Volume 41, No. 3, Fall 2025
Buy this back issue! Available in hardcopy or as a downloadable PDF.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ARTICLES
- The Campanile Murders: A Lost Berkeley Mystery by Randal S. Brandt
AUTHOR! AUTHOR!
- From Lake Tahoe to the Napa Valley by Rachele Baker
- Embedding Northern California with Murder, Mayhem, and Crime by Susan Alice Bickford
- Highway 49 Revisited by Taffy Cannon
- My NorCal Mystery Escapes by Kate Carlisle
- Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay by Glenda Carroll
- Sam Spade Returns by Mark Coggins
- Silicon Valley Will Always Be the Valley of Heart’s Delight to Me by Ron Cook
- Infinite Variety and Inspiration by Janet Dawson
- You Live Where? by Maddie Day
- We Had One Once, but She Died by Michele Drier
- Indigenous Voices Calling by June Gillam
- Meredith Ryan Women’s Mystery Series by Thonie Hevron
- “Why Is a Rock Band like a Writing Desk?” by Claire Johnson
- Santa Cruz: Home to Linguine with Clam Sauce, Avocado Toast… and Murder by Leslie Karst
- Whose Humboldt County Is It, Anyway? by Maria Kelson
- Why Sacramento? by James L’Etoile
- Just a Small Town Duck… by Claudia Long
- The Many Faces of NorCal by Marcia Muller
- How the Screaming Got Started on Northern California’s Quietest Street by Christopher Null
- A San Francisco Tale—Bop City Swing by M.E. Proctor
- The Cities of San Francisco by Lev AC Rosen
- The Noble Grape by Diane Schaffer
- Creating Justice Bay by Patricia Smiley
- Humboldt County: Prohibition, Dinosaurs and a Thousand-Year Flood by Kelli Stanley
- Death, I Said: A Charlie Chan Mystery by John Swann
- Is It Pelican Point… or Bodega Bay? by Penny Warner
- Real Life to Reel Life NorCal Mysteries by William P. Wood
COLUMNS
- Mystery in Retrospect: Reviews, by LJ Roberts and Lucinda Surber
- Children’s Hour: Northern California Mysteries by Gay Toltl Kinman
- Real Crime in Northern California by Cathy Pickens
- From the Editor’s Desk by Janet A. Rudolph
Highway 49 Revisited
by Taffy Cannon
The gold in them thar hills turned out to be the least of the surprises when I visited California’s Gold Rush Country to research Murder Pans Out, the second in my Lynne Montgomery Booked for Travel series, originally credited to Emily Toll.
I found this part of northern California essentially unchanged from a hundred and fifty years earlier, when forty-niners raced cross-country and around Cape Horn to the area where gold had been accidentally discovered at Sutter’s Mill on the American River. The towns remained small and quaint, the highways twisting and serene, the hotels funky and historical, and the river water icy. Some areas had been turned into historical monuments, others into modest tourist traps, and some, like Chinese Camp, were essentially ruins.
The Gold Rush came at a time when San Francisco, the nearest port, was tiny and California a faraway backwater. This all transformed as folks headed for the gold fields however they could get there, the sooner the better. Many original settlers arrived at or below the poverty level. Their lives changed.
Everything changed dramatically and irrevocably with the Gold Rush.
While forty-niners waded in frigid inland rivers, entrepreneurs built enterprises to support them and San Francisco exploded from a town of 500. Unsuccessful gold panners turned to agriculture in the fertile lands surrounding the area’s rivers. Other hustlers took care of the legal machinations that led to California statehood in 1850. And plenty of folks eventually went back home, as empty-handed as when they’d arrived.
This history fascinated me. It was not a subject touched on much in my history courses in the Chicago public schools, Except for those guys standing in the river swirling big metal pans.The Gold Rush itself moved through different iterations. California had few rules, resulting in a lot of making-it-up-on-the-fly; we’re still good at this in the Golden State. The staking of claims, for example, was initially messy, but developed quickly to provide order. Lawlessness was rampant; we’re also still good at that.
Actual mining evolved from the initial river panning everybody visualizes when you mention the Gold Rush. A placer system came next, where waters were channeled downhill through wooden sluices, leaving behind the heavier gold particles. When that system no longer worked, mining went into full-on environmental destruction and started to blow up the mountains.
With water.
Dams blocked mountainous rivers, then fed them into giant hoses called monitors. These blasted away hills and mountains, sending muddy water and lots of destroyed countryside flowing downhill toward the ocean.
Some of the damage created oddly beautiful locations such as Malakoff Diggins, now a historical district with blue lakes and rock walls layered in a style reminiscent of Bryce Canyon. The world’s first long distance telephone line served this mine, though when I visited, there was no cell phone reception.
