Tag Archives: murder mysteries

Currently Reading

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In the Irish Hostage, Bess travels to Ireland to serve as a maid of honor in a wedding. That wedding, does not go forward, however, since the groom is abducted and feared dead. Another death, which appears to have no relation at al to the disappearance of the groom, occurs nearby.

The description of the Irish Troubles (the novel takes place not long after 1916) is absolutely captivating and Todd does a wonderful job of making the reader feel Bess’s emotions: attraction to one of the Irish men, fear for her safety and more.

In a Fatal Lie, Ian Rutledge investigates the murder of a man but his investigation rapidly become so much more. The victim was hunting for his young daughter, abducted from her pram. What had he discovered before his murder? Another winner from Todd, although Hamish plays a smaller role.

I also want to note the death of Caroline Todd, one half of the writing duo with her son Charles, at 86. The new Bess Crawford and Ian Rutledge had already been turned in. It remains to be see what happens to the characters now.

Murderous March 2021

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The conference begins tomorrow at 1 pm. Free but registration is required.

FRIDAY, MARCH 19, 2021

(Note: All times are Eastern)

1.00 – 2.00 pm

Pitch Workshop – moderator Jenny Milchman *

What Agents Want & How to Give It to Them
Figuring out how to woo an agent or small press editor can be as puzzling as a good mystery. In this informal session, writers will receive an overview of the publishing process today, learn how to describe their book and themselves as writers, and discover the secret to a difficult-to-turn-down pitch.

2.15 – 3.45 pm

Master Class I – Sujata Massey (Guest of Honor) *

A Journalistic Approach to Writing a Novel: How to Add the Right Details Without Becoming an Encyclopedia
Sujata will break down the journalism techniques she uses for creating pictures on the page, weaving real facts with the fictitious. She’ll also give tips on how to cultivate valuable sources in government and academia and the importance of sensitive representation of characters with different cultural backgrounds.

4.00 – 5.30 pm

Master Class II – Alison Gaylin (Special Guest)

Creating Lead Characters: Series versus Standalone
From hardboiled crime-solvers to noir antiheroes to the unreliable narrators of psychological suspense, compelling lead characters are a key element in crime fiction. We’ll discuss how to create protagonists that are multi-faceted, surprising and real – whether they’re driving one story or an ongoing series.

6.00 – 7.00 pm

Meet-the-Authors Cocktail Hour
Authors will introduce their series or latest book and present a brief reading. Bring your favorite drink!

Saturday, begins 10 am EST.

10.00 am                     Welcome and Conference Overview by Frankie Y. Bailey, President,  Mavens of Mayhem

10.30 – 11.30 am         Historical Mysteries Panel – Shakers, Quakers, Revolutionaries, and Depression-era cops. Journey with us to exciting mysteries of the past

11.45 am – 12.45 pm      Short Stories and Other Shorts Panel – No matter where you are on your writing journey, short fiction presents an opportunity to try something new, refine your craft, and have the satisfaction of writing “the end” after just 10,000 words. Tune in as these authors share their insights and inspirations behind writing short fiction, and tips on getting started and where to submit.

1.00 – 2.00 pm              A Conversation with our special guests Sujata Massey and Alison Gaylin 

Don’t miss this lively and informative chat with our honored guests.     Moderator – Elaine Viets *

2.15 – 3.15 pm             Gothic Romance and Romantic Suspense Panel – Step away from the comfort of your armchair and flirt with danger as this panel delves into the darkly alluring genres of Gothic Romance and Romantic Suspense.

3.30 – 4.30 pm             Police Procedurals: Fact or Fiction Panel – Ripped from the headlines!  Go behind the scenes and learn how to turn your police procedurals into page-turners as four experts from the field talk about how murder is handled in real life.

4.45 – 5.45 pm             Pathways to Publication Roundtable – This isn’t your grandmother’s publishing world! Getting a book published has changed drastically over the past decades.  Join this panel as they discuss the variety of paths to publication available to authors today.

5.45 pm                       Wrap-up

PITCHES

Publisher Harriette Sackler (Level Best Books) and agent Josh Getzler (HG Literary) will take pitches at a time and date TBA. Indicate on your registration form if you wish to pitch your manuscript. You will be contacted.

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.

Epidemics – Smallpox

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In almost every Will Rees mystery, I include at least one profession and one illness. In Simply Dead, for example, I studied hoop making (for barrels) and lumbering. One of the characters is severely ill with diabetes.

In A Circle of Dead Girls, tuberculosis was the disease of choice. Because the story is set against the early days of the circus, I included details about wagons and early magic tricks.

In Will Rees Number 10, A Murder of Principle, I am including smallpox. Like Covid-19, smallpox was a viral disease and greatly feared.

