Tuesday, November 26, 2019

For Mark de Castrique, the past warps into fiction


HALLIE EPHRON:  It's so strange, the way past incidents can inspire a made-up tale. I once went to a yard sale and came back with an idea for a murder mystery. 

Today we're happy to welcome Mark de Castrique. The latest in his well received Sam Blackman mystery series, Murder in Rat Alley, comes in December from Poisoned Pen Press. He recalls an anecdote that inspired his imagination and led to his remarkable series. 

MARK DE CASTRIQUE: The three rode together down the western North Carolina mountainside in the old truck —a Model T converted into a hearse. One man was black, a funeral director from Asheville. One man, the driver, and his ten-year-old son were white and from the neighboring town of Brevard. The black man had come to the white man, also a funeral director, desperately seeking help to transport a body to Georgia. All he had were a horse and wagon. None of the white funeral homes in Asheville would help him. So, in 1919, through the heart of the Jim Crow South, the three made an eight-hour trek on a mission of mercy.
Rampant segregation meant no public place where they could eat. Arrangements had to be made with the deceased's relatives for lunch along the journey. At noon, they pulled up to a sharecropper’s cabin. An intergenerational gathering greeted them. The patriarch of the black family led the white man and boy into the cabin’s front room. They saw no furniture except for a plank board table and two chairs. There were only two place settings.

“You and your son will eat first and we will wait out in the yard.”

The pronouncement caught the guests by surprise. “There’s more room at the table,” the white man protested. “Or we can all eat outside.”

“No, sir. You’re doing a favor for our family. This is the way we want to honor you.”

So, the man and his boy sat down and ate while everyone else stood in the dusty yard.

The man who told me this story was ninety years old. He had been that ten-year-old child. His adventure was a haunting indictment of my native South and the historic racism that seems to refuse to die. Also, that one-hundred-year-old lunch is garnished with irony – the three stopped because they couldn’t eat together and they wound up not eating together. But what struck me the most was the lesson my elderly friend learned. His father told him later, “Son, sometimes the only thing people have to offer is their hospitality, and you always, always take it.”

His story stuck with me and I needed to exorcise it somehow. The Faulkner quote has a companion from the last line of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

My friend’s story fit how the past pulls us back as we struggle in vain against its relentless presence. So I created a contemporary story featuring a white Iraqi war veteran and amputee, Sam Blackman, who meets an African-American woman, Nakayla Robertson, whose sister has been murdered. The only clue, a 90-year-old journal written by a boy about his trip with his father as they help a black funeral director transport a body from Asheville to Georgia. Blackman’s Coffin provided the means for me to use the true story as the genesis for a mystery novel.

I was pleased with the result, the reviews were good, but then my editor informed me that I wasn’t finished with Sam Blackman. She knew before I did that Sam had more stories to tell. I decided to continue looking at events in the past that create crimes in the present. The rich history of Asheville, North Carolina, and the surrounding mountains have provided opportunities to use factual events to create fictional consequences. And Sam and Nakayla became an interracial couple and co-owners of The Blackman and Robertson Detective Agency.

Their cases have highlighted F. Scott Fitzgerald's visits to Asheville when Zelda was in psychiatric treatment. They've solved a mystery involving Carl Sandburg's mountain farm and its history dating back to the Confederacy. As an interracial couple, they've faced a killer from the days when such relationships were banned by law, and they've untangled the complexity of crimes motivated by a miscarriage of justice that released a guilty man to prey upon innocents.

My new Sam Blackman novel, Murder in Rat Alley, features two little known facts of western North Carolina history: the Apollo Space Program built a tracking station sequestered in Pisgah National Forest that later became a classified Department of Defense secret operating station; and Asheville houses our country’s largest collection of weather data, now so critical in the debate over climate change.


These facts become the fuel of fiction when the skeletal remains of an Apollo-era scientist are unearthed near the site of the tracking station.  The nearly half-century cold case flares white-hot as the investigation triggers murderous consequences in the present.  The trail leads from the stars to South Vietnam to Asheville’s Rat Alley, putting Sam and Nakayla in jeopardy as they face the reality of Faulkner’s quote, "the Past is never dead. It's not even past."

HALLIE: We all have incidents in the past that have stayed with us. As writers, they're gifts, because the incidents that stick are the ones that have a particular resonance... particular and personal, perfect for inspiring a novel. 

As I was reading Mark's essay, I thought back to Apollo and the first space walk that we all watched on our television screens so many years ago. It's a touchstone. What past events would you suggest that mystery authors look to for warping into fiction? (And I can't wait to hear what Mark has to say about "Rat Alley" - is there really such place? Because it makes a great title.) 




