The Spook Lights Affair

Authors’ Note

The historical background in these pages is genuine. Adolph Sutro was mayor of San Francisco in 1895, resided on the clifftop estate called Sutro Heights, and had financed the construction of Cliff House and Sutro Baths; Carville-by-the-Sea was a budding oceanside enclave, though destined to be short-lived; the Barbary Coast and Uptown Tenderloin districts flourished as the city’s lower- and upper-class seats of sin; Theo Durrant, “the Demon of the Belfry,” did in fact murder and mutilate two young women whose bodies were found in the Emanuel Baptist Church in the spring of 1895, for which crimes he was hanged three years later.

It should be noted, however, that for story purposes, small but necessary liberties were taken with certain geographical and descriptive details and time elements. The world of fiction is like those that might be found in parallel or alternate universes: people, places, and events past and present are almost but not quite identical to those in the world we inhabit.

M.M. / B.P.