to create a distinctive story. In sharing lessons taught by years of experience and by citing examples from dozens of esteemed writers, Hall makes working alongside a master thoroughly pleasurable, as well as an invaluable opportunity to craft fiction that is tuned like a precision timepiece.

A portrait of writer Ambrose Bierce and a glimpse of life in 1880s San Francisco mark a mystery in which newspaperman Tom Redmond investigates a series of murders of women, leading him to conspiracies involving the railroads and state politics. Reprint.