How to Do Historical Research @SKGoldenwrites

 LUCY BURDETTE: I met Sarah (SK) Golden in Key West this winter and realized we are both published by Crooked Lane Books. Of course I wanted her to meet you—Welcome to the blog SK!

S.K GOLDEN: It’s taken me three books to do it, but I think I’ve finally got a good grip on how to do historical research. Not a great grip, mind you. Not very firm. But I’m hanging on, and I’m doing my best.

I’m fortunate that my cozy mysteries are set in the late 1950s – there’s lots of information available about that time, from movies and tv shows, to friends I’ve made that lived through the era. The bigger events have, of course, been easier to include because they left such a big impression. 1958 is right between the Korean War and the Vietnam War. Russia has launched a satellite into space. Eisenhower throws the first Halloween party at the White House. That last one might only have been a big deal to me, but, whatever. These things have been easy to research for my work. I have a newspapers.com subscription, and it has paid for itself many times over now. 

What has been a bit of a struggle has been the small details.

I found out what rent in Yonkers for a small apartment would’ve cost by reading a memoir. That wasn’t even why I read the memoir. I read it to help me get the feel of the time beyond what I was seeing in Marilyn Monroe movies. The memoir gave me lots of other details about the late fifties: like handheld cameras were becoming a thing thanks to Zunow and Bolex, so photographers had more options than the flashbulb-heavy styles used by the press; what types of alcohol were popular; and which automat had the best coffee. But the biggest help was the small sentence about rent.

The answer is $29 a month, by the way.

Fashion is a big focus in my books. My main character, a twenty-one-year-old agoraphobe who lost her mother at a young age, uses her appearance as a way to manage her anxiety. She can’t control the things that happen around her, but darn it, she can make sure her shoes and her belt are a perfect match, and her nail polish isn’t chipped.

One of the best things I’ve found to help me write about 1950s fashion so my sleuth can stop her freakouts comes in the form a Sears catalogue. Actually, it’s multiple Sears catalogues from the ‘50s combined into one edited volume by Joanne Olian. I love that thing. It has saved me so much time. Instead of searching Pinterest for hours trying to make sure the outfit I’ve found is era-accurate, I can flip a few pages and pick. It even gives item descriptions! It’s been great not only for my main character, but for my side characters, too.

This should come as a great relief to the – now two – readers who have emailed to let me know that my use of the word ‘pantyhose’ is anachronistic by several months.

As I said at the beginning, my grip on historical research is getting stronger all the time.

 Is there a small detail from the past that you find fascinating? Like, the price of rent in 1958, or the first White House Halloween party? Or maybe the scandal of pantyhose arriving before their time?

S.K. Golden is the author of the Pinnacle Hotel cozy mystery series. Born and raised in the Florida Keys, she married a commercial fisherman. The two of them still live on the islands with their five kids (one boy, four girls — including identical twins!), two cats, and a corgi named Goku. Sarah graduated from Saint Leo University with a bachelor’s degree in Human Services and Administration and has put it to good use approximately zero times. She’s worked as a bank teller, a pharmacy technician, and an executive assistant at her father’s church. Sarah is delighted to be doing none of those things now. Follow her across all platforms @skgoldenwrites.

Allison Montcliar on Words, Words, Words

DEBORAH CROMBIE: One of my favorite new mystery series (as in immediately pre-order in print as soon as I see there's a new book coming!) in the last few years has been the Sparks and Bainbridge books by Allison Montclair. 

I love the fascinating post-WWII London setting, and I love Iris Sparks and Gwendolyn Bainbridge's complicated lives and relationships, but most of all I love the witty banter between the two protagonists. I'm happy to say that the 5th Sparks and Bainbridge, THE LADY FROM BURMA, is every bit as delightful as the previous books.

Of course those of us in on the secret know that Allison is actually Alan Gordon, who's joining us today to talk about something we've never really explored on the blog--

Words, Words, Words

 

by Allison Montclair,

AKA Alan Gordon

 

            When I first began to write mystery novels, it never occurred to me that the word count mattered. I went in more or less following the sage advice of the King of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland: ““Begin at the beginning … and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”

            My first published book [writing under my actual name] came in around 73,000+ words. To my happy surprise, sequels were wanted. However, buried several paragraphs into my brand, spanking new contracts, were minimum word counts of 80,000.

