Category Archives: American history

Speaking

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I had the pleasure of speaking at two libraries over the weekend. I met with a group at the Florida Library (in New York) on Friday and spoke at a fundraiser in Cohoes on Sunday. (It is pronounced Co-hoes, accent on the second syllable).

This is one of my favorite things to do. I do talk about my books, but the best part is always engaging the audience. I enjoy answering the questions and finding out what readers think. And it is sometimes surprising. We might have a long conversation about American History. Usually we talk about the Shakers. Or both shipping and witches in Salem. I did not realize how many see Will Rees, my main character, as self-centered.

I also get suggestions, some of which I take.Always a pleasure for me to get out into the world.

Will Rees # 7 – Simply Dead

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The Shaker Murders has not even been released yet and already I am doing the edits on the next one. The crazy world of publishing!

The Shaker Murders will be published in the U.S. February 1. (It is coming out this month in the UK. Go figure.)

And now the next one, Simply Dead, is complete and will come out in the U.s. in 2020. This is also set in Maine, during the winter though, and involves the Shakers once again.

I am working on #8 which I have titled A Circle of Dead Girls. I have set it against an early traveling circus. More information to follow.

Stay tuned.

 

The Luddites

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A friend called me a Luddite the other day after a fit of yelling about computers.. (I am actually good with computers. But after my laptop crashed in June, I still haven’t gotten my finances straightened out. According to Quicken, I am $14,000 in the hole. Hence my rant about computers in general and online banking in particular.) But I digress.

The name-calling prompted me to research the Luddites. Yes, it was a real group – of weavers and other textile workers in the early nineteenth century. New weaving and spinning machines were coming into the factories.The owners said that the machines were more efficient – they probably were – and would make cloth cheaper – and they did. (The word ‘shoddy’ came into being shortly thereafter. Coincidence? I doubt it.)  The weavers were not opposed to the new machinery; that was not the issue. The problem was greed.

Weavers spent seven years in an apprenticeship before they could set up shop. Now they feared that the time and effort put into this craft was wasted. They had reason to worry. As the factory owners fired the men, they hired women and children, who they paid much less, to work instead.This was the beginning of six year olds working 14 hour days in a factory.

So the men protested. They blackened their faces and broke into the factories to destroy the new and expensive machinery. They purported to follow a fictional character called Ned Ludd(a stocking weaver) or another fictional personage King Ludd. Thus the name.

The British Government sided with the factory owners and made breaking machinery a capital crime. Soldiers were sent to quell the protests. A large number of men (both members of the protests and not) were swept up and accused of being Luddites. Those that were found guilty were either executed or transported. That ended the protests very quickly.

The situation was slightly different in the United States. The first textile factory came into  being in Massachusetts in 1814. Lowell, who had seen the textile machines in Great Britain, wanted to do the same in the U.S. (The city of Lowell is named for him.) He built his first factories beginning in 1816. But the  United States had a smaller population and there was not a large number of unemployed men so there was not the same labor pool. To solve the problem Lowell hired young women, who became known as mill girls, between the ages of 15 and 35. He of course paid them less than men. (To his credit, he chose not to employ children.) The mill girls were housed in company owned boarding houses, were strictly chaperoned and offered other ‘improving’ activities so the jobs had decent working conditions. This changed as the century wore on. The mill girls unionized, went out on strike a few times, and finally joined forces with another union.

Since my character,  Will Rees, is a weaver he is going to be affected by the increasing industrialization. In fact, will lose his profession in less than twenty years. He will be in his middle fifties by then, however, a fairly advanced age for the time, so he will have missed this huge change by only a few years.

 

Bouchercon and more

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I haven’t blogged for awhile. Quite awhile. We moved and moving absorbs all of your energy, psychic as well as physical. Now we are unpacking which is almost as bad.

The week, yes, one week after moving, we left for Bouchercon in Florida. This was another wonderful conference. St. Pete’s was actually cooler than New York! And a wonderful breeze off the water kept the air pleasant. The Vinoy hotel was magnificent. I love this chandelier in the Grand Ballroom. It was huge. It looks like glass snakes, doesn’t it?

chandelier

I attended several great panels. And, of course, I sat on a panel of my own. Jonathan Putnam (Lincoln and Speedwell mysteries) Christopher Huang ( a new author who writes about the 1920’s) Laura Anderson ( who writes about the Tudor Period). The panel was moderated by James Ziskin who writes the Elly Stone mysteries.

panel

I also had the opportunity to talk to several authors I admire besides those on my panel. I greatly enjoyed meeting R. J. Koreto who writes the Alice Roosevelt and Lady Frances Folks mysteries set in Edwardian times.

As usual, I came away with a long list of authors that I now have to read!

 

 

Of coroners and constables

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The positions of coroners and constables both came to the United States from Britain. Corner, the root of which comes from the same root as crown – think coronet – was set up in 1134 to certify the death of an individual within a jurisdiction. The position of constable was also an import but the word is much older. The stable part of constable is from the Latin for, you guessed it, stable so the word actually means the count of the stable.

