Books by Herbert Asbury

This classic history of crime tells how the Chicago underworld earned - and kept - its notorious reputation, from the time it was settled to the Prohibition days of the 1920s.

Herbert Asbury, author of The Gangs of New York and The Gangs of Chicago, turns his attention to chronicle the seedy underworld of San Francisco, from its gold-rush glories to its subterranean opium dens. San Francisco's historic past is here brought to life in all its scintillating and infamous glory.

The Gangs of New York is a tour through a now unrecognisable city of abysmal poverty and habitual violence centred around the infamous slum of Five Points, with its rival Irish and American gangs.

Home to the notorious 'Blue Book', which listed the names and addresses of every prostitute living in the city, New Orleans's infamous red-light district gained a reputation as one of the most raucous in the world.