author
Edward H. Hurlbut
1880–1954
A San Francisco newspaperman who turned city reporting into brisk detective fiction, he wrote stories steeped in the police rooms, politics, and street life of the early twentieth century. His best-known book, Lanagan, Amateur Detective, blends newsroom savvy with crime-solving energy.
1 Audiobook
Lanagan, Amateur Detective
by Edward H. Hurlbut
About the author
Edward H. Hurlbut was an American journalist and fiction writer active in San Francisco in the early 1900s. Sources from LibriVox and later historical research describe him as a newspaperman, and a Stanford record connected with Law and Order in San Francisco identifies him in publicity work tied to civic reform efforts.
He is best remembered for Lanagan, Amateur Detective (1913), a collection of detective stories centered on a San Francisco police reporter. The book stands out for its local color and for the way it draws on the everyday knowledge of a reporter moving between police headquarters, politics, and the city streets.
Although he is not widely known today, Hurlbut's work offers a vivid glimpse of San Francisco crime writing before the hard-boiled era fully took hold. For audiobook listeners, he is an appealing rediscovery: a writer whose background in journalism gives his fiction a quick pace and a convincing feel for how stories, scandals, and investigations unfold.