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Hunt for the Killer
San Francisco Focus
"HERE'S WHERE THEY DUMPED Tim's body after they finished cutting off the head, arms, and legs," says San Francisco author David Hunt, enthusiastically pointing to a dumpster in an alley off of Polk Street. A band of tourists walking nearby overhear and look alarmed-perhaps wishing they'd stayed at Fisherman's Wharf.
Tim is actually a character in Hunt's new book, The Magician's Tale, which recently made news by earning its author a $1 million advance from Putnam. Hunt, better known in crime-fiction circles as awardwinning author Bill Bayer, is taking me on a walking tour of sites that appear in The Magician's Tale, a murder mystery cum travelogue that winds in and out of San Francisco neighborhoods.
The novel centers around Kay Farrow, a nocturnal photographer who is at home among both street hustlers and high society. Nearly blind by day, Kay sees the city clearly by night, often through the eyepiece of a telescope perched in her apartment. When one of her photographic subjects is savagely murdered, she puts her highly trained senses to work in search of his killer.
Like Kay, Hunt is a compulsive observer and recorder. Next to a row of books in his Russian Hill aerie sit a pocket camera, binoculars, a night-vision scope, and a telescope that points due east from his apartment. "There," says Hunt, squinting through the eyepiece, "that's the judge's house, just the way I describe it. "While the judge, a shadowy figure whom Kay compulsively watches through her telescope, lives only in Hunt's book, the house is real and solid- an elegant modern home whose residents are probably unaware that a novelist has been writing them into his work.
Hunt takes me next through nearby Sterling Park, a serene midcity oasis of trees and terraces, where Kay befriends a skittish homeless man who becomes her protector. We walk down a steep hill toward the abandoned Francisco Street reservoir, a gloomy area that is the setting of the book's climactic scene. "That reservoir is deep and dangerous- the wooden cover is probably a hundred years old and rotten," says Hunt. We climb back up Hyde Street, and Hunt, a midwestern native, muses about the city he now calls home. "I love walking in San Francisco. If you go to North Beach, to Chinatown, you see all sorts of human passions, expressions, ways that human beings connect to each other."
Hunt and I drive to Polk Gulch, the decadent gay mecca that attracts many of the novel's characters. Hunt seems disappointed that the more flamboyant residents aren't out yet. "Three-thirty on a Wednesday afternoon, nobody's here-another ten hours and this place will be alive."
Next, we stop at Telegraph Hill for an upclose look at the judge's house. I mention the voyeuristic twinge I experienced while peering at the house through Hunt's telescope. Hunt nods. "There are a lot of people who have telescopes here, and they're not all using them to look at the ships in the bay. I have this terrible feeling that one day I'll be up there looking, and I'll see someone else looking right back at me." -Richard Foss
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