Fatal Family Ties--S.C. Perkins

DEBORAH CROMBIE: How many fictional murders (or real life murders, in fact) do NOT have some sort of family tie lurking in the background of the story? Think about it! We love reading about families (we all have them!) and how they can go wrong. And who knows more about families than a genealogist? Here's my friend and fellow Texan Stephanie Perkins to share the inspiration for her latest mystery featuring genealogist Lucy Lancaster.

 

The Civil War-Era Mystery Behind My Cozy Mystery

 S.C.Perkins

I first had the idea for Fatal Family Ties back in 2013, when I read an article in Smithsonian Magazine about the two oldest-living Civil War veterans. It was, in fact, an excerpt from a non-fiction book about the last remaining veterans of the war between the states. In this tale of two soldiers, one fought for the North, one for the South. It was an interesting piece that became truly fascinating for me at the very end with two sentences that threw a punch at the reader:

One of them indeed was a soldier, but one, according to the best evidence, was a fake. One of them had been living a great big lie. 

As it was an excerpt, the piece never stated—or even truly hinted at—whether it had been the Union soldier or the Confederate soldier who had pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes. Which one had been falsely feted, praised, and made into an icon of sorts for being the last survivor of a heinous and pointless war. I finished the article wondering which man had lied, and that wondering turned into the plot for a mystery.

Back in 2013, I was already having ideas about creating a cozy mystery series that involved history in some way. Making my protagonist, Lucy, a genealogist would come not long thereafter, thank goodness. And I knew I wanted to make this article the basis of a genealogical mystery for Lucy to solve. I would get my chance six years later, with the third book in my Ancestry Detective series.

 At first, I planned to more closely follow the idea from the article. Essentially, Lucy would be contracted to discover which of the two men was lying by doing deep research into their military service records. After all, proving the Civil War service records of a soldier isn’t as easy or straightforward as you’d think. While around the turn of the twentieth century, the War Department faithfully recreated the records they had into what’s known as compiled military service records (CMSRs), they could only work with what they had to start with. Record keeping had been shoddy in the Civil War, and records were often lost or destroyed.

As such, there’s very few instances where a descendant can say for certain that their ancestor fought in a particular Civil War battle. A genealogist—amateur or professional—must find multiple sources that give their claims credible proof. And even then, sometimes it still can’t be considered conclusive.

Regardless, I loved the idea of Lucy having to flex her skills as a genealogist to prove which soldier had been truthful about his service. Except there was an issue. Even fictitiously, I had to choose either a Union man or Confederate man as the real former soldier, and the other as the liar.

As a Southerner myself with deep Northern roots—and with ancestors who fought on both sides during the Civil War—I confess I didn’t especially care to make that choice. So, I considered making both soldiers in question as having fought on the same side. (Either side; I would flip a coin.) Or I could have Lucy prove they were both honest men, or quite the opposite. It could have gone in several different ways, all of which were fun to think about and flesh out a bit.  

Trying all these different plot directions eventually solved my original conundrum for me. As it turned out, the two-soldiers idea got in the way of the overall mystery. It also affected a sub-plot I’d had in my mind since day one, in that I wanted the descendant of one of the soldiers to hire Lucy, and she would be Lucy’s former co-worker. (One that hadn’t been overly nice to Lucy when they’d worked together, either.) I wanted to see Lucy in a secondary place of adversity and see how she fared while she worked out the truth about her former co-worker’s ancestor—and solved a murder, naturally.

Thus, my book became about one former Civil War soldier, not two. And the main reason I made him a Confederate soldier was simply because my books are set in Texas, and the descendants of the soldier had stayed and branched out in Texas. While there were men in Texas who fought for the Union—and I did consider this as an option—it was a rarity that would have made Lucy’s researching easier in a way instead of harder. And what would be the fun of making things easier for my plucky genealogist, right?

Even so, I still had to decide. Was my Civil War-era character lying about being a soldier in the war, or was he telling the truth? I’ll confess I didn’t truly know for a long time. I knew which way I hoped it would go, but in the end, I just kept writing and let the story work itself out. And I hope you’ll be happy with where it goes!

