Gary Krist — Trespassers at the Golden Gate: A True Account of Love, Murder, and Madness in Gilded-Age San Francisco - with Margaret Talbot

Shortly before dusk on November 3, 1870, just as the ferryboat El Capitan was pulling away from its slip into San Francisco Bay, a woman clad in black emerged from the shadows and strode across the crowded deck. Reaching under her veil, she drew a small pistol and aimed it directly at a well-dressed man sitting quietly with his wife and children. The woman fired a single bullet into his chest. "I did it and I don't deny it," she said when arrested shortly thereafter. "He ruined both myself and my daughter."Though little remembered today, the trial of Laura D. Fair for the murder of her lover, A. P. Crittenden, made headlines nationwide. As bestselling author Gary Krist reveals, the operatic facts of the case--a woman strung along for years by a two-timing man, killing him in an alleged fit of madness--challenged an American populace still searching for moral consensus after the Civil War. The trial shone an early and uncomfortable spotlight on social issues like the role of women, the sanctity of the family, and the range of acceptable expressions of gender, while jolting the still-adolescent metropolis of 1870s San Francisco, a city eager to shed its rough-and-tumble Gold Rush-era reputation.Trespassers at the Golden Gate brings readers inside the untamed frontier town, a place where--for a brief period--otherwise marginalized communities found unique opportunities. Readers meet a secretly wealthy Black housekeeper, an enterprising Chinese brothel madam, and a French rabble-rouser who refused to dress in sufficiently "feminine" clothing--as well as familiar figures like Mark Twain and Susan B. Anthony, who become swept up in the drama of the Laura Fair affair.Krist, who previously brought New Orleans to vivid life in Empire of Sin and Chicago in City of Scoundrels, recounts this astonishing story and its surprisingly modern echoes in a rollicking narrative that probes what it all meant--both for a nation still scarred by war and for a city eager for the world stage.PURCHASE BOOK: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593444214?ic_referral=HqcUCIQvCNpn316GPHDNfJohWmH5jgLFyYaS40GZUc8wM5nOLCghC-lpKELO090xfAnxNLQieeeicsu_mQibMqqJ4cXVXgLrt9JrQJG95Z7YOaldPXqbHR2Vhnn_yMxKoxnEAQGary Krist is the author of four previous narrative nonfiction books The White Cascade, City of Scoundrels, Empire of Sin, and The Mirage Factory. He has also written three novels and two short story collections. A widely published journalist and book reviewer, Krist has been the recipient of the Stephen Crane Award, the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Lowell Thomas gold medal for travel journalism, a fiction fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Public Scholar grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.Krist is in conversation with Margaret Talbot. Talbot joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2004, writing Profiles and also dispatches and commentary on legal issues, cultural history, social movements, and indie music. She was one of the founding editors of Lingua Franca and was a senior fellow at New America. In 1999, she received a Whiting Award. Talbot is the author of The Entertainer: Movies, Magic, and My Father's Twentieth Century a history of twentieth-century entertainment told through the adventures of her actor father, Lyle Talbot. She also wrote, with her brother David Talbot, By the Light of Burning Dreams: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the Second American Revolution about left-wing activism in the nineteen-sixties and seventies. A native of Los Angeles, she now lives in Washington, D.C.*recorded 3/12/2025