            I had no idea this was a thing, and having already engaged in pre-sequel panic (Can I do this again? What if it’s worse than the first book? Do I have to give the money back?), this became one more set of worries. What if I fall short? What if I end up padding the writing to stagger across the finish line? I found myself channelling Lucy Van Pelt from the great “Book Report” song in “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.”: “And they were very, very, very, very, very, very happy to be home.”

            Fortunately, I was able to make the adjustment, and as the series continued, 80K became a thing of ease. I even surpassed 100k words on one book, and not a single one was padding. I still consider that one my best published work.

            Eighty thousand words took on a particular feel for me. It had a rhythm to it. As the word count from each finished chapter was added to the total, I had a sense of where I was in the storyline, and where I needed to go. I am not a detailed outliner, tending to chapter outlines with a few sentences for each, so the 80K rhythm becme essential.

            Then I started the Sparks and Bainbridge series — and the new contracts came in with an 85,000 word minimum!

            What? Wait, when did this become a thing? I mean, I had been delivering books that length in the old series, but only because I wanted to. Now, I had to.

            Grumbling ensued on the part of the author.

            But that was the gig, so I let it flow, tried not to worry about it, and hit my mark on the first book, as well as every one since then.

            It does feel different. Not longer, necessarily, but a different rhythm than the first series. Adjustments were made. And it led to one interesting writing adventure. When I was working on the fourth book, An Unkept Woman, I was about halfway through the first draft when I checked on the word count and realized that I wasn’t going to reach the minimum. Not by a long shot. I thought about it for a while, and came up with another plot line to fold into what I already had, involving a potential threat from another source. I went back to the beginning and rewrote, setting it up.

            The end result not only passed the 85k mark, but the book itself became my personal favorite of the series. And it was the required minimum that spurred that creativity on.

            Mystery novels, by and large, are not epic tomes. They have for me a rough three act structure: Crime, Investigation, Solution, and shouldn’t run too long if one is to maintain the tension. There are, of course, exceptions. Iain Pears’s An Instance of the Fingerpost clocked in at a massive 691 pages in hardcover. It also blew me away, with its tale told by four, count ‘em! four different unreliable narrators. By comparison, my longest work, the aforementioned 100,000+ one, came at 304 pages in hardcover. Agatha Christie’s longest mystery under her own name is Sparkling Cyanide, which comes in at 288 pages in the paperback. (Her longest book Giant’s Bread, was under her Mary Westmacott pseudonym. I haven’t read it, but it doesn’t sound like a mystery.)

            I don’t know how other writers have to deal with this (Jungle Red folks, please chime in!). But as a good writer should, I have saved the final twist for the end. Sparks and Bainbridge #7 will be published by a different company. And for the first time in my career, I have a word count —- MAXIMUM!

            Conceptually, this has an entirely different feel. What if I rush the ending? If I fall in love with a plot line that needs more time to unfold? What if I have to cut something I really, really like?

            Lucy Van Pelt, I invoke your spirit. Tell me that the Book Doctor is in to give me advice!

            I have your five cents fee ready.

 

          Allison Montclair is the pseudonym of Alan Gordon. As Allison, she writes the Sparks and Bainbridge mysteries, beginning with THE RIGHT SORT OF MAN (The ALA Reading List Council’s Best Mystery of 2019). Set in 1946 London, the books detail the adventures and struggles of two women trying to run a licensed marriage bureau. The fifth book, THE LADY FROM BURMA, was released this past July.

            As Alan, he has written the Fools’ Guild mysteries, beginning with THIRTEENTH NIGHT, featuring a 13th century pair of married jesters; WHERE WEREWOLVES FEAR TO TREAD, a darn fine werewolf novel; numerous short stories in different genres; and is also a librettist/lyricist for several musicals which have either been performed or workshopped around the country. He has won the Kleban Prize, received honorable mentions for The Best American Mystery Stories and The Best American Science Fiction Stories, and has been on “The Moth Radio Hour” telling the truth, among other accomplishments.

            He has subsidized all of this as a public defender in NYC for nearly 39 years.

 

THE LADY FROM BURMA

 

               London, 1946. Gwendolyn Bainbridge: Aristocrat, war widow, co-proprietor of The Right Sort Marriage Bureau — and a ward of the Crown ever since her husband’s death drove her into an asylum. Now, the long-awaited and long-dreaded date for her petition before the Court of Lunacy has been set. The last thing she needs is another murder investigation falling into her lap, but that is precisely what she gets when the Lady From Burma comes to their office, seeking a new wife for her husband, then turns up dead a few days later in Epping Forest. Along with her partner, Iris Sparks, Gwen is dragged into a case she never wanted, and more will die before it’s over and done with.

