Black fire : the true story of the original Tom Sawyer--and of the mysterious fires that baptized Gold Rush-era San Francisco / written and illustrated by Robert Graysmith.

First biography of the little-known real-life Tom Sawyer (a friend of Mark Twain during his brief tenure as a California newspaper reporter), told through a harrowing account of Sawyer's involvement in the hunt for a serial arsonist who terrorized mid-nineteenth century San Francisco.