The United States still uses ‘coroner’. Think Patricia Cornwall’s Kay Scarpetta. But the office, and the requirements for, vary widely by state even now. Some require a forensics speciality, some just a physician. Some are appointed, some are elected. I suspect the results and the opportunities for abuse also vary from state to state.

Anyone who watches British TV knows about constables and all the ranks within the generic title. But even in the United States the early constables had the duties and privileges of a low level law enforcement officer – they have the power to arrest for example. In the era of my character Will Rees, constables (and the watch) were the agents of the law. The constables were under a Sheriff but in Colonial and early Federalist times there were few of those. In the District of Maine (Maine was not a separate state then but was a part of Massachusetts) there was only one Sheriff.

There are still constables in the U.S. but the duties vary widely. What happened? Well, in 1829, when the British Metropolitan Police were established, the states in the U.S. gradually adopted the model of a police force. And police officers took over the duties formerly assigned to the constable.

The Shaker Murders

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After the events in A Devil’s Cold Dish, Rees and family return to the Shaker community of Zion seeking refuge. But Rees barely arrives when the body of a murdered Shaker Brother is found in the washtub. More murders quickly follow. Surely no Shaker could be the murderer!

I am happy to announce this sixth Will Rees mystery will be published by Severn House, coming out in the United States next spring (2019.) I just finished the edits on the ms and sent it off. The seventh book, working title Simply Dead, will be published the following spring (2020).

I am hard at work on the eighth.

When I have a finalized cover, I will post it.

New Will Rees books coming!

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I am excited and very happy to announce that two new Will Rees books have been accepted for publication. “The Shaker Murders”, Rees number 6, will be coming out next spring. Number 7, working title “Simply Dead” (Not crazy about it), will be after that.

I am working on the next Will Rees; “A Circle of Dead Girls” which is set against the beginnings of the circus in the new United States.

Let’s talk about money

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As I mentioned before in the previous post, at least my character Will Rees was used to money. Of course, in the early U.S., the people used French sous, Spanish pieces of eight, and British pence as well as the new coinage: the American dollar.

In the new series, in Bronze Age Crete, I am not sure how common money was.

No longer nomadic, the civilizations of the Middle East had settled homes where they grew food. Financial interchanges probably began with barter – but that must have taken some dickering. “I’ll give you a bracelet for so many bags of wheat” for example.

By the period of my new series, the civilizations did have metal – hence the name Bronze Age. Bronze is a mixture of tin and copper. I suspect, since they had metal, they had some form of coinage – or at least metal that was used as money. Was it per weight? Who knows.

Many many clay tablets have been found on Crete and of course where the great civilizations of Mesopotamia were located. Most of them are lists: lists of products or a name of a person who will pay so many pieces of silver. One theory suggests that writing began so as to keep track of money.

But we would probably not recognize the money. In some cases the money was based on measures of barley that is the shekel. As we might expect, gold was rare and valuable – but also heavy – so silver and electrum (a combination of gold and silver) were also used. Egypt used copper as money.

And with the trade that took place at this time, I expect Egyptian copper money, shekels and other coins were used as well.

True coins, by the way, were not created until around 600 BCE. A great leap forward because, if you have consistent coinage, the money offered does not have to be weighed every time a financial transaction too place. Of course gold and silver would have been good for valuable items such as a slave or a bull but what about food?Thousands of less valuable coins made of copper or bronze have been found at places like Athens where there were markets and shops.

There is a lot more history about money – the role of kings, banking, lending and interest and so forth – features we take for granted to day. Hard to believe it all had to be invented and is actually quite complicated.

Money, scissors and more

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Much research was and is required for the Will Rees mysteries. After all, they dressed differently, ate differently and mostly lived different. Most people then lived on farms. And, of course, there were no telephones, landlines or otherwise, no computers, no cars – the list goes on and on.

But as I research Bronze Age Crete for my next series, I realize how many things there are. Money, for example. Every Western country as well as China, India and more had money. Well, there was some money in the Bronze Age. In what is now Iraq and Iran, shekels were used. They were tied to a certain amount of barley. Consistent weights for gold and silver were beginning to be set up. But can I casually say my characters in Minoan Crete went to the market with their money and purchased something? No. Something must have been used; after all, Crete was the center of trade. Did they use a barter system or a combination of both? Obviously, more research is required.

I talked about needles in my last post. Well, let’s move on to scissors. Rees uses scissors and we would recognize them. Scissors were invented during the Bronze Age but they were not the scissors we know. More like two blades attached with a copper band.

And the people of Rees’s time period ate similarly to us. More meat heavy and certain vegetables were newish such as potatoes and tomatoes but we would recognize most of their food.  The Minoans ate differently. Sure, they ate lamb, seafood and goat, lentils and other pulses, grains such as barley and wheat. But did they consume dairy products? Had they learned to make cheese? So far, although there are competing theories, no one seems to know.

And did they eat beef? The bull was sacred to them. The Classical Greeks sacrificed Cattle by burning the hides and bones so the aroma would go up to the Gods. Did the Minoans sacrifice their Bulls and do the same? Or did they treat their cattle as they still do in India today: cattle are sacred and not eaten?

But they did consume beer, wine and a fermented honey similar to mead.