DEBS: My first book came in around 70,000 words, if I remember correctly. I had no idea there was such a thing as word count! The next few were a little longer, then the books got a LOT longer. A KILLING OF INNOCENTS was 96,000 words after I cut 100 pages from the manuscript, and it's not the longest book I've written.

REDs, do you try to work to a word target?

READERS, do you have a preferred length of book? Is this something you think about when choosing a book to read?

And readers, stop in with more questions for Alan, who will be stopping in to visit!

Charles Todd--An Irish Hostage

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Summer is really here! There's a new Bess Crawford novel from Charles Todd, an event I look forward to every year! Now I just need a little vacation day so that I can read it straight through!

For those who aren't familiar with the series, "Charles Todd" is mother/son writing partners Caroline and Charles, and they write two series, one featuring Scotland Yard Inspector Ian Rutledge, set after WWI, and one featuring English nurse Bess Crawford, set during the war--and now after .

This 12th Bess Crawford novel sees the war over and Bess trying to chart a new course for herself. It takes her to Ireland for the first time. I wanted to know what drew the Todds to Ireland in this complicated post-war period. (Every time I learn even a little about Irish history, I realize how much I don't know.) Caroline explains:

CAROLINE TODD: Bess Crawford took us to the Great War to show how women stepped up to do their bit.  We followed her through the worst of the fighting to the Armistice and the Peace Treaty—even to the tragedy of men who were to become the long term wounded…

But there was one story we hadn’t told—that of the Irish Troubles—because it was a problem that wouldn’t go away for much of the 20th century.

The Irish had been struggling to find a path to home rule, and London made promises, but nothing seemed to come of it.  When war was declared in 1914, Irishmen enlisted in the British Army, in the hope that their service would be rewarded when it was over—dying for Britain in the worst of the fighting.

But others felt this was not going to move London—and the Easter 1916 Rising in Dublin sent Irishmen into the streets to take their freedom with armed insurrection. It was put down, the ringleaders executed—and people who had had mixed feelings about the Rising suddenly found themselves supporting the Cause.

And when the soldiers who had fought for Britain in France returned, they were treated not as heroes, but as traitors, shunned by their own people.

Into this turmoil, Bess is asked to stand up for Eileen, the Irish nurse who nearly died when Britannic went down in A Duty to the Dead. She has healed, her fiancé has just come home from France—and she wants to be married in Ireland in spite of high feelings against both of them.  But Bess’s family is worried for her safety, and the only way they can see for her to travel is by aircraft. In and out for the wedding….

But it doesn’t quite work out as everyone hopes!

And before she knows it, Bess is involved in kidnapping, murder, no idea where to put her trust, and even dragged to a prison cell!

She feels a duty to help those caught in the middle of what is happening—and learns something about her own heart—but how she can save others when she herself is threatened?

DEBS: There is a great flying scene in the beginning of the book, and of course I thought of Caroline and Charles' adventure going up in a biplane. 

 Now I call that serious research!

But I've never been to Ireland, and I want to know more about their Irish background. Caroline and Charles, is Bess's friend's village a real place? Did you get all the material you needed for this book before the pandemic? Tell us more!

 And REDS and readers, have you visited Ireland?

Jess Montgomery Celebrates Powerful Women

DEBORAH CROMBIE: How perfect is it that we have a new book from Jess Montgomery right smack dab in the middle of Women's History Month? You certainly had to be a strong woman to be a sheriff in Ohio in 1925, like Jess's character Lily Ross. And I absolutely love the connections she's made in her new book, THE STILLS, to a real-life powerful woman.

 

Here's Jess to tell you more! (And what a stunning cover!)

JESS MONTGOMERY: Since I’ve been writing the Kinship Historical Mysteries, I’ve received many comments that they feature strong women. Hurrah! I love to write, and read, about strong women.

The heart of the series is Lily Ross, the sheriff of Bronwyn County in 1925, in the Appalachian region of Ohio. Lily is inspired by Ohio’s true first female sheriff, Maude Collins.

