Fogtown

One foggy day in San Francisco brings together bloody ghosts, a dandyish thug, capricious cops, a suicidal punk rocker, a hyperliterate slumlord, and a sweet old lady sent by God to hand out cash from a hijacked armored car. In Fogtown, Peter Plate uses a loving hand to carve his characters out of hallucination, perversity, and tenacity. Plate's noir sensibility gives him special fluency with the weary souls of urban America's down and out; Fogtown describes a new age unmistakably built on the twentieth century of Nelson Algren and Charles Bukowski.“If Restif had transmuted his peripatetic Parisian musings into suspense fiction, the result might well have resembled Peter Plate's muckraking, gritty take on the fellahin-strewn streets of Fogtown.” –Barry Gifford, author of Wild at Heart


“[Plate's] San Francisco is a fiery hell, where the devil rides in a squad car, and God doesn't deign to put in an appearance.” –San Francisco ChronicleNamed a Literary Laureate of San Francisco in 2004, PETER PLATE taught himself to write fiction during eight years spent squatting in abandoned buildings. He is the author of many novels, beginning with Black Wheel of Anger (1990) and continuing through his seven neo-noir "psychic histories" of San Francisco, where he still lives and writes today.