My mom, Jackie Calhoun, moved to San Francisco in 1945 when she was 11 years old and was a San Francisco Chronicle reader for most of her life. She's been gone for far too long now but she'd be floored to know she's been mentioned in the Sunday Datebook. Known affectionately in the Bay Area as "The Pink Section" for its pink pages (now only the cover is pink-hued), the Sunday Datebook is a big deal for any kind of Bay Area entertainment buff whether you're looking for the scoop on upcoming operas, what to read, or Summer superhero blockbusters. It's the part of the paper that I looked forward to reading ever since I was nine and mostly looking for anything and everything about Star Wars.
If you're in the S.F. Bay Area, please go out and pick up a paper, but if you can't get to one, click here for Peter Hartlaub's profile of me, and how finding out that my mom was a murder suspect led to The Murders That Made Us.
The online version of the article includes a link to Hartlaub's Total SF podcast where we talk Bay Area crime, history and local TV hucksters over sourdough burgers at Red's Java House.
MTMU has also received a stellar review by Jesyka Traynor in True Crime Index. "While reading The Murders that Made Us, I felt as though I was sitting across from Calhoun, a native San Franciscan, as he told me all he knew about the Northern California crime world," Traynor writes.
"There are as many insightful and provocative moments in Calhoun’s book as there are humorous and sarcastic ones. This is a balance not easily or often struck within the genre of true crime, and it makes Calhoun’s book a stand-out in the genre," she concludes.
Traynor is working on her dissertation on California literature, so I'm really happy she liked the book.
Click here to check it out.
--BC