In THE STILLS, the third outing set in 1927, Prohibition comes to the forefront of the story, with Lily's nemesis--bootlegger George Vogel--setting up a dangerous, deadly operation right in Bronwyn County. Lily's co-narrator for this novel is Fiona--George's new wife, and a former member of the Kinship community. Though Lily and Fiona have very different means, and thus on the surface are complete opposites, they desire the same end: control over their own lives.

Into this volatile showdown, I couldn’t help but include another real-life woman: U.S. Assistant Attorney General Mabel Walker Willebrandt, the highest-ranking woman in federal government in her day. And she wasn’t an obscure figure. Partly because of her unusual role as a woman (Mabel was the second woman to receive an appointment to Assistant Attorney General, but the first served only a few months, and Mabel served from 1921 to 1929), and partly because she spoke frequently and made the news often, Mabel was very well known across the country.

Her job was to ensure that the laws of the Volstead act, set up to give teeth to Prohibition, were enforced. That included, in part, overseeing the newly formed Bureau of Prohibition. (Previously, a Prohibition Unit fell under the Bureau of Internal Revenue, but in 1927, the unit was elevated into its own bureau.)

Though Mabel personally opposed Prohibition, she did believe in the rule of law, and that it should be enforced for everyone. Her virtuous view didn’t win her a lot of friends—in spite of some spectacular successes in taking down bootleggers and crime bosses—even among those who supposedly, as far as the public was concerned, supported the law. She was given some fairly harsh nicknames at the time—Prohibition Portia and Mrs. Firebrand among them. (The latter was particularly unkind, given that she was divorced—another unusual act for a woman back then.)

Because the Anti-Saloon League was headquartered in Westerville, Ohio (where there is now a museum for the league), which is not too far northeast of where Lily lives and works, it occurred to me that it would be viable for Mabel to have a speaking tour that would include Kinship. And since Lily is working with a Bureau agent in her confrontation with George Vogel (and in real life, Mabel came into conflict with George Remus), I delighted in bringing them together for a brief meeting.

Even at the start of THE STILLS, Lily is nervous about meeting Mabel. And yet, though Lily also believes in the rule of law, she is uncomfortable with how the particular laws of Prohibition are carried out:

“Lily thinks of a quote from Wayne Wheeler, an advocate from the Anti-Saloon League, headquartered just northeast of here near Columbus, Ohio’s state capitol. He’d said, The government is under no obligation to furnish the people with alcohol that is drinkable when the Constitution prohibits it. The person who drinks this industrial alcohol is a deliberate suicide. . . .

The quote, reported far and wide and in her local newspaper just last month, had so horrified Lily that it stuck with her, word for word. It could only be deliberate if the drinker was fully informed. She finds the law requiring deadly methanol to be added to industrial alcohol to

be reprehensible, no matter the twisted logic defending it. Maybe, when she meets Mabel Walker Willebrandt, she’ll ask how a government that’s supposed to help and educate people could do such a thing.”

Does Lily confront Mabel with such a question? Well, you’ll have to read THE STILLS to find out!

In the meantime, it’s clear that Lily, Mabel, and even Fiona, are all strong women in their own, unique ways.

One reason I like to write about strong women (and strive to be one, myself) is because of the role models of strong women in my family I still look back on: My Aunts Opal and May, my Grandmother Lou, to name a few. And there are celebrities who I admire as strong women—Dolly Parton immediately comes to mind.

How about you? Do you think of strong women from your family, your community or even history or popular culture when you need a dose of encouragement and strength?

Leave a comment, and one Jungle Red reader’s name will be drawn at random to receive a copy of THE STILLS.

 

 Jess Montgomery is the author of the Kinship Historical Mystery Series published by Minotaur Books. The Stills is the most recent title in the series, inspired by Ohio's true first female sheriff in 1925. Set in the Appalachian region, the series draws on themes of workers' rights and women's roles, and has garnered several awards, including the Ohioana Book Awards Readers' Choice in Fiction for 2020. She is also the Level Up Your Writing (Life) columnist for Writer's Digest Magazine, and the Literary Life columnist for the Dayton Daily News.

There's more about THE STILLS here.

 

Life Then and Now by Peg Cochran

LUCY BURDETTE: Today I'm delighted to welcome a good friend from the Mystery Lovers Kitchen blog, Peg Cochran. Besides being a wonderful cook, she writes multiple series, including a historical mystery series taking place in the 1930s. I'll let her tell you about the new book--welcome Peg!

