Jungle Red Writers: Virginia Wine Country

DEBORAH CROMBIE: I am such a fan of Ellen Crosby's books that it's always an exciting day for me when there is a new one, and her 10th Wine Country Mystery is out this coming Tuesday! I love reading about Lucie Montgomery and her Virginia vineyard, and I especially love the title of this book, THE ANGEL'S SHARE. The "angel's share" is what is lost to evaporation as spirits age, and the term is also used in making scotch whisky.

Give me vineyards, a good crime, and history threaded through a contemporary story, and I am a happy reader!

ELLEN CROSBY:

I love Virginia, my adopted home state. Especially as a writer.

My wine country mysteries take place in a picturesque, idyllic region of the Old Dominion known as horse and hunt country where rolling hills, checkerboard fields, country lanes, and pretty villages are set against the backdrop of the dowager-humped Blue Ridge Mountains. It is a tradition-steeped, tweeds-and-jodhpurs kind of place where foxhunts, twilight summer polo, steeplechase races and hunt balls are important events marked on calendars. And there are vineyards—situated next to gated estates or abutting horse farms that raise Thoroughbreds bound for the Derby or the Olympics.

Though my series is set in the invented town of Atoka (population 64), I have located it next door to the charming village of Middleburg where streets are named for the signers of the Declaration of Independence because they were friends of the man who founded the town in 1787. Washington Street (named for George) is the main street, but once you leave town, it becomes Mosby’s Highway for the region’s most famous Civil War hero, Colonel John Singleton Mosby. Romantically known as the Gray Ghost for his success hiding from Union soldiers, Mosby and his Partisan Rangers crouched behind stacked stonewalls that crisscrossed fields and lined roads, tucked into hidey-holes under homes, or roosted up in trees. To this day folks swear that on moonless nights they see the Ghost riding across a field searching for Yankees.

So in addition to a picture-postcard setting, my little corner of Virginia has something else: history that is often more fascinating than anything I could invent. And sometimes the perfect historical nugget for the plot of a future book falls into my lap. In the case of THE ANGELS’ SHARE, the tenth Virginia wine country mystery, I had just finished giving a talk organized by a library at a local vineyard when a man came up to me and said, “Have you ever written a book about the Freemasons?” I told him I hadn’t and he slipped me his business card.

“You should,” he said.

Intrigued, I began to look into the Masons, knowing nothing except that they were a secretive male-only organization that sometimes wore unusual costumes and were supposedly tied to the founding of Washington, D.C. Before long my research led to the Jamestown Colony and stories of a cache of documents brought from London to Virginia by a relative of Sir Francis Bacon, who happened to be a famous Freemason.

Hidden under the bell tower of the Jamestown church, these documents were—again, supposedly—later moved to a vault under Bruton Parish Church, a still-functioning church in nearby Williamsburg. To allay claims of a cover-up and prove once and for all that there was no Bruton Vault, representatives of the church and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation dug up the churchyard—twice, in 1938 and 1992—looking for the documents. They never found anything. Detractors claim they dug in the wrong place. Or that John D. Rockefeller, the multimillionaire philanthropist who financed the restoration of Williamsburg in 1926, removed them himself.

Soon I was deep down a rabbit hole, finding websites asserting that everything from the Ark of the Covenant to a never-before-seen novel written by Francis Bacon containing Masonic principles incorporated into the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were among the hidden trove of items. Even more intriguing were claims Bacon was the real author of Shakespeare’s plays: the proof—pages in his handwriting—was also part of the secret cache. The last person to view the contents of Bruton Vault was Thomas Jefferson, who ordered it sealed permanently. Oh, yes, and the Ark of the Covenant may now be buried under National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.

Or so they say.

The story of Bruton Vault—a fantastical, National Treasure-type tale—was too irresistible not to write about. I gave it my own spin and in THE ANGELS’ SHARE Lucie Montgomery, my protagonist, searches for the killer of someone she believes discovered what really happened to the contents of the vault. The toughest part of writing this book—as you might imagine—was figuring out a believable and hopefully satisfying ending to a real-life mystery.

Which, of course, involved more research. So last fall, my husband and I spent a morning at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. where the former head of reference and two other librarians showed us First Folios and explained that almost nothing in Shakespeare’s handwriting exists anywhere. Though the Folger has the most extensive collection of First Folios in the world, the library owns a single document in Shakespeare’s handwriting: a real estate deed tied to one of his businesses. We were also told that at the Folger it’s universally believed that Shakespeare really did write Shakespeare.

The next day we drove down to Jamestown to meet with the senior historian at Historic Jamestowne, the archeological site of the settlement. As it happened, that day Hurricane Florence was making its way up the East Coast. Though the weather reports became progressively bleaker urging people to evacuate low-lying coastal areas (like Jamestown), our host was still game to give us a tour. For three hours, the three of us sat alone on benches where the original church had been located and walked through a deserted museum—everyone else had left—talking of hardships, starvation, and cannibalism as the sky grew blacker across the James River. We barely made it to the car when the rain started pelting down. The five-hour drive home to northern Virginia in a hurricane was unforgettable and harrowing.

The things I do for research.

By the time I had figured out how I was going to resolve what happened to the Bruton Vault in THE ANGELS’ SHARE, I was of mixed minds whether I believed it had ever existed or not. For one thing, there was too much information out there—too many stories spanning decades, even centuries—for it to have been made up out of whole cloth. Right?

So if it did exist, what happened to it? Where was it—or where is it?

Ellen Crosby pours up another corking mystery with The Angels' Share, an intriguing blend of secret societies, Prohibition bootleg wine, and potentially scandalous documents hidden by the Founding Fathers, all of which yield a vintage murder.

When Lucie Montgomery attends a Thanksgiving weekend party for friends and neighbors at Hawthorne Castle, an honest-to-goodness castle owned by the Avery family, the last great newspaper dynasty in America and owner of the Washington Tribune, she doesn’t expect the festive occasion to end in death.

During the party, Prescott Avery, the 95-year old family patriarch, invites Lucie to his fabulous wine cellar where he offers to pay any price for a cache of 200-year-old Madeira that her great-great-uncle, a Prohibition bootlegger, discovered hidden in the US Capitol in the 1920s. Lucie knows nothing about the valuable wine, believing her late father, a notorious gambler and spendthrift, probably sold or drank it. By the end of the party Lucie and her fiancé, winemaker Quinn Santori, discover Prescott’s body lying in his wine cellar. Is one of the guests a murderer?

As Lucie searches for the lost Madeira, which she believes links Prescott’s death to a cryptic letter her father owned, she learns about Prescott’s affiliation with the Freemasons. More investigating hints at a mysterious vault supposedly containing documents hidden by the Founding Fathers and a possible tie to William Shakespeare. If Lucie finds the long-lost documents, the explosive revelations could change history. But will she uncover a three hundred-year-old secret before a determined killer finds her?

ELLEN CROSBY is the author of the Virginia-set Wine Country Mystery series, which began with The Merlot Murders. She has also written a mystery series featuring international photojournalist Sophie Medina. Previously she worked as a freelance reporter for The Washington Post, as the Moscow correspondent for ABC News Radio, and as an economist at the United States Senate.

READERS, what do you think? Hidden wine, secret vaults, could they exist?