 As for the two men from the Smithsonian Magazine piece? Sure, the book would have told me which man fought in the Civil War and which one didn’t, but there’s also a part of me that doesn’t really want to know now. I kind of like thinking of it simply as the mystery I first read in 2013 that gave me a great premise for Fatal Family Ties in 2021. And to this particular mystery, I got to write the ending that satisfied me most.  

 

S.C. Perkins's Fatal Family Ties is the captivating third mystery in the Ancestry Detective series, in which Texas genealogist Lucy Lancaster deals with murders in both the past and present.

Lucy is just about to tuck into a plate of tacos at her favorite Austin joint, Big Flaco’s, when she gets an unexpected visit from her former―and least-favorite―co-worker. Camilla Braithwaite hasn’t gotten much friendlier since the last time Lucy saw her, but that doesn't stop her from asking a favor. In her hand is a newspaper feature on an ancestor, a civil war corporal―and a liar, according to the article. Charles Braithwaite is depicted as a phony and a deserter, and Camilla wants Lucy’s help clearing his name.

Lucy would prefer to spend her free time with her new beau, special agent Ben Turner, but takes the case, making no promises that Camilla will like the outcome of her investigation. Camilla leads Lucy to the Texas History Museum, where their first clue is a triptych painting, passed down in the Braithwaite family for generations, one panel of which has disappeared. But before Lucy can get much further, a member of the Braithwaite family is murdered in his own bed, and another panel of the painting found missing.

There are no shortage of suspects among the Braithwaite clan―including Camilla herself. This case will take Lucy to Houston and back again as she works to find the truth, and catch an elusive killer.

 

S.C. Perkins is a fifth-generation Texan who grew up hearing fascinating stories of her ancestry and eating lots of great Tex-Mex. Her first book, Murder Once Removed, was the winner of the 2017 Malice Domestic Best First Traditional Mystery competition, and an Agatha Award Nominee. She resides in Houston and, when she’s not writing, she’s likely outside in the sun or on the beach. 

DEBS: This is such a fascinating story! It makes me wish I knew if anyone in my family had fought in the Civil War, on either side.  REDS and readers, do you have Civil War veterans in your family   

#giveaway! STEPHANIE WILL GIVE A COPY OF FATAL FAMILY TIES TO A COMMENTER!  

And RED ALERT: the winner of Maddie Day's NO GRATER CRIME is Pat D. Email your snail mail address to Edith at edithmaxwell dot com.

The winner of Alyssa's MURDER AT WAKEHURST is Judi. Email your snail mail address to alyssamaxwellauthor at gmail dot com.

S.C. Perkins--Decoding My Fascination with World War II and Spy Craft

DEBORAH CROMBIE: What could be more fun than genealogy, Texas, and WWII spy craft, all in one book?? I loved S.C. Perkins' first Ancestry Detective Mystery with protagonist Lucy Lancaster, a Texas genealogist, but when I read the description of this second book, my finger hit the BUY button faster than you can say family tree!

What a perfect summer read! Here's Stephanie to tell us how all these elements came together.

S.C. PERKINS: I was five years old when World War II became something I recognized, courtesy of two of my father’s favorite television shows. One was Baa Baa Black Sheep, staring Robert Conrad and featuring the exploits of a misfit band of World War II fighter pilots in the South Pacific. The other was reruns of the sitcom Hogan’s Heroes, about American POWs who became resistance fighters while in a German prison camp. 

Thanks to my movie-loving mother, more wartime-set classics came into my life, from musicals like South Pacific, comedies such as Operation Petticoat, and, when I was a bit older, excellent dramas that included The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Great Escape, From Here to Eternity, and The Longest Day.

My interest in espionage also came from when I was very young and from what I saw on television. However, there was one scene from an otherwise fuzzy memory of a black-and-white show—so fuzzy I can’t remember the name of it—that truly launched my fascination with spy craft. The scene was of a spy finding a microdot hidden in a book.

Image courtesy of Pinterest

I was absolutely, completely stunned when I saw this. Was it really possible to reduce crucial information to the size of a printed period and hide it almost literally anywhere? Apparently it was, and since that moment, in my eyes, not even the coolest gadgets Q thought up in the James Bond films matched the power of the microdot.