Mark de Castrique grew up in the mountains of western North Carolina where many of his novels are set. He’s a veteran of the television and film production industry, has served as an adjunct professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte teaching The American Mystery, and he’s a frequent speaker and workshop leader. He and his wife, Linda, live in Charlotte, North Carolina.

www.markdecastrique.com

47 comments:

  1. “Murder in Rat Alley” sounds like quite an intriguing story, Mark, and I’m really looking forward to reading it. [And is it a real place?]

    Apollo may be the quintessential choice for warping fact into fiction, but the opening of the sarcophagus of Egypt’s King Tut in 1924 is a possibility. Or perhaps Mark Twain’s 1894 visit to Nikola Tesla’s laboratory . . . .

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    1. OMG what terrific ideas. Joan, you're brilliant. Just thinking... it would make a great book of short stories, each one inspired by some real event. I was inspired by the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire for THERE WAS AN OLD WOMAN.

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    2. I apologize if this is a resend. Mystery is what happened to first reply. Joan, Rat Alley is a real place in Asheville, although you won't find it listed by the Chamber of Commerce. When I first heard the name, I knew it was the perfect place for a murder. I had a title ... no story.

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  2. How wonderful you could use that nugget of the past in your book, Mark. Am recommending this series to my in-laws who live in Asheville!

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    1. Thanks, Edith. Tell your in-laws and 100 of their closest friends to join me at Malaprop's Bookstore on Jan 7, 2020

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    2. I will! I've been in that bookstore - great place.

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    3. Sounds like a visit to the in-laws is in order.

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  3. congratulations on your new release! Crimes in the past causing/contributing to present day crimes: financial misconduct, graft and corruption at the local and city levels, voter fraud, stolen patents for inventions.

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    1. Margaret, Thanks for the ideas! I'm sure it's been done (and someone let me know if it has), but I've always been intrigued by the circumstances around Poe's death and the final three days where he simply disappeared. Alien abduction anyone?

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  4. Mark, I am so glad you shared your elderly friend's story. I am white and my family is from the south where the past is never far away. What I learned from their stories is that poor folks, black and white, are the same and I hated the way black people were treated. I hope some day we are truly equal. I'm looking forward to reading your series!

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    1. Thanks, Cathy. I found it hard to believe that it wasn't until 1967 that the Supreme Court struck down the old Confederate states' ban on interracial marriage. I was able to use that past injustice in A Murder in Passing.
      I can also recommend The Color of Law if want a look at institutionalized discrimination.

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  5. Opening up the JRW daily post is a gift that keeps on giving--looky here--another great new-to-me series combining elements of story right up my alley--place, intriguing characters, and weaving past into present--can't wait to start your series, Mark!

    What if there's a nugget of truth in old family stories? My family history includes several such stories--the cave where a missing father is said to be buried. What if, in a modern development of the area, a cultural resources survey were to find bones in that rock shelter--including recent ones with a tie to the past? What about the young war bride who died by suicide? And a letter--a confession?--arrives 50 years later?

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    1. OH MY! This is reminding me of a perhaps apocryphal story... that my grandmother was unable to get out of Russia at the turn of the century until a friend, who had the papers to leave, died unexpectedly. My grandmother used her papers, and I would guess assumed her identity??? Hmmm.

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    2. All great ideas. I think about ten books could be written on comments made so far.

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  6. We’re watching The Crown of course— and just saw the episode about the Aberfan mine disaster. Such a devastating reality—with all kinds of story possibilities.

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  7. And Mark—welcome! Rat Alley—it sounds brilliant.

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    1. Thanks, Hank. Enjoyed being with you on the panel last year at Poisoned Pen conference, and swapping Watergate stories. What's old is new again.

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  8. I can't wait to start reading these books!

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    1. Thanks, Judi. The first in that series is Blackman's Coffin, although all standalone.

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  9. Mark, welcome to Jungle Reds! What an intriguing premise for a series.

    The past is rife with possibilities. I just found out that the Polish Government in Exile during WWII visited Buffalo, NY in December 1942. And now I have more to my next book idea for that series.

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  10. Sounds like you can take that premise in a lot of interesting directions.

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  11. Hallie, Thanks for the opportunity to be a part of today's conversation. I'll try not to blatantly steal too many of the great story ideas being shared.

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    1. We're thrilled to have you! And... I don't believe it's possible to 'steal' story ideas... they're out there for the plucking, and no one can write it the way you can.

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    2. I'll consider you my character witness if I ever go on trial for plagiarism.

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  12. Shalom Reds and fans. I have so many personal stories and I always threaten to put them down on paper. I thought to tell the story of my attendance at an appearance of John Lindsay in my neighborhood during his run for the office of Mayor of New York City when I was 12 years old.