Meanwhile, San Francisco Bay was filling with silt at the rate of a foot a year. Debris and flooding buried some towns, devastated agriculture, and caused so much damage that it led to the first environmental regulation in the country. We’re still very good at this one.
This vast, once-distant area had become known around the world as the Golden State, no further identifier needed. And “Gold Rush” may be history’s most wonderful period name.
This backdrop and the relative isolation of the current area provided significant challenges in plotting and casting Murder Pans Out, but in the end everything came together beautifully. A group of Southern California school teachers solved one murder, prevented another, captured some outlaws, thwarted munitions smugglers, and had a lot of fun—all while moving toward a home-grown attempted murder.
I had a fancy new big publisher, which insisted that my original title, Highway 49 Revisited, be changed. I loved that title. It was perfect. But naming the book for the gentle road that still winds north and south through this beautiful country was considered too contemporary, too Dylanesque, too challenging for modern mystery readers.
And so the book became Murder Pans Out.
Taffy Cannon’s Mysterious Travels books cover all corners of the US. She’s the author of California Crime stand-alones and the Nan Robinson State Bar series. Her first novel, Convictions: A Novel of the Sixties, has just been reissued and is a timely reflection of contemporary political issues.
Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay
by Glenda Carroll
When I first came to California, I knew little about the State except what the movies told me—sun, beaches, surfing and glamorous stars. I didn’t understand that there was an enormous difference between Southern California and where I landed… Northern California, the San Francisco Bay Area, to be precise. But all it took was spending one summer in San Francisco to realize that I wasn’t where I thought I was. Instead of broiling sun at the beaches, I found chilly fog. Instead of tropical warm breezes, wind whipped down the steep hills blowing newspapers and candy wrappers into the sky. I stayed bundled up in a puffy jacket and warm ankle boots; my flipflops and shorts stashed at the bottom of my closet. I understood from the depth of my chilled body the quote that is attributed to Mark Twain, “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.” (BTW, he never said it.)
It took a few years before I appreciated where I lived. I didn’t understand how much the beauty of Northern California—its redwoods, mountains, crashing coastal waves and rolling fog—had seeped into my identity until I launched into writing my Trisha Carson mystery series. Without realizing it, I made the surroundings another character in my book.
My mysteries have a current of water running through them. I can find floating bodies anywhere in the Bay area… in San Francisco Bay, the Sierra Lakes or at the Marin shoreline. For example, in Better Off Dead, the fourth mystery in the series, a successful financier training in the chilly waters of San Francisco Bay for an open water swim is run over by his support boat. A grisly accident. Do I swim in San Francisco Bay? Yes, I do. Have I trained for open water races? Many times. But I’ve never been run over by a boat. (Thank you, thank you, thank you.) However, I do know of swimmers who have lost limbs because of careless boaters.
I’m one of those authors who writes about what she knows. Maybe my sense of imagination isn’t up to par with those who can create new and strange worlds. I’m stuck in the real world and that includes where I swim, what I’ve experienced and where I live. For example, the first book in the series, Dead in the Water, begins with something I observed at Whiskeytown Lake outside of Redding, California, about three hours north of San Francisco. Two open water swims were taking place that day, a two-mile swim and a one-mile. I was the Pacific Masters Open Water Chair, and it was my job to make sure there were safety personnel on land and in the water, the course was well marked and that everyone who got into the water got out. In the one-mile race I witnessed a male swimmer make an abrupt turn towards shore on the last leg, stagger out and collapse. In the two-mile race, I stood by the finish line while a man jogged beneath the arch, leaned over, hands on knees and exclaimed that he didn’t feel well. Both men died. It was something I never forgot and that event (loosely) became the opening scene in Dead in the Water.
Besides intimate knowledge of the water since I’ve raced sailboats, surfed and swam, my on-land surroundings became just as ingrained. The protagonist, Trisha Carson, frequently glances at the towering redwoods off her bedroom patio and watches the sun drift through the branches until it splatters across the trail beneath her house. Or she witnesses dusk turning to darkness on Mt. Tamalpais, a section of the Northern California Coast Range, and imagines the Pacific Ocean on the side of the small mountain, much as I do.
Like most residents of the Bay area, especially those not far from the ocean, Trisha often deals with fog. At times, a wall of dull solid grey fog completely erases the horizon and bleeds into the sky. Or whiteish tumbling fog dips down the hills of Sausalito. She’s watched as a layer of heavy damp fog rolled over the ballpark of the San Francisco Giants, swallowing up the players, turning them into ghosts.
Then there is the fog on the Golden Gate Bridge. From book three, Dead Code, Trisha is on her way from Marin County to Oracle Park and her seasonal job with the San Francisco Giants.
Traffic inched across the Golden Gate Bridge in thick summer fog. Sometimes I could see the cars around me; thirty seconds later, they disappeared into the greyness. Foghorns blared their deep two-toned alarms. The gloom was so thick I could hold it in my hand.
