Category Archives: murder mysteries

Voting -in 1800

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Some fun facts about 1800 election

The voters did not elect the president. They chose instead their representatives for the House. This caused a problem (more than one IMHO). If Congress chose the President, that violated the principle of separation of powers. So how to do it?

The Electoral College was set up to address this; the voters elected the delegates who chose the President. (Sounds unnecessarily complicated to me.) Each delegate had two votes, one for President, and one for VP. (In the previous election, Adams won the Presidency and Jefferson the vice-presidency so the top officials were of different parties. (And the men disliked each other and disagreed on almost every point. Imagine if this were Trump and Hillary Clinton?) If the delegates had chosen to use their votes for Burr, instead of becoming Jefferson’s VP he would have become president. He was pressured to remove his name in the event he received more votes; he declined to do so.

The candidates themselves did not campaign. The supporters did the campaigning, and the newspapers were every bit as passionate in declaring for their favored candidate as they are now.

Fun fact: the meeting they held to decide this was called a caucus. This is an Algonquian word meaning advisor.

The polls that our current candidates live and die on had a totally different meaning back then.

Since poll meant the top of a head, polling meant counting heads.

Maryland was the first state to require voting on paper (in 1799).

Ballots meant tossing a ball into a box, usually a pea, a pebble, or commonly, a bullet. It was not secret at all.

Out of a total U.S. population of 5.23 million, only 600,000 were eligible to vote. Only in Maryland could a black man vote and then only until 1802 when the law was changed. Only in New Jersey could a white woman vote, and that was changed in 1807. Generally speaking, the only citizens who could vote were white landowning males.

Finally, the House was set up in such a way that the number of representatives is based on population. (That is one reason why a census is taken every ten years.) But the southern states had large populations of slaves, which skewed the number, especially since the enslaved people could not vote. So it was decided that each enslaved person should count as three fifths of a white person. (The law caused a lot of resentment in the North since a state like Virginia, that had a lot of slaves, had much more political power based on a non-voting population.)

It just boggles the imagination.

Goodreads Giveaway

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A Circle of Dead Girls was just formally released on March 3rd. (I say formally because Amazon had it in mid-February.)

Death in the Great Dismal will come out October 7.

These titles are eight and nine, respectively.

Since it has been many years since the publication of the first three in the Will Rees saga, (and also because with people kept at home because of the corona virus – COVID-19, they have more time to read) I am offering a Goodreads giveaway of A Simple Murder:

Yes, I will be giving away three books to three lucky winners. Go to Goodreads to sign on.

More about the Tarot

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Why did I include the Tarot in A Circle of Dead Girls? The short answer is I wanted to be able to comment on the action and on Rees’s investigation in an oblique way. Although Bambola is the character who believes in the cards, she also does not listen to what they are saying to her. And Rees, although he is skeptical of anything that is not concrete, is surprised by the accuracy of some of the readings.

Do I believe? Well, I have friends who do. The readings they have done for me have sometimes been surprisingly accurate. So how does one align something that purports to foretell the future with the practicalities of the here and now?

I believe that some people are unusually intuitive. We all use non-verbal clues to understand another person’s distress, anger or joy. Some of us are amazingly good at that. I suspect that the cards allow this intuitive reader to focus and, in doing so, really hone in on the person sitting on the other side of the table and understand far more about them than they might consciously.

One further note about the tarot my mystery. Bambola associates justice with Rees. I would postulate that most of the protagonists in mystery novels have that passion. They don’t give up even when threatened with death. And a good thing for those of us who love reading mystery novels.

The Tarot – and Will Rees

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In A Circle of Dead Girls, Will Rees meets a character who uses tarot cards for divination.

I’ve gotten a couple of questions about whether Tarot cards were even around then. Weren’t they all the rage in the sixties?

The cards were actually popularized (for the first time!) in the 1400s and were used as, well, playing cards. There were four suits. The ‘trump’ cards were added later. It is thought that tarot cards came from Egypt.

From the deck I used.

By the mid-eighteenth century, the tarot cards were being used for divination. The first deck specifically created for divination was produced in 1789. There have been successive waves of interest since then and yes, the late sixties saw saw a surge.

So it is perfectly possible that Rees would have seen a deck of tarot cards, especially from someone of Italian extraction.

