Jack London and Murder on Nob Hill Blog Tour
A killing erased from the record anchors
the start of JACK LONDON AND MURDER ON NOB HILL by Ray M. Schultze, where Jack
London becomes the lone witness to an event no one else will claim occurred.
In 1898 San Francisco, Jack’s attempt to
report the murder is met with silence, pushing him into areas where
disappearances and rivalries intersect beneath daily life. Chinatown’s
alleyways reveal networks shaped by shifting loyalties and contested influence.
A woman tied to these hidden dynamics deepens both the uncertainty and the
significance of what he uncovers. As Jack follows each uneven thread, he
confronts individuals whose authority depends on steering information away from
public view.
Ray M. Schultze is the author of six
novels, including works of suspense and historical fiction. A former newspaper
reporter for outlets in California, Florida, and Arizona, he later shifted to
writing fiction inspired by authors such as Alan Furst and Ken Follett. He
lives in Santa Rosa, California, with his wife, Judi, and enjoys tennis,
hiking, coastal exploration, and international travel—experiences that often
influence his stories. Visit him at raymschultze.com.
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WHY JACK LONDON?
A better question might be, why wouldn’t any
author thirst to make Jack London a character in their novel?
At the peak of his short writing career, Jack
was a rock star of his time, his fame spreading well beyond America. He was a
larger-than-life figure whose personal exploits fascinated the public just as
much as his novels and short stories entertained it. By the age of 22, he had
tramped from California to New York, prospected for gold in the Yukon, sailed
the Pacific to Japan, pirated oysters in San Francisco Bay, slaved in factories
canning fish and shoveling coal, and earned some notoriety as “the boy Socialist
of Oakland.”
He was brilliant and arrogant, but he brimmed
with compassion for his fellow man, and his friends were legion. At 22, he was
still unknown except for his political activities, and he struggled mightily to
get his writing published.
To me, the thought of capturing him at that
moment of despair and confronting him fictionally with a moral dilemma—how
would he react if he stumbled upon a murder, a murder that the police swept
under the rug?—was irresistible. The frosting on this cake was his time and
place: San Francisco in 1898 was far different than we know it as today.
The city practiced a brash capitalism in which
laborers toiled long hours in pitiful conditions for meager wages, and the
Chinese inhabitants were viciously discriminated against. They were bottled up
in the enclave known as Chinatown, where vice thrived as the murderous rival
gangs called the tongs sowed fear. What a fertile field for a novelist!
Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
San Francisco
Fall, 1898
Jack London was drunk.
Ingloriously, outrageously, irredeemably drunk.
It had been a long time since he had been so demolished.
This was the day he committed himself to make up for lost time. It was a clear,
moonlit evening, the city’s gaslights blazing, but his disorientation was so
intense that for all he knew he could have been wrapped mummy-like in the fog.
At the age of twenty-two, he had been drunk innumerable
times in innumerable places. One could fairly say he had earned an advanced
degree in inebriation at the school of John Barleycorn. Truth be told, he had
never cared for the taste of liquor, but that was hardly the point. He cradled
the glass to grease the wheels of camaraderie or to establish his manly
credentials among hard-drinking men. And if not that, to ameliorate the bouts
of depression he was prone to or simply to escape the hardships of growing up
poor and being forced to become a work beast from a very early age. This day,
he was intent on doing a deep dive, swimming down into the current of
forgetfulness, stealing a glimpse of oblivion, even while knowing that it was a
transitory experience, that he must at some point rise back up and burst
painfully onto the surface. With his head pounding and body wracked, he would
once again have to face the reminders of failure: the stream of rejection
letters, the dashed-off notes declaring his writing unfit for public
consumption.
Had these editors embraced so much hackwork that they could
no longer discern honest, robust writing? Did
they really favor gross sentimentality over impassioned realism? Yes, he was of
a raw age, but he knew he had experienced more of the world—and discovered more
of its truth—than many men over a lifetime. He had slaved in the factories,
processing jute, canning fish, shoveling coal. He had pirated oysters along the
bay before switching sides to enforce the marine law. He had ridden the rails
west to east, seen the fat Iowa farm country, marveled at Niagara Falls in the
moonlight, endured the living hell of jail as a convicted vagrant and walked
the slums of New York City. He had braved the Pacific on a seal hunter,
stepping ashore in Japan. And he had met the ultimate physical and mental
challenges prospecting for gold in the unforgiving wilderness of the Yukon.