PEG COCHRAN: I want to thank Lucy and the Jungle Reds for having me.  I’ve long admired the blog so this is a great honor!

My historical series, Murder, She Reported, is set in the late 1930s in New York City.  Both my parents grew up in New York City and became teenagers during those years.  I’ve been fascinated with the 1930s and 1940s since I heard their stories of eating at the Automat or Chock Full O’Nuts, listening to Tommy Dorsey and Glen Miller and dancing the jitterbug.   I’ve also always been a huge fan of old movies and at one time I was positive that I’d grow up to live in a Manhattan high-rise with a view of the city and a martini glass in my hand! (I did eventually live in Manhattan with a view of Queens but sans the martinis—I hated the taste.)  One of the things I love about the time period is how different it is from today…and yet how similar in many ways.  

Much of the action in Murder, She Encountered, the third book in the series, takes place at the 1939 New York World’s Fair—billed as the “World of Tomorrow.”   

Carrier debuted air conditioning at the fair and became a very popular attraction during the sweltering summer heat.  Dupont previewed nylon stockings that were less expensive and more durable than silk hosiery and the Westinghouse exhibit included Elektro—a seven-foot tall robot with a 700 word vocabulary.  We now take air conditioning, nylon pantyhose and robots—used for everything from manufacturing to surgery—for granted.

A lot of what I learned during my research helped to shape my characters and create an exciting story.  Take one upper-class woman who graduated from Wellesley College and who wants to do something with her life and put her in a time period when she is expected to live at home until she lands a suitable husband and moves into her own home to raise a family, host dinner parties and lunch with her girlfriends—and watch the explosions occur and the sparks fly!   

From the beginning, Elizabeth “Biz” Adams has other plans.  She’d studied photography and much to her mother’s dismay, lands a job at the Daily Trumpet, a tabloid newspaper where she starts as a gal Friday and eventually becomes a crime photographer and a woman working in a man’s world.

Women like Biz fought the good fight for the rest of us who now have opportunities unheard of in her time although we are still battling certain issues like equal pay or the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment or validation of the #MeToo movement.

In Biz’s day there were distinct divisions between the classes—upper class women marry within their social class—an appropriate young man in banking, law or medicine who knows how to play tennis and bridge and knows who and how much to tip at restaurants like the Stork Club.  

Biz again bucks expectations by falling for Sal Marino, a NYC detective who she met while photographing a murder.  Not only is he not from her social class, he’s Italian, his parents are immigrants and they live on the lower Eastside instead of the upper Eastside of Manhattan—all strikes against him in the eyes of Biz’s parents and friends.

America tended toward isolationism at the time—a committee called America First was formed toward the end of the 1930s.  In May of 1939, more than 900 Jews fled Hitler’s Europe aboard the S. S. St. Louis seeking asylum in the United States but were not permitted entry into the country.  Biz is appalled that these poor souls were turned away while the prevailing view was that the United States ought to curtail immigration.  Today we are still striving to regulate immigration and provide a fair and equitable process for those seeking sanctuary within our borders.

All of this, as you can imagine, created a lot of (delicious) conflict between Biz and her parents and friends.  But like Katherine Hepburn, a leading lady of the time who insisted on wearing trousers when most women didn’t, Biz is determined to live life on her own terms and not be bound by the restrictions of the era. 

In Murder, She Encountered, her romance with Marino is heating up and she is saving money for her own apartment—all bound to send her friends and family into a tizzy!

Red readers: If you had lived in the 1930s, would you have conformed to expectations or would you have rebelled like Biz?

Mystery writing lets Peg indulge her curiosity under the guise of “work” (aka research). As a kid, she read the entire set of children’s encyclopedias her parents gave her and has been known to read the dictionary. She put pen to paper at age seven when she wrote plays and forced her cousins to perform them at Christmas dinner. She switched to mysteries when she discovered the perfect hiding place for a body down the street from her house.

When she’s not writing, she spends her time reading, cooking, spoiling her granddaughter and checking her books’ stats on Amazon. A former Jersey girl, Peg now resides in Michigan with her husband. She is the author of the Murder, She Reported series, the Cranberry Cove series, the Farmer’s Daughter series, the Gourmet De-Lite series, the Lucille series and the Sweet Nothing Lingerie series (written as Meg London.) Find her on Facebook and her website.

