Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades

From Library Journal
Tom Redmond, printer's assistant and would-be journalist for a satirical weekly, joins editor Ambrose Bierce in investigating a series of brutal prostitute murders in 1880s San Francisco. Initial conjecture and sleuthing establish links to a nouveau riche family of dubious integrity and the unethical and sometimes violent owners of the railroad monopoly. Quips from the misogynistic Bierce, naive observations from Redmond, and snippets of information about local history and real characters should stir reader demand. Hall, the author of some 20 novels, including Separations (LJ 6/1/97), is best known for his Westerns. Highly recommended.Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Hall does more here than blend fact with fiction to tell an entertaining tale. He conducts a writing seminar as well. Hall effectively uses a young reporter who works for Ambrose Bierce to narrate the story, and he opens each chapter with an excerpt from Bierce's Devil's Dictionary. He paints word pictures of his characters and gives life to San Francisco in the late 1800s and the mining camps of even earlier days. It all begins when a Jack the Ripper type, known as the Morton Street Slasher, starts butchering young women, leaving a spade playing card with each naked or partially naked body. For reporter Tom Redmond, who fears for the safety of a particular young woman, it is a major mystery. For Bierce, it is an opportunity to continue his war on the mining and railroad monarchs along with the bought-and-paid-for politicians of the day. This is as much a historical novel as it is a mystery, and Hall's portrayal of Bierce, the woman-hating, crusading journalist, is flawless. Budd Arthur

From Kirkus Reviews
The veteran author of such high-spirited realistic romances as The Bad Lands (1978), among others, moves in on Caleb Carr's territory with this colorful historical picaresque. Halls agreeable hero (and narrator) is 20ish Tom Redmond, an ``apprentice journalist'' working (in the early 1800s) for a San Francisco ``satirical weekly'' (The Hornet) who's the wary protg of celebrated writer and misanthrope Ambrose Bierce. Tom's education moves into overdrive when Bierce's interest is piqued by a series of vicious murders of women, whose bodies are left decorated by playing cards (all spades). The cub reporter's tentative research leads to the discovery of a complex stock fraud that pointsdespite Bierce's antimonopolistic suspicions (he believes the Southern Pacific Railroad guilty of everything)to a mysterious cooperative: ``the Society of Spades in Virginia City [Nevada], which was convened in order to purchase the Jack of Spades Mine.'' But that's only the beginning, in a beautifully paced thriller that also involves senatorial duplicity, a high-profile divorce, a bizarre case of concealed parentage that must have Wilkie Collins spinning in his grave with envy, and such deliciously devious supporting characters as procuress (and reported black magician) Mammy Pleasant, suspicious Chief of Detectives Isaiah Pusey, and ``Highgrade Carrie'' Stearns, ``the Miners' Angel'' (in more than one sense). Tom weathers all the storms more than manfullyeven if it seems he'll never win the plucky Amelia Brittain. And Hall has the admirable good sense to surrender generous swatches of the narrative to ``Bitter Bierce,'' who declares himself ``the sworn enemy of piffle,'' not to mention Southern Pacific, organized religion, ``femininnies, and mogul eland $tanford, among numerous others. And how can you dislike a curmudgeon capable of such invective as ``This murderer's adiposity is casting a shadow on my eggs that I fear will turn them rancid? Superlative entertainment. Has Oakley Hall really been this good all along, and if so why isn't his fiction better known? -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Book Description
When the Morton Street Slasher leaves the corpses of his victims on the tangled gaslit streets near San Francisco's Union Square, he marks each body with a playing card. Ambrose "Bitter" Bierce, the city's famed newspaperman, immediately blames the rash of murders on his sworn enemies, the Southern Pacific Railway magnates. Bierce and his young protege at the Hornet, Tom Redmond, set out to solve the case, uncovering conspiracy and corruption at every turn.

Smart, funny, and compulsively readable, Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades is more than a simple murder mystery. Like Caleb Carr's The Alienist and E. L. Doctorow's The Waterworks, it exposes the sordid underbelly of Gilded Age America.

"Hall conjures up a wonderfully yeasty San Francisco in the 1870s. . . . The dialogue and detail are sung with perfect pitch."-- Chicago Tribune

"Oakley Hall is a novelist who never seems to make a wrong move. . . . He is a writer to read again and again."-- Richard Ford

"One of the country's finest writers"(Robert Stone)


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Hall is a novelist who never seems to make a wrong move. . . . He is a writer to read and read again. — Richard Ford


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