Yet these smug literary gatekeepers kept themselves
cloistered in their offices, stooping to consider the supplications of someone
they surely regarded as a lesser mortal. Would they care to know how hard Jack
had labored since returning from the goldfields in midsummer, how he had
disciplined himself to sleep no more than five and a half hours a night and
chained himself to the writing desk except for brief meals and the occasional
odd job? How he had churned out short stories, essays, poems, even jokes, any
kind of writing he could think of, desperate to make the handful of dollars
that would allow him a decent living and help support the family? No, of course
they wouldn’t care. He would have taken soulful satisfaction in reaching out,
grabbing them by the lapels and shaking them until their brains rattled. Since
that was not feasible, he had sought solace in the bottle.
Where the hell am I?
That’s the existential question, isn’t it? There was nothing more
existential than struggling to put one foot in front of the other, to keep from
falling down and possibly being trampled by the carefree souls out for an
evening of entertainment or being kicked or robbed by those malevolent ones looking
for a sadistic thrill or profit. He took a tiny measure of relief in realizing
he was staggering along the sidewalk and not in the street where a
horse-and-carriage might thunder over him, pounding him into the cobblestones. So,
where? Washington Street? Montgomery? Likely one or the other, since he had
just tried to gain admission to the Bank Exchange Saloon, with its crystal
chandeliers, marble embellishments and elegant oil paintings. It wasn’t really his
sort of place—too refined, too welcoming to the lawyers and well-heeled
capitalists that he disdained. But he fancied invading it just for amusement’s
sake. Not surprisingly, the saloonkeeper ejected him. Just as well, he told
himself, since the taste of the bar’s renowned Pisco Punch would have been lost
on him.
He had begun his odyssey in late afternoon at his favorite
watering-hole, Heinold’s First and Last Chance Saloon, which teetered on
pilings on the Oakland waterfront, not far from his home.
“What’s up with you, Jack?” asked Johnny Heinold, who was
used to seeing him huddling with a dictionary at a side table rather than
elbow-bent at the bar. “You got writer’s block?”
Writer’s block? Jack had to
laugh. The spigot of his creativity was gushing. The problem was, the magazines
and newspapers weren’t thirsty for it. “No, just need something to warm the
blood in my veins after writing about all those freezing nights in the
Klondike.”
Interview With The Author:
What are the hazards of fictionalizing a
real person?
The thought that you might be guilty of libel
plays on your mind, which is a good reason to choose as a subject someone who’s
been dead for at least a century! I fictionalized Bogart in one of my novels,
and I sweated that one because he’s so iconic. You really feel the pressure of
getting the personality down right. The last thing you want is some expert on
the man telling you that you got it all wrong. Arrggg.
How do you come up with your ideas for
novels?
Because I’m an independent author trying to
seduce the major publishing houses, I’m always on the lookout for what the
industry calls “high concept” stories—basically ones based on an outrageous or
over-the-top premise like the idea of the writer Jack London getting involved
in a murder investigation. Seriously?
When do you get your best ideas for
writing?
Sometimes when I’m half-awake in the middle of
the night or just rousing myself in the morning. Sometimes entire lines of
dialogue pop into my head and I try to write them down before I drift off
again.
You’ve written some international
thrillers. Do you try to visit the setting when it’s a far-away place?
It’s a must for me. You can research your
heart out on, say, Portugal or Austria, and probably uncover every detail your
story needs—except for the intangible feel of a place. The only exception I
made was my novel Beranek’s Stand, set in Iran. I chickened out on that
one.
If you could time-travel, where would you
go?
The bronze-age city-state of Knossos, on the
island of Crete. It was the first sophisticated urban civilization of Europe,
and the Minoans produced magnificent art and gloried in nature. By coincidence,
Knossos happens to be the setting of my next novel…
My Review:
I went into this with a very skeptical viewpoint, but I really loved the cover. That was enough of a reason for me to give this book a chance. If I'm being honest, I'm not a Jack London fan. However, I haven't really given the author a chance either. This book has made me want to give his books a chance and read about his life.
This author has an incredible writing style that keeps us as the reader intrigued and wanting to turn the page every time! I fully recommend this book. Even if you aren't a fan of Jack London. Trust me.
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