The initial symptoms were similar to the flu, Covid-19 and many other viral diseases: fever, muscle pain, fatigue and headache. Before the distinctive rash erupted, small reddish spots appeared on mucous membranes of the mouth, tongue, and throat. 

The characteristic skin rash form within two days after the reddish spots on the mucous membranes. The rash was formed of pustules with a dot (that became filled with fluid) in the center. These spots scabbed over and then the scabs fell off, usually resulting in scarring.

The origin of smallpox is unknown although the theory says the virus developed in certain African rodents 60,000 or so years ago. The earliest evidence of human illness dates to the third century BCE with Egyptian mummies It is a lethal disease with a fatality rate for the ordinary kind of about 30 percent. Higher among babies. The Malignant and Hemorrhagic forms are over ninety percent fatal. Occurring in outbreaks, it killed hundreds of thousands, including at least six monarchs in Europe. In the twentieth century it is estimated to have killed 300 million alone. As recently as 1967, 15 million cases occurred worldwide.

In 1796, Edward Jenner discovered that milkmaids who had contracted cowpox, a much less serious disease, did not come down with smallpox. He began a trial and proved that inoculation with cowpox prevented smallpox. Inoculation with the live virus had already begun but, although the disease tended to be less severe and less fatal, some people still died. The cowpox was safer.

Later, the vaccine was made of the killed virus. In Great Britain, Russia, the United States vaccination was practiced. However. My father contracted small pox as a toddler and lived to tell the tale. I am old enough to remember my smallpox vaccination and still bear the scar on my upper arm.

A concerted global effort a to eradicate smallpox succeeded with the last naturally occurring case in 1977. (The last death was in 1978. A researcher contracted the disease from a research sample.) WHO officially certified the eradication of smallpox in 1980.

More about voting -elections 1796-1800

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“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, a quote ascribed to writer and philosopher George Santayana. Variations have been popularized by different speakers.

Well, whoever created this saying was right.

I thought of this as I did research for my next book (after Death in the Great Dismal) which is tentatively titled Murder on Principle. I happened to come across a number of interesting factoids about the election in 1800; a contest between John Quincy Adams and Thomas Jefferson. (This was the fourth election but since George Washington basically ran unopposed in the first two, in actual fact it was the second contest.) 

When George Washington had opted not to run again for a third term, both 

Adams and Jefferson ran to replace him. Adams won, narrowly, in this third election. Since there were no parties, the candidate with the next highest number of votes became the vice president. So, while Adams became the President, Thomas Jefferson became his vice-president. (The chasm between the beliefs of these two men was deep; Think Trump as President and Hillary Clinton as his vice-president.) The two men faced off in the following election cycle -1800 – causing a constitutional crisis. To solve it, Adams ran as a Federalist and Jefferson as a Republican.

The Federalists were more akin to our current Republican party while Jefferson was like our modern day Democrats. (Just to illustrate the difference between them, Jefferson worried that without term limits the President could serve for a lifetime. Adams thought that was a fine idea.) 

The Electoral College had been already formed. (I leave the discussion to whether it is still needed now to another day.) Jefferson and Adams won an equal number of votes, a result that threw the election into the hands of the House.

For people who believe our current politics are nasty, here are a few examples of what was happening then.

Alexander Hamilton claimed that if Adams was reelected, Virginians (like Jefferson) would resort to physical force to keep the Federalists out of office. Further, he tried to persuade John Jay to change the rules so that the legislature would not be able to choose the Jefferson electoral delegates, saying that it would ‘prevent an atheist in Religion and a fanatic in politics from getting possession of the helm of state.” Jay refused.

Adams, furthermore, as one of his last acts, chose John Marshall as Chief Justice, thereby giving control of the courts to the Federalists.

Jefferson, meanwhile, believed that Adams and the Federalists would seek to change the laws so that a President could serve for life.

Sound familiar?

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.

The Feral Chicken

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In the interests of accuracy, I research many many things for inclusion into my books. I’ve dyed with indigo, for example . (And what an adventure that was; it smells like rancid pee.) I’ve gone interesting places, such as Salem (for Death in Salem) and the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia (for Death in the Great Dismal).

And I try different recipes and eat things I might not otherwise eat, such as a Shaker pie made of heavily sugared sliced fresh lemons (so sour it could not be eaten) or ployes (a kind of pancake made from buckwheat and not bad.)

My latest experiment – a free range chicken. My husband and I belong to a CSA. They have a chicken share but this offering was not from the share. It was a hen past her egg laying days. So, in the spirit of adventure – and tasting a chicken as our ancestors might have, I took a chicken.

I was warned to stew it gently which I did. I have tasted venison that was more flavorful and tenderer than this chicken. In addition, the chicken was so small it would not have fed a hungry man. The drumsticks had about an oz of meat on them. If this was an example of the chickens available back then, it is no wonder the early colonists relied on hunting.