Missing Downton Abbey, or are we?

RHYS BOWEN: How did you survive Sunday evening with no Downton Abbey? It was hard for me and my daughter and we didn't see how we could survive a year without Downton. And now Maggie Smith has said she'll only do one more season, whatever happens. She commented that her character has to be at least one hundred and ten by now! (that poor dog Isis was also older than any dog I've known)

So it's a good time to reflect what we love so much about Downton. The story is pure soap opera, isn't it? Man with mad wife. Illegitimate children. Returning Russian prince. Evil servants. Good and long suffering servants. It's all over the top and if it were in a contemporary setting it would be relegated to daytime TV.  One of the things we love about it is that it is Downton Abbey, fictitious home of the Crawley famly. We are fascinated by a lifestyle we can hardly imagine. Oodles of servants. A maid waking you with morning tea. Elaborate meals. Hunts and balls and shoots. And gorgeous clothes.  I think we love the clothes best of all.

It seems we can't get enough of the lifestyle of the rich and famous a century ago. A few days ago I enjoyed meeting a new writer called Tessa Arlen who has written a mystery called Death of a Dishonorable Gentleman that takes place at a costume ball at a stately home. It's terrific reading, giving the reader a glimpse into the lifestyle above and below stairs. Tessa herself is the daughter of a British diplomat and has lived in various parts of the world, including India where I'm sure she had servants to wait on her, like Downton girls.

So maybe it's time for a reality check: I grew up in a big English house. Not nearly as stately as Downton but with long drafty hallways down which the wind whistled. And one thing I can tell you about it: It was cold. All the time. There was no central heating. If a fire was lit at one end of a forty foot roon the other end still remained glacial. The bedrooms on my parent's floor had fireplaces, but there were none on the floor where my brother and I slept. Hence the windows would ice up in winter, the wind would rattle the window frames and I would snuggle into a tiny ball, clutching my hot water bottle to keep warm.

When I see the Downton people in their elegant silk dresses I always think "You were freezing cold, remember?"

And life seems so easy to us, but was really so difficult. It needed a maid to do up the forty buttons at the back of a dress. And that dress was never washed if it was silk. The marks were sponges off it. But in Edwardian times mud would cake onto the skirts. And people weren't so keen on bathing as they are now. Most people would have a good wash once a day and maybe a bath once a week (bathrooms were also freezing.  My father would light an oil stove in ours and we'd all take baths on the same evening.)

Quite possibly everybody smelled bad. Lower class people only had one dress for weekdays and one for Sundays. They covered them with an apron. Men didn't change their shirts every day. They changed their collars (hence the need for collar studs).

And we call them the good old days, but were they? It seems that at Downton they enjoyed a succession of lovely meals and house parties, but in reality the life of an upper class woman was one of boredom. Meals punctuated long dreary days writing letters, wandering through the gardens, reading and playing the piano. Houses were a good distance from each other so it was often a life of loneliness with the husband busy with running the estate or with his business and the wife with nothing much to do except entertain on rare occasions. The only chances to meet young men were those deemed suitable and introduced by the family, and then there was no real chance of getting to know them beyond a brief stroll in the gardens. No wonder Lady Mary wanted to test out Lord Dillingham's prowess before she married him. No wonder there was bed-hopping when they had company!

And those good old days came with no concept of modern medicine. If your cold turned into pneumonia you would probably die. Even upper class women died in childbirth (as we know from Lady Sybil). My grandmother lost a child to scarlet fever and one to meningitis. 

So would you really have wanted to live then? Or are you content to enjoy their life vicariously through our books?  My next Lady Georgie is called Malice at the Palace and will give you a chance to live like a royal!

But is it History? Triss Stein and the Crossroads of Facts and Nostaligia

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: Triss Stein and I met at Bouchercon in Albany last year, but were deep in conversation before we realized we're neighbors — both residing in Brooklyn's historic Park Slope neighborhood.

I love Triss's Erica Donato series because it's set in "the Slope" — but Triss invokes Brooklyn both past and present so wonderfully that, regardless of where you live, you'll find yourself among the brownstones with gas lamps set on shady tree-lined streets as well. And it's not just me — Publishers Weekly says Triss gives " ... a vivid sense of Erica’s Brooklyn neighborhood, and the characterization is wonderful."

