Category Archives: Suffolk, Virginia

Suffolk, Virginia

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By now, Everyone knows I attended a book festival in this city. Not only is the festival just about my favorite, but I love the city itself.

The Great Dismal Swamp lies just outside, and, I would suspect, some of the city lies on reclaimed swamp land. I’ve taken several tours of the swamp, which provided the basis for one of my favorite of my own books: Death in the Great Dismal.

The swamp was established as a wildlife preserve in 1974. It is a peat swamp and the estimate of the depth is 15 feet of peat. When walking through the swamp it is important to watch your footing; the tour guide dropped a pole down and it rapidly disappeared from sight. The preserve is owned by the wildlife. Signs of bears are everywhere. All the insects bite. Unusual birds flutter through the tall, straight pole pines. Truly an amazing place.

Suffolk is also a major producer of peanuts. A short drive around shows peanut farms and a drive through town brings one to the peanut factories. The peanut itself is a curious plant. The peanut is unusual because, although it flowers above ground, the seeds, I.e. peanuts, are below the ground. They have to be dried to release the moisture from the soil.

As is usual with some of the weird plants we eat for food, how were peanuts discovered? Did someone dig up the roots and find the peanuts growing beside the roots? Who figured out they need drying? That they can be roasted?

The Virginia peanut is large and very crunchy, larger than most, and so crunchy my jaw started to hurt. They are a legume, not a nut, despite the name. These groundnuts, originally only eaten by pigs, were studied extensively by George Washington Carver. He developed hundreds of uses for them but credit for making peanut butter lies with Dr. John Kellogg, he of cereal fame.

The Suffolk Author’s Festival

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Instead of blogging about books, I thought I would talk about the Festival. I’ve gone many years running; this is one of my favorite festivals. The staff is great, I love the area, and I really enjoy meeting the readers.

I also always sell quite a few books.

This year I also served on a panel. Moderated by Christine Trent (author of Lady of Ashes and the Florence Nightingale mysteries), the panel discussed Balancing Fact and Fiction. Also on the panel were Ellen Butler, Nicole Glover, Stacie Murphy, and Katharine Schellman. Of the panel members, outside of Christine, I’ve read only Katharine Schellman. Expect reviews of the other authors’ books to come. I bought eight books while I was there.

Other old friends I connected with: Heather Weidner and John Dedakis, both of whom have new books out in their series. (For Heather, it is the Pearly Girls.) Some authors I met last year: Maggie King and Mike Marsh I met last year and got reacquainted with this year.

New authors for me: Esme Addison and Lee Clark. I expect to read books by these authors as well.

The headliner was Tonya Kappes who has written more books than I can count.

This festival is such fun I hope to attend again next year.

The Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp

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In Death in the Great Dismal, I take a temporary break from Rees’s world; the District of Maine and the community of Shakers who live nearby, to send him and Lydia south to Virginia.

Rees is asked by his friend Tobias to rescue his wife Ruth from the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia. Rees and Lydia agree, somewhat reluctantly, and travel to the swamp. (The swamp still exists, bridging 100,000 acres in Southern Virginia into northern North Carolina, and has been declared a Wildlife Refuge.)

There, Tobias guides them to a small village of fugitives, who were living hand to mouth, in the depths of the swamp. Who were these people?

Well, first of all, the existence of the Maroons is true and historically accurate. The hunger for freedom was so acute that many people fled slavery, preferring to take their chances in the hostile environment of the swamp. Daniel Sayers, an archeologist, has done excavations to identify some of the sites of the villages. The village structures were built of wood and, because of the climate in the swamp, they have all rotted. There are no stones of any kind in the swamp but Sayers found remnants of post holes and pottery shards. Why were they called Maroons. No one really knows. One theory is that the name is from the French, marronage, to flee.

Although not well known until recently, the existence of these small villages is present in the historical record. Slave takers were sent regularly into the swamp to recapture escapees – with mixed success. Some of these Maroons lived so deep within the swamp, surviving and raising families, that they could not be found. The children born here grew up in their turn, and the descendent of the original fugitives did not leave the swamp until after the Civil War. They had never seen a white person.

As I describe, male slaves were regularly hired by the Dismal Canal Company to dig the canal. The overseers turned a blind eye to the maroons who worked as shingle makers, despite knowing they were fugitives, because these shingle makers helped make the quotas.

I also based my character Quaco, on an historical account of a man who, brought to Virginia on a slave ship, escaped to the swamp as soon as he arrived. He survived by hunting, and dressed himself in the skins of the animals in killed. He never learned English.

Suffolk Mystery Festival

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The Suffolk Mystery Authors Festival is just about my favorite. It is smaller than Bouchercon but everything is perfectly done.

This year I was on a panel with some awe-inspiring panelists. Such thoughtful responses. I look forward to meeting with them again next year.

Next up, my blog tour with Partners in crime.

Suffolk Mystery Convention

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Very excited to announce that the Suffolk Mystery Convention will be held on March 6. I will send along information in a week or so.

I will be discussing my new Novel Death in the Great Dismal.

It is an appropriate choice since Suffolk is the town nearest the swamp.

It is an amazing experience to go from the streets of Suffolk and the small peanut farms nearby to the alien environment of the swamp. It is also very buggy!

Death in the Great Dismal -Goodreads Giveaway

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I am so excited to announce a giveaway for my new book: Death in the Great Dismal. Will and Lydia travel south, to the Great Dismal swamp, They have been asked to rescue Ruth, a woman taken from Maine and sold down south. She has escaped to a village in the heart of the swamp and is living there with other fugitives.

Of course, Will and Lydia are in the village no more than a few days when the first murder occurs.

The Giveaway ends the first week of January.

Death in the Great Dismal

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Very excited to reveal the cover for my next Will Rees mystery: Death in the Great Dismal. It will be released early fall. In this book, Will and Lydia travel to the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia to rescue a free black woman, taken from Maine and enslaved, who has fled to the swamp. One of the other maroons is murdered – but Will and Lydia are on the case.

I have had many wonderful covers but this one is exceptional.

Death in the Great Dismal

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In the ninth entry in the Will Rees Series, Will and Lydia travel to the Great Dismal Swamp to help a friend. Several murders occur – of course since these are murder mysteries.

This is a peat bog and in some places the peat is fourteen feet deep, Although we went in September, it was still really buggy. It is hard to imagine people living here, raising families and, on the drier places, trying to farm.