What about codes and ciphers, you might ask? Oh, they’re on a level all their own! I’m enthralled by cryptography—though I confess I’m only interested in those types created and broken by humans as opposed to computers. (In fact, I would like to believe that, had I lived during World War II, I would have made an excellent codebreaker.)

So, since my main character, Lucy, is a genealogist, if you’re thinking I’m a certified history lover, you’d be right. Then add in my interest with World War II, spies, microdots, and cryptography? You’d better believe it I would be champing at the bit to put all of my loves into one book—and I decided I wanted to do so when I introduced Lucy’s beloved grandfather in Lineage Most Lethal. His name is George Lancaster, but Lucy calls him Grandpa.

To be honest, I thought about waiting a couple of books to introduce Grandpa, but I knew I couldn’t for a couple of reasons. One, because I was simply too excited. And the other? Well, sadly, it’s because members of the Greatest Generation are in their nineties now and passing away at an alarming rate. If Lucy were to conceivably have a World War II-era grandfather, I needed to introduce him now—and, boy, am I glad I did, because he was an absolute delight to write.

But there’s another reason I wanted Grandpa to be a World War II veteran, and that lies in the secret he’s kept from his family for over seventy-five years.

If you read my first book, Murder Once Removed, you might recall a small detail about the desk Lucy uses in her office located in downtown Austin, Texas. The desk belonged to Grandpa, a former reporter, and it has a large crosshatch carved into one corner.

I remember when I wrote that bit about the crosshatch, that it just sort of came out onto the page, unbidden. Lucy believes it was for Grandpa and his reporter buddies to play tic-tac-toe for beer money back in the day when things were slow. Yet, as soon as I wrote it, I knew it hadn’t been for tic-tac-toe—or, not usually. I now knew what secret Grandpa had been keeping:  he was an OSS spy, and that crosshatch was used to decipher a type of coded message called a Pigpen Cipher.

Also known as a Freemason’s Cipher, the Pigpen Cipher is a type of substitution cipher where symbols formed from the grid are used to represent letters in a secret message. This type of code goes back possibly to ancient times and has been used in one form or another by many groups, including the Knights Templar and Civil War soldiers.

 Image courtesy of Wikipedia

I also had great fun using two other types of code in Lineage Most Lethal, including Morse Code and a book cipher—where a book is used as the key text to both create and decode a message. And the book I chose as the key text for my book cipher? Well, let’s just say I had a great time deciding on another piece of espionage history for that plot point.

When it came to the specifics of the microdot and how and where Lucy would discover it, I considered paying homage to my fuzzy memory of the spy finding the microdot in a book. That was, until I happened to be perusing the International Spy Museum website while researching microdots. There, I saw a little notation about fountain pens becoming a spy gadget. I won’t give my plot away by saying how, but as soon as I read this, I knew I had to use it (though I did have to fudge the timeline just a bit).

There’s one fact that doesn’t need decoding, though:  I had as much fun researching and writing all the World War II and spy-craft information in Lucy’s second adventure as I did the genealogy. I hope you’ll enjoy reading it just as much!

Fun fact:  I actually used the real key text to create the book ciphers you’ll see in Lineage Most Lethal. I figured, if I were going to put all my favorite spy stuff in one book, I was going to go whole hog!

S.C. Perkins is a fifth-generation Texan who grew up hearing fascinating stories of her ancestry and eating lots of great Tex-Mex. Her first book, Murder Once Removed, was the winner of the 2017 Malice Domestic Best First Traditional Mystery competition, and an Agatha Award Nominee. She resides in Houston and, when she’s not writing, she’s likely outside in the sun or on the beach. You can find her at scperkins.com or on Twitter, Instagram, Goodreads, and Facebook at @SCPerkinsWriter.

DEBS: Oh, my, wasn't Robert Conrad dishy? And you know I absolutely could not resist a book that had a microdot hidden in a fountain pen! Tell us in the comments if you are fascinated by spy craft, and Stephanie will give a way a copy of Lineage Most Lethal to one lucky commenter!