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LOST GOLD OF SAN FRANCISCO
by Michael Castleman
21st-century Publishing, March 2003
388 pages
$24.95
ISBN: 0972262415


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

It wasn't until after I finished reading this book that I realized "hey, what did happen to the gold?" The fact that I didn't notice (and cared a little but not too much) says something interesting about the book. I'm not sure it's deceptive -- nah, it's really not -- but the story the book did tell was compelling and interesting.

Castleman starts out in 1906, on the eve of the San Francisco earthquake. His focus is the Mint and a shipment of mis-struck coins that are due to be shipped out of town to the Denver mint. There is an enormous amount of gold in the building, $200 million, and the superintendent is worried; he wants the shipment out of his building, because there is no room for the extra 17 bags of gold coins. The military at the Presidio will take charge of the coins. Then the quake hits; chaos in the streets, obviously, worries everyone as does the chances of fire, the cattle stampeding down Market Street, looting, theft, aftershocks, you name it. A wagon guarded by several men is sent out to the Presidio, except one of the men is a thief, and a murderer who joined the Army to avoid a prison sentence. He ends up with the gold, hides it in the pandemonium and is lost to legend.

Move ahead to 1989; Ed Rosenberg, reporter for the San Francisco Foghorn (that's one of the few false notes in this book; no one would name a newspaper "the Foghorn"), and former coin collector is following a story about a rare coin collection his editor, mogul and rich man Gilchrist is donating to a museum. Gilchrist's son Chet appears at the newspaper; a friend of Rosenberg's, Chet had gone underground after some massive problems with heroin; in Alaska, under an assumed name, he'd won a Pulitzer and he's now back in California, trying to restart his life. In the next few days, the man responsible for the museum's acquisition of the collection is killed, and Chet disappears, after talking with someone about the legendary "lost gold". 

This is the first fiction from author Castleman, who has a background in factual, science and medical writing. He got the idea of the story, he says, by reading about a worker on a construction site who happened one day to pick up a gold coin during excavation work. He followed the thread well, with a good plot that is linked between the two major 20th century quakes in the Bay Area; the '06 event and the Loma Prieta quake, the "world series" earthquake of 1989. His story is good, it's solid and while I didn't totally buy the denouement, he sets it out well. The dialogue, I thought, needed work at times; the usual "trying to explain historical details" in conversation that often comes in a historical novel showed up a bit too often. And clearly, Castleman is a really good researcher who doesn't want to let go of any of his research; who would, the stuff's fascinating? But I got a bit bored with every mention of what was on the radio in September of 1989, just to add verisimilitude. The focus on the San Francisco Giants' "magic number' in getting to the World Series (and I know what that term means) was just endless and numbing after about the 10th time. And the final scene with the bad guy went on too long for me, where Rosenberg explains to the guy how he figured out who-dun-it.

It wasn't a straight-forward story all that time and that's good, because I think it might have been. The author uses setting well, I think, both the bay area setting and the north area in Lake Tahoe. I wanted to know what happened to Chet, I wanted to know how Rosenberg got there, and I wanted good to win out and evil to be caught and punished. Maybe that's simplistic - isn't that what we all want out of mysteries - but it's simply why this book worked well. The next one? With a little editing help, I think it could be a really good read. And maybe, just maybe, someone will actually find the lost gold of San Francisco. If not? That's okay too.

Reviewed by Andi Shechter, May 2003

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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