Jack London wrote extensively about the Klondike gold rush of the late 1890s, not the earlier California gold rush centered on Sacramento — a mismatch Zhorik either doesn’t know or doesn’t care about while spinning his cover story. Incline Village, meanwhile, is a real, and real wealthy, unincorporated community on the Nevada shore of Lake Tahoe, long favored by the well-off for its lack of state income tax and its mountain scenery — a plausible-sounding destination for a supposedly ruined American businessman, even if nothing about the geography or the literary reference actually holds together on close inspection. The vagueness is the point: Zhorik is performing wealth and worldliness for an audience unlikely to check the details.
Jack London and Incline Village
