Out of the Past

As a lifelong bibliophile with a special interest in reference books, I’m always delighted to find a useful one that I didn’t even know existed. Regular readers know that I’ve been working on a novel, The Big Boom, set in New Orleans of 1925 and featuring the characters from “Until the End of Days“ and “Hellhound”. It will surprise no one who has read more than a few examples of my work that I’m an absolute fiend for accuracy; anachronisms and other such errors really annoy me when I encounter them, so there’s absolutely no way I’m going to let them creep into my work if I can possibly avoid it. But once in a while, the fact one needs is far too obscure for the enshittified latter-day Google to turn up, and since there is no academic library nearby that can turn into a complicated search unless I want to rewrite that section of the story so as to avoid referencing unknown facts. Now, some of you may know that early 20th-century New Orleans had one of the most extensive networks of…