**And the winners of Tuesday's books are Daisy Dilly (Vicki) for Sherry Harris's SELL LOW, SWEET HARRIET, and MARILYN (ewatvess) for Barbara Ross's SEALED OFF. 

THE WIDOWS: A Visit to a 1920s Appalachia Mystery with Jess Montgomery

LUCY BURDETTE: We're so excited to be hosting Jess Montgomery and her brand new release, THE WIDOWS. You might know Jess as Sharon Short, who's written a wonderful novel MY ONE SQUARE INCH OF ALASKA, along with several mystery series and many essays and humor columns. But this month she's here to talk about her new historical mystery, written as Jess Montgomery. Welcome Jess!

JESS MONTGOMERY: I’m a child of Appalachia—both sides of my family of origin go back generation after generation after generation deep in the hills and hollers (as we pronounced ‘hollows’) in Eastern Kentucky. However, I grew up in a region of Ohio that’s geographically outside the Appalachian foothills of southeastern Ohio—a first-generation “Buckeye,” as I was often teased as a child.

Yet, the dynamics of growing up in an Appalachian family shaped me far more than actual location of birth. I grew up steeped in Appalachian lore, dialect, food, attitudes, customs, crafts, music. When I was in high school, I wrote a musical, “Just an Old Ballad,” inspired by the Appalachian ballads I’d grown up learning—ballads that often centered around heartache and sorrow and, yes, murder. “Pearl Bryant,” a variation of the ballad more commonly known as “Pearl Bryan” was one of the songs my Mamaw taught me. The opening verse as I learned it from my Mamaw:

Down, down in yonder valley

Where flowers fade and bloom

Lies our own Pearl Bryant

A-mouldering in her tomb…

Probably not the lyrics an eight-year-old girl ought to learn from her grandmother, but though I couldn’t have described it this way as a young kid, I was enchanted by the ballad’s intrigue, the striking imagery and lovely though dramatic words, the haunting melody and mournful rhythms.

I loved singing it while helping Mamaw wind skeins of thread or yarn for her crocheting projects. Such songs—along with quilts, and soup beans and corn pone for supper, and observing aunts and uncles barter tomatoes and canned goods back and forth at the end of each summer, and trips ‘back home’ (as my parents called it even decades after moving north for factory work) to the land where my family members were tobacco and subsistence farmers—formed the backdrop of my childhood.

So perhaps, knowing I wanted to be a writer, and being fairly proficient as a pianist and guitarist, it’s not all that amazing that I wrote a musical play inspired by this backdrop and the ballads I’d learned: “Just an Old Ballad.”

What was amazing is that my school’s drama teacher allowed me to produce and direct it. Even more amazing—I cast in the lead male role a young man who I’d later date and marry. Thirty-plus years later, we’re still happily married—a pretty great outcome for a self-penned and produced high school musical!

But in the middle-class, suburban high school I attended, the audience of my peers was a bit less than, well, receptive. It wasn’t just that the tunes I wrote were pretty amateurish. (I was 17, after all.) I think the dialect and subject matter and characters were odd and jarring to them.

As years went by, I never wrote directly about Appalachian characters. Looking back, I was probably somewhat burned by the reception of my murder-mystery/love-story musical. I’ve always felt a bit at odds with where I fit—not geographically born into Appalachia, and yet formed by the region more deeply than where I actually was born and grew up.

Then, a few years ago, we were planning our first trip to visit our younger daughter for her birthday weekend at Ohio University, in Athens County, Ohio—the Appalachian foothills. I ran across a tourism website for Vinton County (just southwest of Athens County), which featured Maude Collins, Ohio’s true first female sheriff in 1925 after her husband was killed in the line of duty while writing a speeding ticket. Maude worked as her husband’s jail matron in the small jail attached to the county-owned sheriff’s house, where they lived with their five children. The story goes that Maude was packing up to go back to her parents in West Virginia when the county commissioners came by and asked, “Where you goin’, Maude,” and then further inquired as to whether she’d fill out her husband’s term. She would and did, and in 1926, was elected in her own right as sheriff—in a landslide.

My imagination immediately went to work: what if great mystery surrounded the murder of the sheriff? What if he was allegedly killed by a prisoner he was transporting—and that prisoner supposedly ran off? What if his widow didn’t accept that easy explanation, but did accept the role of sheriff—just so she could investigate his murder?

