Click here to listen to an James' interview with NPR's Cheryl Corley on Weekend All Things Considered, April 18, 2004. Or read from the transcript below.

CHERYL CORLEY, host: It was one of the most horrific urban disasters in history. Everything shook, buildings toppled and exploded, fires ravaged the city, looters came out in full force to pick clean damaged buildings, federal troops shot the looters and then made off with the spoils themselves. After the smoke cleared, corrupt politicians painted a rosy picture for the world, declaring a death toll less than 10 percent of the actual numbers. The day was April 18th, 1906; the city was San Francisco. The earthquake and resulting fire wiped out much of what was once called the Paris of the West.

Author and screenwriter James Dalessandro uses the disaster as a backdrop for his new novel, 1906. The book comes out today, marking the anniversary of San Francisco's near demise. James Dalessandro joins us from our New York bureau.

Welcome.

Mr. JAMES DALESSANDRO (Author, 1906): Thank you, Cheryl. It's a pleasure to be here.

CORLEY: Well, this is a historical novel, but, you know, you raise some interesting questions about the official version of what happened in San Francisco. Is this more revisionist history than it is fiction?

Mr. DALESSANDRO: What I wanted to do here was paint a portrait of the city that is no more—a really fascinating, complex, beautiful and frightening city—but also to correct the record. I realize that's ambitious for fiction, but the official record was so much fiction itself that it wasn't difficult to correct things.

CORLEY: Well, describe the devastation for us and what happened after the earthquake.

Mr. DALESSANDRO: It's almost impossible to imagine. Even San Franciscans are pretty much unaware of just how massive the devastation was. The earthquake itself—which was probably about an 8.2; there are various estimates—-tore a 300-mile path through Northern California, starting in Mendocino County and going all the way through Monterey. It rearranged the topography of Northern California. It leveled millions of trees, flipped railroad cars upside down, slammed buildings into each other. And the worst part of it was the fires, actually...

CORLEY: Mm-hmm.

Mr. DALESSANDRO: ...that started within seconds of the disaster. Statistically, 29,000 buildings, 87 percent of all the standing structures in the city of San Francisco, were destroyed and incinerated.

CORLEY: And it was also interesting the way they decided to fight the fire, as well. With dynamite?

Mr. DALESSANDRO: Well, that's part of the story that people are not quite aware of, and hopefully we'll change some of that. What happened was there were three main waterlines into the city of San Francisco from the Spring Valley water system. Two of them, unfortunately, ran directly above the San Andreas fault, and they ruptured as a result of the quake, leaving the Fire Department without water.

So the military and the National Guard troops and some firefighters—they resorted to the use of dynamite. Every time they blew up a building, it started several other fires and it spread the disaster rather than checking it. It was a debacle.

CORLEY: And there was also this proclamation, this infamous proclamation, too, by the mayor about shooting and killing looters, as well, right?

Mr. DALESSANDRO: Eugene Schmitz, the mayor—one of the first things he did was issue a proclamation that said the federal troops, the National Guard, the citizens police—they gave badges and guns to a thousand citizens. If you were a friend of anyone at City Hall, you could get a badge and a gun and you could go out and shoot anybody that you suspected of looting. And in some instances, there were people who might have been carrying their own goods out of their own houses and their own stores, and it was just wholesale shoot anyone.

CORLEY: It sounds like it was utter chaos.

Mr. DALESSANDRO: Chaos, I guess, can't even begin to describe it.

CORLEY: Well, your protagonist in 1906 is a reporter, a crusading female reporter. Did you want her to just help set the record straight here?

Mr. DALESSANDRO: I created Annalisa Passarelli in 1906 because I like to tell rather macho stories from a feminine perspective. I don't believe there are enough good female protagonists or enough good female voices in either fiction or film.

CORLEY: Hear, hear.

Mr. DALESSANDRO: Yeah. Well, thank you. And I felt that she was an interesting character. San Francisco was one of the suffragist, feminist capitals of the United States at that time. And basically, she is a 23-year-old UC-Berkeley, University of California-Berkeley graduate who wanted to become a muckraking journalist. Fremont Older, the editor of the Evening Bulletin, was the man who was dedicated to eradicating the rampant graft and corruption in San Francisco. So when my fictional character, Annalisa Passarelli, tried to join his crusade, he told her, `Well, this is a distinctly male occupation'—muckraking and investigative journalism—and he hired her as the opera and theater critic. Well, lo and behold, she's sitting in the opera box with all the people who controlled San Francisco, and she becomes the secret informant, sort of the hub at the wheel of the entire story, and she tries to help bring down the bad guys.

Most people are unaware that in April of 1906, the greatest corruption probe in American history was under way. The mayor and political boss, Abe Ruef, and all 18 members of the Board of Supervisors found out on the morning of April 17th, the day before the earthquake, that their arrest on massive corruption was inevitable. It was a plot that was actually hatched at the White House with the backing of President Theodore Roosevelt, and it was an attempt by the federal government to break the back of political bosses to control every aspect of life in American cities.

CORLEY: Mr. Dalessandro, you mention a couple of your references, but what other source material did you use for the history in this novel?

Mr. DALESSANDRO: Well, one of the things I did was—there's a historian named Malcolm Barker who had collected thousands of letters from survivors. And I read lots of those letters, and it really, really gave you an understanding of the horror and also the heroism of people there. And one of the turning points was reading about the great Italian tenor Enrico Caruso, who was probably the Elvis Presley of his era, and how he had performed the part of Don Jose in "Carmen" five hours before the earthquake hit.

CORLEY: Well, there's a scene near the end of the book where, as the city burns, Caruso sings an aria from "La Boheme." And describe that for us a little bit.

Mr. DALESSANDRO: What happened was Caruso was staying at the famous Palace Hotel in San Francisco. And when his conductor, Alfred Hertz, found Caruso, he was quite distraught over the experience. And his first concern—Enrico Caruso's first concern—was for his voice. And Caruso was frightened and intimidated. And Hertz took him to the window and said, `Enrico, please, try your voice. Sing out the window.' And Caruso sang from the window of the Palace Hotel overlooking Market Street, the biggest thoroughfare in San Francisco. And there were many people running down the street trying to escape who heard Caruso sing and who stopped and looked upward. Many observers stated later that Caruso performed this heroic act to calm the hysterical crowds. In fact...

CORLEY: So this is true?

Mr. DALESSANDRO: It is true. I'm convinced from my research that Caruso actually sang three different times; once in Golden Gate Park, and the first time that morning from his window at the Palace Hotel. And that he really was not trying to calm the hysterical crowds; he was, at the time, actually just testing his voice out. But again, it's one of those fabulous parts of the story that has evolved into myth and continues to be part of the fabric of this extraordinary story.

(Soundbite of "Che Gelida Manina" )

Mr. ENRICO CARUSO: (Singing in Italian)

CORLEY: And that was Enrico Caruso, singing "Che Gelida Manina" from "La Boheme" in February of 1906, before the actual earthquake happened in San Francisco.

James Dalessandro is the author of the novel 1906. He joined us from NPR's New York bureau.
Thank you so much.

Mr. DALESSANDRO: Thank you, Cheryl. It's been a pleasure.

(Soundbite of "Che Gelida Manina")

Mr. CARUSO: (Singing in Italian)

CORLEY: For more on the great San Francisco earthquake and fires, go to our Web site at npr.org.