HALLIE EPHRON: It's with the greatest pleasure that I welcome Liz Milliron, a regular presence here on Jungle Red Writers. (I feel a special affinity for Liz since we both from writing (very exciting) technical material to writing crime novels.)
Liz's stories about where she gets her ideas are astounding. We should all have such colorful relatives!
Welcome, Liz!
LIZ MILLIRON: Thanks for hosting me today, Hallie. It’s always fun visiting the “front side” of the blog.
You may be surprised to learn, reader, that I’m in the family way.
No, not like that. I’m way past my childbearing age, at least psychologically speaking. I’m talking in my fiction. Let me explain.
When I sat down to write Thicker Than Water, the sixth in the Laurel Highlands Mysteries and which came out last year, I made a deliberate decision to explore family dynamics.
It seemed a natural point at which to do so. Jim and Sally were taking their relationship to a deeper level. Once a couple does that, discussion about family comes up. In that book I wanted to explore what makes a family, feelings toward family, the various definitions and types of families, and chosen vs. biological family.
Then came The Secrets We Keep.
In this book, Betty is hired by a soldier home on medical leave. He was raised in an orphanage and was always told he was left in the church. He grew up satisfied with the story, but his brush with death has made him determined to find his biological mother. Of course secrets – and murder – are involved, leading Betty to think about the cost of exposing long-held family truths. Not only that, Betty has to deal with her feelings about her fiancé – and the handsome new man in her life who is definitely interested in more than friendship.
Currently, I’m working on The Lies We Live, the sixth Homefront Mystery, and family secrets and relationship issues again take center stage. Betty’s client is concerned for her brother and Betty has to face her fiancé when he returns from the war, discharged because of an injury.
This intrigued me. I looked at my past books, especially the historicals. The Enemy We Don’t Know explored the relationship between cousins and how it affected the crime. The Stories We Tell involved a character’s grandmother and her potential connections, previously unknown, with the Polish government in exile. The Lessons We Learn revolved around the death of a character’s father and the toll his hidden life took on his family. The Truth We Hide again touched on family dynamics, in this case the estrangement of the victim from his father.
Do you see a pattern here?
None, or very little, of this was planned. My own family history is pretty boring. No deep secrets, no infamous ancestors. My grandfather’s family was full of functioning alcoholics. They owned a bar, which seems to be a bad business model for a family of drinkers. I know my father’s Uncle Fran fell off a dock in Buffalo and drowned (a story I mined for Lessons, although Uncle Fran wasn’t murdered).
My grandfather always described his mother as a “mean old lady,” something my father seconded. There is the story of how she smuggled whiskey into the country from Canada by hiding the bottles in the door panels of her car. One night, the chief of police and the head of Customs at the Peace Bridge showed up at her door. They didn’t want to arrest her. They wanted a drink. (That story may be a tad apocryphal, I don’t know.) But that isn’t a secret.
I know a little about my paternal grandmother’s family. Her brother was a cop and a recovering alcoholic. Her sister-in-law drove a bus. They both told all the stories, though. I know a little more about my maternal grandmother’s family because my aunt has done extensive genealogical research, but she makes all of them sound like saints. Nothing is known about my maternal grandfather’s family. He was a small child when they immigrated from Croatia and he never talked about them.
Maybe it isn’t strange so many of my stories involve family secrets. With a family that doesn’t have secrets, at least that I know of, I want to submerse myself in those that do. Of course, maybe my family is awash in secrets. After all, if I knew about them, they wouldn’t be, well, secret, would they?
Real or fictional, all I know is it’s a great subject to play with. And since my real life is so devoid of secrecy, I guess I’ll continue to make them up.
Reds and readers, did your family have secrets? Were they ever uncovered and, if so, what happened?
***I’ve got three ARCs of The Secrets We Keep I’ll give to three commentators (US only – sorry).***
Liz Milliron is the author of The Laurel Highlands Mysteries series, set in the scenic Laurel Highlands and The Homefront Mysteries, set in Buffalo, NY during the early years of World War II. She is a co-host of the crime fiction podcast “Guns, Knives & Lipstick." Liz is a member of Pennwriters, Sisters in Crime, International Thriller Writers, and The Historical Novel Society and is the current vice-President of the Pittsburgh chapter of Sisters in Crime and the Education Liaison for the National SinC board. Liz lives in Pittsburgh with her son and a very spoiled retired-racer greyhound.
About Secrets We Keep: June, 1943 Betty Ahern isn’t a novice PI anymore. After solving several dangerous cases, she is hired for what she hopes will be simpler one. A soldier home from Europe on medical furlough wants her to find his birth mother. Left at a church and raised an orphan at Father Baker’s Home for Boys, his only clue is a silver St. Christopher medal with a French inscription on the back.