    Then I recalled something that occurred only 2 weeks ago. I was at the office of my eye doctor. He’s part of a practice that specializes problems of the retina and I travel to Philadelphia to see him. He is a very good doctor but I he’s a retina specialist for a condition which I probably don’t have. There is always a large number of people in the waiting rooms, most of them older than 65, I think. Last week though, I noticed one younger man, maybe late thirties-early forties, who was dressed in what I assumed were hospital blues. Then I realized that he was in chains. He was escorted by three uniformed and armed prison guards.

    It was the first time that I had ever seen anyone manacled like that. I only knew chains from Dickens character, the ghost of Marley in A Christmas Carol. Maybe Robert Duval at the end of the movie The Apostle. I’ve had acquaintances who perhaps were on house arrest who wore electric ankle bracelets to monitor their movements.

    However, this was a new experience for me and would probably be a good premise for a short story. I have a pen pal who is incarcerated upstate but a few weeks back he let me now that he was brought back to Bucks County for a hearing. He didn’t say so, but I think he probably travelled and was brought to court in chains.

    I am very grateful to be free. I have put Murder in the Rat Alley on my Goodreads “Want to Read” list.

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    1. Thanks for putting Rat Alley as a reading destination. It's not the most picturesque place on the planet. I think your doctor office experience does have the seeds of a short story within.

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  13. Your series sounds right up my alley, Mark! I grew up in the South and stories like the funeral director's break my heart. One of my husband's co-workers commented on the difference between southern and northern racism back in the 80s or 90s. He said racism was alive and well in the north; it was simply conducted behind your back. In the south it was upfront and in your face. No pretense. He preferred the latter.

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    1. Pat, I'm afraid you're right. Geography only gives a difference of expression, not existence.

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  14. Mark, that is one of the most powerful stories I've ever read. I have a dear friend who spent his childhood as a sharecropper, picking cotton as a kid, in Kentucky. An Navy pilot crashed in the field one day and my friend was gobsmacked when the pilot climbed out of the wreckage. The pilot looked at him and said, "Join the Navy and you can wear the uniform and never be hungry again." He did and worked his way up to Chief Petty Officer. Interesting how a random experience can change a life. Can't wait to read your books. They sound fabulous.

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    1. That's a great story, Jenn. A life-changing message delivered from out of the sky.

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  16. Your series sounds great! Love mysteries that intertwine past and present.

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  17. Hi, Mark. Best of luck with the new book. We are fellow PPP authors (when Barbara advises, it's always a good idea to pay attention, right?) but I have somehow missed your books. Now I am totally intrigued and I plan to fix that failure immediately. I have been in Asheville several times over the years - my college roommate hometown - and my books too are about the past that never disappears. I tend to look for the trends - tensions over changing neighborhoods - and the small, quirky stuff - theft of stained glass windows from neglected cemetery chapels - rather than the big headliners.Answering the questions, I was in NY on 9/11 but I don't think I will ever the writer who could tackle that in fiction. OTOH, the famous 60's figure, Abby Hoffman, who I remember well, was found in disguise in my home turf along the NY/Canada border - where I thought nothing ever happened! One day I will write about it. Maybe.

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    1. Triss, I never argue with our editor. We have spirited discussions. Interesting story about Abby Hoffman. You should use it before Steal This Book becomes Steal This Plot.

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  18. I've also somehow missed the Sam Blackman series, which I will quickly rectify. I love contemporary tales where the characters and events are shaped by the past. And the American south has more "past" than almost any other part of the country.

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    1. Hi, Julia,
      Speaking of the past, I think we were on a panel together in a past lifetime. And the South has nothing on the quirky characters of New England as I discovered when I married my Boston wife.

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  20. Mark, the story is a powerful one, and your series sounds really cool. I will be looking into it, and I've passed your information along to a friend in Burnsville, NC, who is involved in a literary festival each year. Best of luck with it all.

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    1. Thanks, Gigi. I've been to the Burnsville Festival twice. They do a great job.

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  21. Bought Blackman's Coffin before I finished reading the comments. This series is so intriguing, I can't believe I missed it.

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  22. Thanks, Hallie for letting me be a part of today's blog. And thanks to all who for the encouragement and kind comments.
    Mark

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  23. Hallie, great post about a new to me author!

    Mark, congratulations on your book series and welcome to Jungle Reds! I want to read your book.

    There are many, many, many stories from the past that could become a novel. Or a kernel of a story or an overheard conversation can become a novel. I think Maeve Binchy was inspired to write Tara Road after overhearing a conversation at the airport waiting for her plane?

    Diana

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