Murray Hall is a historical fiction novel by Milo Allan. It was first published in April 2025 by Black & White Publishing. This review is intended to be free of spoilers, but none of us are perfect. Consider yourself warned! I have also included a historical context section at the end of this review. Because this novel is based on a real person, I have put this section at the bottom of the page, after the affiliate links, so that those who do not wish to read the historical context for fear of spoilers can avoid it.
A review copy was provided by the publisher. There are affiliate links at the end of this review.
Blurb
He kept his secret for a lifetime. Now the truth will rock New York.
It is 1901, and Dr Gallagher has just pronounced Murray Hall dead. New York politico, gambler, womaniser – Hall is all these things, but when the newspapers break the news of his death to the world, they reveal a side to his identity he never wanted known, a secret no one could have guessed.
Sam Clellan, an ambitious young journalist, is determined to uncover the truth of Hall’s past, but his search leads him down winding alleys of fact and fiction. From humble beginnings in Glasgow’s tenements to a life spent rubbing up against New York’s political elite, Murray Hall is the definition of a self-made man. But the higher his status rises, the higher the stakes become.
Inspired by a true story of one Scot’s rise to prominence, Murray Hall unearths a queer past erased by history, finally bringing all the puzzle pieces together to discover the secret of this extraordinary, ordinary man, which shocked New York, America and the world.
Review
In Murray Hall, Milo Allan crafts a novel that feels like a whispered confession passed through time; one that lingers long after the final page. Set against the gaslit backdrop of turn-of-the-century New York, this historical fiction unearths the extraordinary life of a man who defied the rigid binaries of his era, not with rebellion, but with quiet, persistent presence.
Allan’s prose is elegant and restrained, allowing the story’s emotional weight to emerge organically. We learn of the titular Hall, a political operator, gambler, and social chameleon whose death in 1901 reveals a secret that shocks the city and rewrites the narrative of his life. But this is no sensationalist tale. Instead, Allan invites us into the intimate spaces between public persona and private truth, where identity is not declared, but lived, and where courage often wears the mask of ordinary routine.
What makes Murray Hall so compelling is its refusal to flatten its subject into a symbol. Hall is rendered with complexity and contradiction: a man of ambition and tenderness, of secrets and sincerity. The novel’s structure – part investigative journalism, part character study – mirrors the fragmented way we uncover truth, piece by piece, through memory, myth, and the stories others tell about us.
There’s a subtle brilliance in how Allan handles the novel’s central revelation. Rather than framing it as a twist (really, we know the conclusion, but enjoy the journey to it), it becomes a lens through which every preceding moment is reinterpreted. The result is a narrative that feels both timeless and timely, resonating with contemporary conversations about gender, authenticity, and the cost of invisibility.
It’s in the character Joe Young’s smoky reflection, “Ah’d say Murray was one who lost a few lives along the way. So be it. Lives are made to be lost,” that the soul of Murray Hall flickers most vividly. Milo Allan lingers here, not for sentimentality, but to let this line echo like a gambler’s maxim or an epitaph scribbled on the back of a playing card. The card room scene is less about a game than a séance, each deal peeling back layers of memory and myth. Hall’s life, as Joe tells it, wasn’t a single, linear tale but a shuffled deck of selves; played, folded, reshuffled. In this moment, identity becomes an act of survival and reinvention, and the novel quietly insists: the lives we lose say as much about us as the ones we live.
Murray Hall is not just a novel about a man who lived a hidden life, it’s a meditation on the lives we all construct, the masks we wear, and the truths we bury beneath them. It’s a story that asks us to look again, to listen more closely, and to honour the quiet revolutions that unfold in the margins of history.
Rating: 4/5
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Historical Context (Potential Spoilers)
Murray Hall was a real person; a New York City bail bondsman and Tammany Hall political operative in the late 19th century. Born in Govan, Scotland, in 1841 as Mary Anderson, Hall began living as a man in his teens and emigrated to the United States, where he built a life that defied the rigid gender norms of the time.
In an era when women were denied the right to vote, own property freely, or participate in politics, Hall not only voted but thrived in the smoky backrooms of Tammany Hall, one of the most powerful political machines in American history. His death in 1901 from breast cancer revealed a truth that stunned the public: Hall had been assigned female at birth. The revelation sparked a media frenzy, with headlines oscillating between scandal and reluctant admiration.
What makes Hall’s story so compelling is not just the secret he kept, but the life he lived. He was known as a hard-drinking, poker-playing, politically savvy man who moved easily among New York’s elite. His ability to navigate (and succeed in) a world that would have excluded him had his assigned gender been known speaks volumes about both his personal resilience and the social constraints of the time.
By embedding this context into the novel, Milo Allan doesn’t just tell a story; he resurrects a moment in history when identity was both a survival strategy and a quiet act of rebellion. The novel becomes a bridge between past and present, inviting readers to reflect on how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go.
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