news of Oakley Hall's latest novel

[Doug Millison]

from PW Daily for Booksellers, 4 Jan 99:

On West Coast, Queen of Spades Is King

Spades have always been a symbol of bad luck in cards, but they're
proving to be a sign of good fortune for University of California Press.
Its November release Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of  Spades--a
historical mystery by veteran writer Oakley M. Hall that features a serial
murderer who leaves behind a card in that suit on the body of each victim
has sold well enough over the holiday season to put the book on both the
San Francisco Chronicle and Northern California Independent Booksellers
Association bestseller lists. The book's initial 7500 copy printing has sold
out, and current advance orders total 3,000, which will take up most of the
just-off-the-press 3,500-copy second printing.

Since the novel is set in late-19th century San Francisco and features
the real but very mysterious California writer Bierce, UC Press director
Jim Clark originally acquired it for the house's California fiction reprint
series.

"But then we realized we didn't have a reprint; it was an original novel,
so we had a naked novel out there on our list," said Clark. UC's
marketing department decided to pull it out of the series and give
it a separate push complete with a larger-than-typical advance readers
copy mailing. Inadvertently the book has become the first original novel
published by the house in its 103-year-history.

Sales so far have been, as one would suspect, mostly regional, thanks
to its subject matter, and fueled also by Hall's connections within the
California writing community (he heads up the esteemed Squaw Valley
Community of Writers, which meets every summer,). But UC is starting to
see reviews of the book in other regions, including Seattle and Chicago,
as well as interest from  both specialty and general bookstores nationwide,
particularly given comparison of the book to Caleb Carr's bestselling
historical mystery The Alienist in reviews.

The book is also bringing about a nice renaissance for 78-year-old Hall,
a prolific novelist perhaps best known for the Pulitzer-Prize-nominated
western Warlock (Viking, 1958) that became a Richard Widmark/Henry
Fonda/Anthony Quinn classic, and ski expose The Downhill Racers
(Viking, 1963), which was adapted as Downhill Racer with Robert
Redford. Hall has published with practically every major New York
trade house since his 1949 debut, but published his last new novel
with the University of Nevada Press, which has also done some reprints
of past work. But thanks to the success of Queen of Spades, a New York
trade house just might be in the cards for Hall's future.  To date, four
publishers, watching the sales spike, have called UC interested in acquiring
paperback reprint rights.--Judy Quinn



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