When Murray Hall died in 1901, he left no words that would be shared with the world. No writing survives in which the New York bailbondsman, brawler, womaniser, gambler and politico, tells his own story.

But in the months after his body was examined and swiftly announced dead of breast cancer and declared a woman, countless columns of newsprint were spun out of the ‘mystery’.

The sensationalist press of the time carried headlines like, ‘Known as a Man for Sixty Years, She Died a Woman’ and ‘The Mystery of New York’s Man-Woman’.

His life was written and rewritten, in a story that provided scandal and entertainment for New York and beyond. Even now, in Scotland, over a century later, we are telling it - this time in the form of a novel, heavily based on the newspaper articles of the time.

Over the past few years, in researching the novel Murray Hall with my co-writer, Milo Clenshaw, I have spent many hours trawling through the newspaper testimonies of Hall’s friends and acquaintances and following a trail of speculation that leads back to Scotland.

Two sets of eyes, those of a 27-year-old trans man (Milo), and of a 54-year-old cis woman (me), have peered at the same life, as we tried to pick our way through the multitude of stories and shape them into something based around the fictional narrative of a journalist investigating his story.

Murray’s life certainly was colourful. A small man, often dressed in an over-sized coat and straw hat, sometimes wielding a threatening blackthorn cane, he had been married, possibly twice, perhaps three times. He was also known to have “whipped a policeman”, drank, smoked, played a mean hand of poker, and proved himself in the shady world of Tammany Hall politics. He even, as headlines declared with some shock, “voted”.

But also, Hall appears to have inhabited a household of women, including wife, Celia, and adopted daughter Minnie Hall. Tales of his marriage are not always pretty.

Interviews with his wife’s sister, Ellen Elba Hobbs revealed that he was abusive, threatening and controlling, exerting some kind of “power” over her.

Remarkably few acquaintances or loved ones seemed to express any suspicion that he was a woman. Daughter Minnie, for instance, refused at an inquest to refer to him as she.

One of the things that makes him so hard to fathom is that contradictory tales were told about his past and background, many of them presumably generated by him. Was he a ‘forty-niner’ who had sought his fortune in the California goldrush? Or a Scottish nobleman in pursuit of a lost fortune?

Nevertheless, one story became key in determining how Murray’s life would be understood, and it was broken by the New York World. The source, an elderly Scottish former nurse, Mrs. Canning, revealed that she believed Murray Hall was originally John Campbell, a person who had been at the centre of a similar scandal thirty years previously in Scotland.

Campbell, an itinerant worker, who had moved around the central belt working on farms, on railway construction, and a shipbuilder’s forge. Shifting between Govan, Duddingston, Paisley and Kirknewton (where he was married to a woman with two children), took ill in 1871 when Scotland was in the grip of a smallpox epidemic.

He caught the disease from his landlady for whom he had been caring, and when the doctor was summoned, he was told he must go straight to hospital. He refused, prompting the doctor’s question, ‘‘Was it because of sex?”

Campbell answered in the affirmative, and what followed, including the publication of his story in the UK press (so Mrs. Canning’s testimony went) was what drove him to emigrate to the “land of promise”.

I have no idea if these two really were the same (and a lot of doubts), but what matters, in terms of our book, was that many thought they were. Nor do I think there is much we can say with certainty about what Murray’s own feelings were about what we might now call his gender.

As Milo, in his postscript to our novel puts it: “There are many reasons why Hall might have lived as he did, the two most obvious being that he was transgender, or that he saw and understood the privileges men enjoyed and wanted to access them himself. It is possible that both were true.”

For myself, I do believe that he was trans, or at least genderqueer, because I can’t imagine someone committing so fully to a life that didn’t truly reflect who they were. But that’s just more conjecture – if there is an objective truth to the story of Murray Hall, we haven’t found it. ■

Vicky Allan

Info: Murray Hall by Milo Allan is published by Black & White £16.99