Betty tracks down the unmarried daughter of a wealthy businessman who mysteriously vanished from society for several months in the early 1920s. Against her better judgment, Betty tells her client, who rushes off to meet her. But when the woman is found murdered, and her client is arrested for the crime, Betty must switch from locating a missing mother to clearing his name.
Aided by some new partners, Betty once again delves into the secrets of Buffalo’s elite. What she finds threatens to rip open secrets long buried. Can she find a killer and reunite a family? Or will the hunt cost Betty and her client everything, including their lives?
In this book, Betty is hired by a soldier home on medical leave. He was raised in an orphanage and was always told he was left in the church. He grew up satisfied with the story, but his brush with death has made him determined to find his biological mother. Of course secrets – and murder – are involved, leading Betty to think about the cost of exposing long-held family truths. Not only that, Betty has to deal with her feelings about her fiancé – and the handsome new man in her life who is definitely interested in more than friendship.
Currently, I’m working on The Lies We Live, the sixth Homefront Mystery, and family secrets and relationship issues again take center stage. Betty’s client is concerned for her brother and Betty has to face her fiancé when he returns from the war, discharged because of an injury.
This intrigued me. I looked at my past books, especially the historicals. The Enemy We Don’t Know explored the relationship between cousins and how it affected the crime. The Stories We Tell involved a character’s grandmother and her potential connections, previously unknown, with the Polish government in exile. The Lessons We Learn revolved around the death of a character’s father and the toll his hidden life took on his family. The Truth We Hide again touched on family dynamics, in this case the estrangement of the victim from his father.
Do you see a pattern here?
None, or very little, of this was planned. My own family history is pretty boring. No deep secrets, no infamous ancestors. My grandfather’s family was full of functioning alcoholics. They owned a bar, which seems to be a bad business model for a family of drinkers. I know my father’s Uncle Fran fell off a dock in Buffalo and drowned (a story I mined for Lessons, although Uncle Fran wasn’t murdered).
My grandfather always described his mother as a “mean old lady,” something my father seconded. There is the story of how she smuggled whiskey into the country from Canada by hiding the bottles in the door panels of her car. One night, the chief of police and the head of Customs at the Peace Bridge showed up at her door. They didn’t want to arrest her. They wanted a drink. (That story may be a tad apocryphal, I don’t know.) But that isn’t a secret.
I know a little about my paternal grandmother’s family. Her brother was a cop and a recovering alcoholic. Her sister-in-law drove a bus. They both told all the stories, though. I know a little more about my maternal grandmother’s family because my aunt has done extensive genealogical research, but she makes all of them sound like saints. Nothing is known about my maternal grandfather’s family. He was a small child when they immigrated from Croatia and he never talked about them.
Maybe it isn’t strange so many of my stories involve family secrets. With a family that doesn’t have secrets, at least that I know of, I want to submerse myself in those that do. Of course, maybe my family is awash in secrets. After all, if I knew about them, they wouldn’t be, well, secret, would they?
Real or fictional, all I know is it’s a great subject to play with. And since my real life is so devoid of secrecy, I guess I’ll continue to make them up.
Reds and readers, did your family have secrets? Were they ever uncovered and, if so, what happened?
***I’ve got three ARCs of The Secrets We Keep I’ll give to three commentators (US only – sorry).***
Liz Milliron is the author of The Laurel Highlands Mysteries series, set in the scenic Laurel Highlands and The Homefront Mysteries, set in Buffalo, NY during the early years of World War II. She is a co-host of the crime fiction podcast “Guns, Knives & Lipstick." Liz is a member of Pennwriters, Sisters in Crime, International Thriller Writers, and The Historical Novel Society and is the current vice-President of the Pittsburgh chapter of Sisters in Crime and the Education Liaison for the National SinC board. Liz lives in Pittsburgh with her son and a very spoiled retired-racer greyhound.
About Secrets We Keep: June, 1943 Betty Ahern isn’t a novice PI anymore. After solving several dangerous cases, she is hired for what she hopes will be simpler one. A soldier home from Europe on medical furlough wants her to find his birth mother. Left at a church and raised an orphan at Father Baker’s Home for Boys, his only clue is a silver St. Christopher medal with a French inscription on the back.
Betty tracks down the unmarried daughter of a wealthy businessman who mysteriously vanished from society for several months in the early 1920s. Against her better judgment, Betty tells her client, who rushes off to meet her. But when the woman is found murdered, and her client is arrested for the crime, Betty must switch from locating a missing mother to clearing his name.
Aided by some new partners, Betty once again delves into the secrets of Buffalo’s elite. What she finds threatens to rip open secrets long buried. Can she find a killer and reunite a family? Or will the hunt cost Betty and her client everything, including their lives?
