The Magnificent Rogues of San Francisco - Book Review

Recently, I published my latest novel, Bodacious Creed: a Steampunk Zombie Western. It takes place in 1876, in an alternate Santa Cruz, California. Most of the sequel is going to take place in San Francisco.

I want to capture the spirit of The City—as people were calling San Francisco back then, and as many still do—and I found The Magnificent Rogues of San Francisco by Charles Adams. This seemed the perfect place to start, a book that could give a history of The City and some of its most infamous citizens. This book did not disappoint, and now I can use some of the most notorious rogues of San Francisco as characters in my next book.

The Magnificent Rogues of San Francisco contains four parts: PART I Early Rogues, covering about 1850 to 1875, PART II Later Rogues, covering about 1875 to 1900, PART III Twentieth-Century Rogues, covering from 1900 to about 1925, and PART IV Probably Not the Last Rogues, covering 1925 through about the 1950s, though the final historical personage, Sally Stanford, lived until 1982.

What makes a rogue? A good portion of the people examined in this book were outright sociopathic criminals. Shanghai Kelly kidnapped men who came to his saloon and sold them to ship captains as sailors. Little Pete ran the Chinatown mob. Mammy Pleasant manipulated and murdered people to get what she wanted. Abe Ruef made it rich by putting his cronies into high political positions and charging big businesses for favorable votes.

Others were extreme nonconformists. James Lick was an eccentric who had a glorious hotel built. It crumbled in the 1906 earthquake. He also founded Lick Observatory and made sure that it had the best astronomical telescope in the world. Ambrose Bierce, a brilliant and handsome newspaper columnist, was a ladies man who upset many popular city figures with his sarcastic reviews of their behavior, and eventually went to Mexico and was never heard from again. You may know him as the author of The Devil’s Dictionary.

The book covers many others. In addition to illustrating the adventures and foibles of these noteworthy men and women, Charles Adams gives a good overview of San Francisco history and how dangerous life could be there in the city’s early years. I look forward to weaving in some of the offbeat people I learned about here into my next novel.

Whether you're a writer doing research, a lover of American history, or you just want an enjoyable and often surprising read, I recommend The Magnificent Rogues of San Francisco. I loved it.