San Francisco, 1898 A city divided by wealth, vice and fear A murder crying out for justice: Jack London and Murder on Nob Hill by Ray M. Schultze Book Tour with Guest Post & Author QnA
Across 1898 San Francisco, Jack’s search for clarity leads into areas where disappearances and rivalries intersect with established patterns of control. Chinatown’s compact streets reveal small but telling discrepancies—signs of operations built on quiet influence rather than public authority. A woman with ties to these internal structures deepens the ambiguity surrounding the crime, shaping the direction of Jack’s investigation. As he observes how various interests align or conflict, he encounters players whose control depends on removing events from collective memory. His pursuit reflects the broader dynamics shaping how truth is managed throughout the city.
Ray M. Schultze is the author of six novels, five of them works of suspense—The Last Safe Place, Combustion, The Devil in Dreamland, Decatur’s Dig, and Beranek’s Stand. His most recent novel, Russian River, is historical fiction. His interest in writing began in childhood with a handmade, folded-paper “magazine” that his mother encouraged. After graduating from the University of California at Riverside, he pursued newspaper reporting as a practical way to support himself while writing fiction. Over a twenty-five-year career, he covered politics, the legal system, and education for newspapers in California, Florida, and Arizona. When he turned to fiction full-time, he drew inspiration from authors such as Alan Furst and Ken Follett. Ray now lives in Santa Rosa, California, with his wife, Judi. They enjoy tennis, hiking, exploring the region’s beaches and headlands, and international travel—experiences that often shape his novels’ settings. He is also an award-winning woodworking artist. Visit him at his website.
Amazon: https://bit.ly/48AI8UB
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/244308185-jack-london-and-murder-on-nob-hill
Publisher: Ray M. Schultze
Publication date: December 2, 2025
Genre(s): Mystery, murder mystery, historical fiction, historical mystery, literary fiction, biographical fiction
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.”
But after downing a few whiskeys, Jack ferried across the bay and took to the trough at a
Outside, the night had turned cold and the fog had arrived with a vengeance, its amorphous fingers probing every alley, courtyard and crevice. Jack looked wildly around him and fought the disorientation. Over his pounding heart, he listened. In the distance: the soft clatter of feet on cobblestones. He chased the sound.
Jack had no idea where he was, what he was running toward. He chased the sound like a magnet seeking out a slag heap of metal. Shops flashed by him in a blur. He stumbled occasionally on the uneven cobbles but kept going. Thankfully, few people were on the streets.
As he careened into a side street, he lost the sound. The lane ended in two alleys that split off in different directions. He stopped and bent over, his hands on his knees bracing him as his breath came in ragged bursts. Slowly, the thumping of his heart eased, and he peered around. Which alley? Left or right? He waited for his instincts to come to his aid. They didn’t. He felt too weary to even guess.
Then he heard a dog’s vicious bark. To the left!
He ran on.
Twenty yards in, the alley opened into a larger space, like a courtyard, dimly lit by light pouring from the windows of adjacent buildings. Jack realized he was in a dead-end.
On one side, the dog—big, with a shaggy coat—was continuing to bark. It had gotten tangled up in some ropes, and it strained against them. Still, the dog was single-mindedly focused on the opposite side, where a pyramid of barrels towered. Jack moved to the center and waited.
Moments later, a blocky shadow floated from behind the barrels. The hatchet man. He hefted a brick in his hand.
Jack tried to get his breathing under control. He said hoarsely, “You killed that helpless girl on Nob Hill, didn’t you? Why?”
The man said nothing. He seemed to be calculating his next move.
Jack said, “You know you’ll have to get through me.”
It was as if they were actors on a stage frozen in their roles. Seconds streamed by. The man made up his mind.
He launched himself on an angle away from Jack but then veered suddenly, swinging the brick toward Jack’s head. Jack had expected the feint and threw all his weight against the hurtling body, at the same time batting the arm holding the paver to one side. Jack drove him back against the barrels, which collapsed in a jumble. As the two men sprawled onto the pavement, one of the barrels rolled over Tan Lok’s arm, crushing it, and he wailed in pain. Once they had regained their footing, Jack sprang at him, punching him in the jaw and then the nose, which spurted blood. The man sank to his knees. Cursing in Chinese, he latched onto a barrel and flung it half-heartedly in Jack’s direction. Jack dodged it, retreating several feet.
The highbinder struggled to his feet but remained stooped, laboring to breathe. Blood poured from his nose, spattering the carnation’s scattered petals. Jack could see that the fight was over. A moment later, as if in confirmation, the man waved his arms in front of him in a gesture of exhaustion.
Shaky though he was, Jack felt a jolt of exhilaration.
Abruptly, Tan Lok shuddered as two bullets pounded into his chest. He staggered a step or two and fell face first onto the cobbles.
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!
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…
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