Here's a brief description of Triss's newest Erica Donato novel, Brooklyn Graves: 

A brutally murdered friend who was a family man with not an enemy in the world. A box full of charming letters home, written a century ago by an unknown young woman working at the famed Tiffany studios. Historic Green-Wood cemetery, where a decrepit mausoleum with stunning stained glass windows is now off limits, even to a famed art historian.

Suddenly, all of this, from the tragic to the merely eccentric, becomes part of Erica Donato’s life. As if her life is not full enough.  She is a youngish single mother of a teen, an oldish history grad student, lowest person on the museum’s totem pole. She doesn’t need more responsibility, but she gets it anyway as secrets start emerging in the most unexpected places. 

In Brooklyn Graves a story of old families, old loves and hidden ties merges with new crimes and the true value of art, against the background of the splendid old cemetery and the life of modern Brooklyn.

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: Please welcome Triss as she joins us to talk about the crossroads of history, nostalgia, and the subjectivity of memory.


TRISS STEIN: If you're interested in history, a fascination I share with some Jungle Red writers, sooner or later you run into someone, in print or in person, whose memories  are in direct contradiction to everything you know.  I'm not talking about historians disagreeing. I'm talking about the elderly person who says it was so much better in the good old days. And those days happen to be the period otherwise know as the Great Depression. (I'm not making this up. That person is someone I know very well.)

Some other examples:

If you say "tenement" most people correctly picture horrifyingly overcrowded, unsanitary, epidemic-breeding housing, long outlawed. However, when the wonderful tenement history museum was being created on New York's Lower East Side, two elderly women were deeply interested in the project. Turned out they had been, as  children some of the last residents of that building before it was closed for good. There are taped interviews of them ... and their cheerful, touching and fond memories.

The co-worker, my contemporary, who collected '50's television memorabilia, is holding onto something I can't fathom. The good old days of Hopalong Cassidy and the first TV Superman?  Really? This is about his childhood, not about  the television quality. It's not so different from the book reviewer who condemned Little Women (!)  and lamented the superior books of his youth. [It's a real review, anonymous but thought to be by Henry James (!!) ]

I like Jack Finney's writing a lot, from stories I  remember reading as a teen, to his hugely successful Time and Again, but sometimes I find them irritating too. They are so sentimental about - here it is again -  the good old days, when everything was better. I used to love that romantic point of view. Now, I know better. In the photos of  How the Other Half Lives, taken just a few miles away from Finney's Gramercy Park, we see the rest of the story.

For a writer writing about the past, it's a dilemma. Unlike Rhys Bowen or Susan Elia MacNeal, I am not writing historicals but I am writing a series about a Brooklyn historian whose research into Brooklyn's very diverse neighborhoods brings her up against crimes both old and current. It gives me a chance to play historian.  For all of us, writing history,  the personal memories provide the vivid, particular details that create immediacy for our stories. At the same time, we can't trust anyone's memories to be anything more than just that - their own memories, filtered through their own experiences. Fascinating, often. Accurate? Ahh, not necessarily.

There is nostalgia. And there is history. In this time, we can't ( or shouldn't, anyway) take as fully reliable, memories of the wonderful days of the ante-bellum South, or, for that matter, the British empire, pre-World War 1. Yet it remains interesting  - and useful to know- that many people saw it all that way.

Right there, in that gap between the proud soldiers of World War

11 and the Negro troops riding in the back of the trains, the glamorous Hollywood of the studios and the novel Miss Lonelyhearts, the legendary Age of Aquarius  and the lives lost to drugs (I wrote that in Brooklyn Bones),  the  British life Upstairs and the life Downstairs, is a great place to find a story.

What do you think, you history fans out there?  Were you ever on the losing side of the argument that begins with "the old neighborhood was so wonderful until  'they' moved in" ? (It's always the losing side, because you can't argue with people's memories)   My new book, Brooklyn Graves, is about Tiffany, Gilded Age New York , a grand cemetary and -ah-ha - new people moving into an old neighborhood. With a twist or two. 

Reds and lovely readers: What’s your favorite history/nostalgia contradiction? 

And where do you stand in that particular argument? 

Triss Stein is a small–town girl from New York state’s dairy country  who has spent most of her adult life living and working in New York  city. This gives her the useful double vision of a stranger and a  resident for writing mysteries about Brooklyn, her ever-fascinating,  ever-changing, ever-challenging adopted home. Brooklyn Graves will  be out from Poisoned Pen Press in March and  is second in the series,  after Brooklyn Bones. Triss is active in both Sisters in Crime and Mystery Writers of America and is on the board of the  MWA NY chapter.