Why did I choose to use the tarot and the more occult use of tarot? Will Rees, after all, is a character with his feet firmly rooted in the practical. Did I include a supernatural element to this mystery? After all, Rees is astonished by the accuracy of some of Bambola’s readings. Although I left the door open for that interpretation, I chose that mechanism to show something of Bambola’s character. She believes in the readings but ignores what they say to her.

Goodreads Giveaway – A Circle of Dead Girls

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Although I planned to schedule the giveaway to hit just before the release date – March 3 – the book is available now!

So sign up for you copy on Goodreads.

The circus has come to town. Rees drives in to see a performance but sees his old nemesis, Magistrate Hanson, instead. Returning home, Rees meets up with a group of Shakers who are searching for a missing girl. Rees agrees to help search – and they find the girl’s murdered body in a field.

Upcoming events

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So excited to announce several events.

On Sunday, January 12, I will be speaking at the East Fishkill Public Library at 1:30.

In February, February 8 to be exact, I will be speaking at Goshen Public Library.

Also, in preparation for the release of the next Will Rees: A Circle of Dead Girls,

I will be holding a Giveaway for Simply Dead throughout January on Goodreads.

In February, look for a giveaway for A Circle of Dead Girls.

Another

    Bald Cypress

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    The bald cypress used to be one of the most common trees in the swamp but from logging and other causes the numbers diminished tone replaced by red maple and other deciduous trees.

    Bald cypress is itself deciduous and drops its leaves/needles in the fall. They are a beautiful and vivid orange with a hint of purple. A concerted effort to re-establish the bald cypress in the swamp was begun. One of the most interesting and, for me, creepiest feature of the bald cypress is something called cypress knees. No one knows why they exist but the theory is that they help bring oxygen to the roots.

    The orange surface is the dropped needles. All the small trunks are cypress knees.
    I found these knees totally creepy. There are hundreds and hundreds of them and to me it looks like an alien life form (the pod people or something) taking over.

    The Great Dismal Swamp, Again

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    Next March, A Circle of Dead Girls will be released. It has already been released in the UK.

    The Will Rees Mystery that will come out after, probably next summer, is titled Death in the Great Dismal. As one may guess, this mystery takes Will and Lydia to the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia.

    Since I always find it easier to imagine my characters in the location in which the mystery takes place, I have visited the swamp again. What an amazing place!

    Loblolly pines. Even in the winter, when the leaves have dropped, it is difficult to see through the vegetation. The pines grow on drier islands in the swamp. This is where the maroons, the escaped slaves, would have set up camps.
    One of the many streams in the swamp. The water is black. Tannin leaches from the roots of the cypress. Although the water is safe to drink, any fabric or lighter surface will be dyed brown by the water. Look closely. All the water ways are edges with the stubs of trees where the beavers have gnawed them down.
    Downed trees are everywhere. I describe this scene in my book, although Rees finds a clue at the water’s edge.

    Of tightrope walkers and more

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    One of the main characters in A Circle of Dead Girls is a tightrope walker, Called rope dancers, the tightrope walkers have been a feature of the circuses for centuries. The Romans called them funambulists.

    My rope dancer is nicknamed Bambola, a name that I borrowed from a famous Italian tightrope walker. These aerialists have always been popular acts. I imagine the excitement in a small farming community at seeing this act would have been high.

    Many of the rope dancers were women but not all. In fact, as the circuses traveled around, dynasties that were known for aerial acts formed and became famous in their own right.

    Will Rees and others in the audience of that time would not have seen an act that became arguably the most popular of all: the trapeze artists. The trapeze was developed from the tightrope; more accurately from a slack rope that the artist then hung from. The first tricks were done from a static trapeze; a rope that hung without moving. The flying trapeze was not invented until the mid-1800s by a young aerialist: Jules Leotard. He invented it by practicing over his father’s swimming pool.

    For many decades, the flying trapeze was one of these most popular acts ever.

    Circus Acrobats

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    Acrobats are another piece of the circus story that has a long history. The first known depictions of acrobats jugglers appeared about 5000 years ago, in Egypt, in the early dynastic period (3000 B.C.). The Egyptians developed a strong tradition of these arts and later taught them to the Greeks. They in turn taught the arts to the Romans.

    The Romans spread them throughout their Empire via itinerant troupes of performers.

    Acrobatics rose independently in China.

    Although the earliest performances had religious overtones, the entertainers soon realized the audiences enjoyed the performances as entertainment. This created tension with the religious powers, culminating in the Middle Ages who accused the performers of being in league with the devil. During the Reformation in England during the 1660s, all such forms of frivolity was forbidden.