Trisha, like most of us who have lived somewhere for a long time, doesn’t see— really see—her surroundings. Because of that, I emphasized her extended environment to the point that it became a secondary character in the series. I don’t think she appreciates the uniqueness of where she grew up and has come back to live after a short stay in Colorado. But as her creator, I’ll make sure that every now and then, she stops solving crimes, looks up, gazes around her and appreciates the beauty of her hometown.
Author’s note: Soul singer Otis Redding started writing “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” while he stayed on a rented houseboat in Sausalito in 1967.
Glenda Carroll is the author of the amateur sleuth Trisha Carson mysteries set in the beautiful San Francisco Bay area. The fourth book in the series, Better Off Dead, came out in Spring 2025. Glenda spends more time swimming than writing. She also tutors first generation, low-income high school students in English and History. She lives in Northern California with her dog, McCovey.
Why Sacramento?
by James L’Etoile
Why did I set a mystery series in Sacramento? That very question came up during a Bouchercon panel a few years ago, and it’s come up again. Admittedly, Sacramento doesn’t have the same panache as Paris, London, or New York. The Northern California city doesn’t even have the glitz of Hollywood, a few hundred miles to the south. So, why choose Sacramento as a setting? What does it have to offer?
Crime. Sacramento has a long history of crime within the city. What more could a crime fiction author want? It goes much deeper than common street crime. There’s a historical connection to lawbreakers in the city, going back to the heady, anything-goes, Gold Rush days.
Sacramento accepted crime and violence as a given in this new territory. In 1850, sex worker Ida Brewer allegedly stabbed and killed another prostitute who poached one of Ida’s clients. She was acquitted after a jury trial because, as legend has it, the “Johns” were reluctant to come forward. She went on to kill one of her Johns a few years later. This time she was convicted, and the town fathers were reluctant to hang a woman, so she was released after paying a fine and asked politely to leave town.
A few miles to the west, Folsom Prison was established in the 1880s to manage the growing number of violent offenders who followed the gold rush and transcontinental railroad boom. Nearly a hundred men and women were executed by hanging at Folsom, and many who worked behind those old prison walls with me swore they saw and felt the energy of those lost souls. The imposing granite edifice and iron gates greeted Johnny Cash in 1968, and the prison continues to hold legendary status and attracts thousands of visitors annually—some involuntarily…
With every breath the city took to expand beyond its colorful history, mystery came along as a reminder that a price comes with prosperity and freedom. Sacramento’s ability to survive also allowed darker elements of the criminal culture to prey upon the innocent in the Sacramento region. Notorious serial killers—the I-5 Strangler, The Vampire of Sacramento, the Unabomber, Juan Corona, Dorothea Puente, Morris Solomon, and the recently unmasked Golden State Killer, Joseph DeAngelo Jr. hunted in the city’s streets. There are reports that as many as 15% of the nation’s serial killers have a connection to Sacramento.
Sacramento is the state’s capital, and it wasn’t the first choice. If memory serves, it was fifth choice as the permanent seat of government. And with government comes corruption and backroom deals. Three state senators were convicted of racketeering after they were found to have exchanged their votes for campaign contributions. Mafia crime families took root in the city after fleeing the east coast. Tales of fraud, influence peddling, and the occasional body discovery were common on the evening news.
Government operations in a state capitol requires a massive workforce to support the political beast. With elections, recalls, and term limits, the new cadres of legislators, their staff, and the state workforce to keep the machine moving regularly change. New faces in a town that thrives on anonymity. No one really knows one another. What a great place to work if you’re a criminal. No one knows whether you’re supposed to be in the city or not.
So, why do I write stories set in Sacramento? The answer is the place is ready-made for crime fiction. In Face of Greed, my detective Emily Hunter responds to a home invasion gone horribly wrong. The homeowner is murdered, and he was a political power broker in the city with secrets… secrets worth killing for.
In River of Lies, Emily chases down an arsonist who is burning down the city’s homeless camps. The city’s former anti-homeless mayor is found in the ashes. Even the homeless have something that somebody wants.
Coming January 2026, Emily returns with Illusion of Truth, a story that begins with a church bombing and a city council member blaming the police for the uptick in violence.
Doesn’t seem like “fiction,” does it? So, come and join me on a crime fiction tour of the city. Lock your doors and windows, folks. Things go bump in the night in Sacramento…
James L’Etoile uses his twenty-nine years behind bars as an influence in his award-winning novels, short stories, and screenplays. He is a former associate warden in a maximum-security prison, a hostage negotiator, and director of California’s state parole system. His novels have been shortlisted or awarded the Lefty, Anthony, Macavity, Silver Falchion, and the Public Safety Writers Award. River of Lies and Sins of the Father are his most recent novels. Look for Illusion of Truth coming in 2026.
Buy this back issue! Available in hardcopy or as a downloadable PDF.