KAREN ODDEN:
Back in December, when I read the blog entry on this site by
Edith Maxwell (Maddie Day) about her new mystery series set on Cape Cod, I felt
something in my chest soften. Perhaps because I’m still a new author, it’s a
relief to hear that even established, successful writers find that their
projects can start as one thing and end up as something utterly different.
My second adult novel, A
Dangerous Duet, began life as a young adult mystery called “The
Phrenologist’s Daughter,” about a young woman named Nell who watches her father
read the scalps of gullible older women for money. Someday I’m going to put
phrenology into a novel because I think it’s the wackiest pseudo-science ever.
It reached its zenith in the 1840s in England, and its practitioners believed
that the bumps on your skull could reveal something indelible about your
character. So the bump you have just in front of your left ear? It reflects
your propensity for thieving. Little did you know.
The problem is, I couldn’t come up with a plot that I felt
“worked” for a YA. My heroine Nell’s more interesting con-man phrenologist
father kept taking over. Besides, I heard from my agent that YA historical
mysteries simply weren’t selling.
This was in 2012. Then suddenly, in May, my father died in a
car accident. This was a painful time for many reasons, not least because my
father and I had never been close. He was at heart rather a loner, enjoying his
solitary travels with his excellent camera, his collections of model cars and planes
in our basement, and perhaps most of all, his music. He had been an exceptional
pianist, and I’d grown up listening to him play the baby grand in our living
room. Sometimes I’d lie underneath the instrument, on the goldenrod shag carpet
(it was the 70s), and watch his feet in their Hush Puppies move among the three
pedals. Unwilling to travel as much as a symphony position would require, he
found ways to use his talent to earn money locally: he played weddings and
funerals and Sunday masses at a beautiful gothic church in Rochester, and
taught piano lessons to students who were, I gathered, largely lacking in
talent and apathetic. I took lessons as well for a few years. But I was lacking
in talent and apathetic, and eventually I quit, much to our mutual relief.
But my father, and pianos, were on my mind, and a new idea
began to form in my head, about a young woman pianist in Victorian London. And
somewhere around this time, my husband had a work trip to London, and I was
able to tag along. With only the faintest sketch of an idea in my head, I
visited two places. The first was the Royal Academy of Music, where there
was—to my delight—an exhibit about Victorian music and music halls. There was
also a class roster that showed “Frances Elizabeth Dickens,” in scratchy
script, fourth from the bottom on a yellow page. I knew a little about
Charles’s older sister from research I had done in preparation for writing the
introduction for Barnes and Noble’s edition of Hard Times. A talented pianist, Fanny had attended the Royal
Academy in the 1820s but had to drop out after a few years because her parents
could no longer afford tuition. (Mr. Dickens was a notorious spendthrift and
was thrown into debtor’s prison. Hence Charles’s infamous stint in the
bootblack factory at age 12.) Later, she was able to return, paying her way by
serving as an instructor to the younger children.
But what would a young woman pianist do if she couldn’t
afford tuition for even those first few years and wanted it desperately? Truth
be told, there weren’t many employment options in the 1840s for a young woman
from a middle-class family. She could go out as a governess, or a teacher, or perhaps
a nurse. Or perhaps she could find a way to use her talent to earn money …
perhaps serve as an accompanist in a music hall … I felt the stirrings of
sincere curiosity about this idea. But music halls weren’t established by the
dozens in London until about 1870, so I would need to move my story forward
thirty years. (Phrenology was debunked by then. Yes, I felt some wry amusement
at having done all that research for naught!)
The second place I visited in London was Wilton’s Music
Hall. I discovered that music halls often featured a wide range of performers
from musicians to German knife throwers to trapeze artists. The performances
tended to be bawdy, political, humorous, profane and satirical—a profound
swerve away from the middle-class values promoted by the Society for the
Suppression of Vice (est. 1802). The modern-day equivalent of the music hall
program would be closer to a series of Saturday
Night Live skits than a polished Broadway show.
Wilton’s is the last Victorian music hall standing, I
believe, that still puts on a wide variety of critically acclaimed shows. It has
served as a set for movies, perhaps most famously in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. Robert Downey Jr.’s Holmes
ostensibly takes Jude Law’s Watson out to celebrate his engagement, and the
stag party devolves into a mad chase scene with an acrobatic Cossack assassin.
Located on Graces Alley in Whitechapel (infamous for the
Jack the Ripper murders in 1888), Wilton’s was assembled piecemeal in the 1850s
from four separate houses plus a back “yard” area. I reached the doors—there
are a pair of them—and turned. From where I stood, I could see the Tower Bridge
and hear the slapping of the water against the boats. Some seagulls cawed
hollowly, and my throat tightened. Inside, I smelled the warm tang of beer and
caught my toe on a nail that stood up from a worn floorboard. (Such an omen!)
Downstairs, I found floors that met unevenly, plaster peeling off the bricks,
and the smell of rust.
Back upstairs, on the main floor, I peered through a window
at the back of the music hall and saw a lovely U-shaped room, painted in shades
of blue and green, with turned pillars and a stage up front. (Below is a view
from the stage. For more information, see www.wiltons.org.uk.
They have an excellent blog about the history of the place as well as their
current and upcoming events.)
.
As I stood at the back of the auditorium, gazing toward the
stage, an image came as clearly as if it were a still from a movie: my heroine
Nell (dressed as a male performer … because men were paid twice as much as
women) seated at a piano, in an alcove at stage right. And as I drafted the
first three chapters the next day, on the plane ride home, an entire cast of
characters began to emerge, including a magician who had stolen his hat from a
police constable and a violinist with a bitter grudge against the world
Those chapters changed too, ultimately. But when I reread
them, now that they’re in print, it’s with a sense of profound gratitude that
in London, I was able to find the physical bits and pieces that beckoned a
premise into being, and that steered me in a direction I had no idea I was
going.
