Ambrose Bierce - San Francisco Noir 2 - The Classics

The press of people pushed him against the window so that the glass creaked.

And then thirty more, from generations hence, came through the door, and pushed their way in. The window glass protested. The newcomers pushed, vaguely and sullenly, toward the window. The glass cracked — and shrieked once.

Only the glass shrieked. Ash, though, was silent, as he was heaved through the shattering glass and out the window, down into the air shaft, and into the innermost reality of the city.

Ambrose Bierce(1842–1914) was a journalist and satirist who contributed to and edited a number of newspapers, including the San Francisco News Letter, the Californian , and the Wasp . His best-known works include the scathing collection The Devil’s Dictionary and the short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” which has been adapted into film, radio broadcasts, and teleplays.

Craig Clevengerwas born in Dallas, Texas and currently lives in San Francisco. He is the author of two novels, The Contortionist’s Handbook and Dermaphoria , and is currently working on his third. He can be found at www.craigclevenger.com.

Janet Dawsoncreated Oakland, California private investigator Jeri Howard, who has sleuthed her way through nine novels. Jeri’s first case, Kindred Crimes, won the St. Martin’s Press/Private Eye Writers of America contest for Best First Private Eye Novel, and earned Shamus, Macavity, and Anthony award nominations as well. Her short story “Voice Mail,” in the collection Scam and Eggs, won a Macavity Award. Another story, “Slayer Statute,” received a Shamus Award nomination. She works at the Institute of Urban and Regional Development at the University of California, Berkeley.

Fletcher Flora(1914–1968) wrote over sixty mystery and noir stories for major crime publications such as Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine . He also wrote sixteen novels and coauthored many more, including Hildegarde Withers Makes the Scene, a crime novel about the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco.

Joe Gores,a former San Francisco — based private investigator, is the author of dozens of screenplays, television scripts, biographies, short stories, and novels, including the acclaimed DKA detective series. A Northern California resident, he has won three Edgar Awards and Japan’s Maltese Falcon Award.

Don Herronis best known for leading the Dashiell Hammett Tour in San Francisco since 1977, giving him a long working acquaintance with the city of the 1920s and hardboiled stories pounded out for publication in the pulp magazine Black Mask . He is the author of various books, including The Literary World of San Francisco & Its Environs and Willeford, a survey of the life and times of cult noir author Charles Willeford.

Jack London(1876–1916), a San Francisco native, is best known today for his adventure novel The Call of the Wild and his pro-socialist dystopia The Iron Heel . But during his lifetime his greatest successes were his prolific short fiction, many of which are set in the Bay Area.

Peter Maravelishas had a lifelong involvement in the world of arts and letters. For over twenty years, he has been a bookseller and events producer. He is currently the events director at City Lights Bookstore. He was born and raised in San Francisco, where he currently lives.

Seth Morgan(1949–1990) published only one novel, Homeboy (1990), which won him high critical praise in many cities including San Francisco, where the work is set. The novel’s preoccupation with heroin addicts and convicts perhaps best captures Morgan’s own troubled life of drugs and crime. He won the PEN essay contest for convicts while incarcerated for armed robbery in the mid 1970s.

Marcia Muller, a native of the Detroit area, has authored thirty-five novels, three of them in collaboration with her husband Bill Pronzini; seven short story collections; and numerous nonfiction articles. Together she and Pronzini have edited a dozen anthologies and a nonfiction book on the mystery genre. The Mulzinis, as friends call them, live in Sonoma County, California, in a house full of books.

Frank Norris(1870–1902) was born in Chicago and moved to San Francisco at the age of fourteen. After attending Berkeley and Harvard, Norris embarked on an expansive writing career as a news correspondent in South Africa, an editorial assistant for the San Francisco Wave, and a war correspondent for McClure’s Magazine during the Spanish — American War in 1898. Heavily influenced by French naturalism, Norris’s most notable work, McTeague (1899), explores the life and trials of a dentist at the dawn of twentieth-century America in the city of San Francisco. McTeague has also been captured in different film versions and as an opera. His other works include The Octopus: A Story of California (1901) and The Pit (1903).

Oscar Peñarandaleft the Philippines at the age of twelve. He spent his adolescent years in Vancouver, Canada, and then moved to San Francisco at the age of seventeen. His stories, poems, and essays have been anthologized both nationally and internationally. He is the author of Full Deck (Jokers Playing), a collection of poetry, and Seasons by the Bay, an award-winning story collection.

Bill Pronzinihas published seventy novels, including three in collaboration with his wife, novelist Marcia Muller, and thirty-three in his popular Nameless Detective Series. He is also the author of four nonfiction books, twenty collections of short stories, and scores of uncollected stories, articles, essays, and book reviews; additionally, he has edited and coedited numerous anthologies. His work has been translated into eighteen languages and published in nearly thirty countries. In 2008 he was named a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master, the organization’s highest award. He has also received three Shamus Awards, the Lifetime Achievement Award (presented in 1987) from the Private Eye Writers of America, and six Edgar Award nominations.

John Shirleyis the author of numerous novels, including Cellars, Wetbones, City Come A-Walkin’, Eclipse, A Splendid Chaos, and, most recently, The Other End . He was coscreenwriter of the film The Crow, and his recent novel Demons is in development as a movie at the Weinstein Company.

Mark Twain(1835–1910), born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, is among the finest contributors to the canon of American literature. He began to gain fame when his story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” appeared in the New York Saturday Press in 1865. His book The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) is widely considered the Great American Novel. Its predecessor, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), is also remarkable for Twain’s play with language and his attention to the innocence and imagination of childhood. Twain’s literary career evolved when he headed west for San Francisco. There he continued as a journalist, began lecturing and met his wife, Olivia Langdon.

William T. Vollmannwas born in Los Angeles in 1959 and attended Deep Springs College and Cornell University. He is the author of various books, including The Atlas (winner of the 1997 PEN Center West Award), You Bright and Risen Angels, The Rainbow Stories, and a series of novels entitled Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes . In addition, Vollmann’s works of nonfiction include An Afghanistan Picture Show and Rising Up and Rising Down, a seven-volume treatise on violence that was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2003. His journalism and fiction have been published in the New Yorker, Esquire, Spin, Gear, and Granta . In 1999, the New Yorker named Vollmann “one of the twenty best writers in America under forty.” His most recent work, Riding Toward Everywhere, was published in 2008 to great critical acclaim. He lives in California with his wife and daughter.