And so, Lily Ross came into being. Along with an unlikely ally—Marvena Whitcomb, herself a widow after her common law husband dies in a coal mining cave in, a union organizer, and a childhood friend of Lily’s husband—Lily sets to investigating the murder. Their sleuthing plays out against a backdrop of women’s rights, worker’s rights, union miners sparring with management, coal mining, and prohibition.

But the setting—1920s Appalachia—is as much a character in the story as Lily and Marvena.

So at last, I could come full circle and embrace my Appalachian roots in my writing—lore, dialect, food, attitudes, customs, crafts, music. More importantly, as I shaped the strong female cast of THE WIDOWS, I particularly drew on the paternal side of my family of origin—my grandmother, aunts, great aunts, and a cousin—and memories of their quiet strength, their traditions. I thought about travelling with my parents down winding roads, deep in the night, to finally come to my grandma’s tiny house, set on a sloped lawn that bloomed with purple phlox in the spring. In any season, she always had some treat waiting for me—a slice of pie, or of her delicious dried-apple stack cake, or sorghum cookies, and a big glass of fresh cold milk. I didn’t live with her, but somehow, each visit with her deep in the heart of Appalachia felt like coming home.

Though THE WIDOWS is fully a story of my imagination, its threads include not just the inspiration of Maude, but the inspiration of these deep roots. Writing it, in many ways, feels like finally coming home.


For Jess, that dried-apple stack cake evoked a sense of "home." What food, person, or activity most evokes home for you?

About the Book: Set in the coal-mining town of Kinship, Ohio in 1925, The Widows is about two women from different worlds, whose lives collide when the man they both love is found murdered. When Lily Ross learns that her husband, Daniel Ross, Kinship’s widely respected sheriff, has been killed while transporting a prisoner, she is devastated and vows to avenge his death.  Hours after his funeral, a stranger appears at her door.  Marvena Whitcomb, a hardscrabble coal miner’s widow, is unaware that Daniel has been killed, and begs to speak with him about her missing daughter. In the course of their encounter, these two women—who live only miles apart but come from entirely different worlds—realize that Daniel was not the man they believed him to be—and that his murder is far more complex than either of them could have imagined. In order to uncover the truth, Lily and Marvena must work together and eventually learn to trust one another if they are going to find Daniel’s killer—and save their community.  While The Widows is a work of fiction, the plot was inspired by the true stories of two women: Maude Collins, the first female sheriff in the state of Ohio, whose husband died in the line of duty under mysterious circumstances in 1925, and by Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, the prominent labor and community organizer. The Widows explores the dangers of coal mining, the history of unionization, and the struggle for women’s rights.

THE WIDOWS (writing as Jess Montgomery), published by Minotaur Books, January 8, 2019
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Charles Todd--A Forgotten Place

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Two of the highlights in my year are the releases of two new Charles Todd novels, one featuring Scotland Yard inspector Ian Rutledge in the winter, and one featuring WWI battlefield nurse Bess Crawford in the fall. Which means--There is a new Bess Crawford book, A FORGOTTEN PLACE !!!

And it's fabulous!! For those of you who don't know, "Charles Todd" is the mother/son writing team of Charles and Caroline Todd. I have been fans of the Todds since long before I met them, and now, even though they are dear friends and fellow Anglophiles and I have some idea how their writing process works, their books never cease to amaze me. A FORGOTTEN PLACE  is no exception.

The Todds have been kind enough to answer some questions for us today, but first, here's a snippet about the book to put our discussion in context:

The Armistice has been signed, and WWI is finally over. A battlefield nurse now attending war wounded amputees, Bess Crawford watches the despair Captain Williams feels for his wounded men.  The Captain worries that peace will do what war couldn’t—take their lives by suicide. For these men, there are no parades, no cheers. When they are sent home at last, their injuries prevent them from returning to the mines where they once made their living.  When the Captain’s letters become increasing depressed, Bess requests leave and goes to that bleak coal mining village to help. But she arrives too late. His men dead, Captain Williams has left the valley and Bess fears he too will find a way to end his own life. 

Finally, Bess tracks him to an isolated, storm-battered Welsh peninsula; a harsh and forgotten place where secrets and death go hand in hand. Once there, Bess realizes she is stranded—and in mortal danger. A rising death toll and the hostility of a village in possession of a lethal secret shut her in, as winter storms cut her off from any escape.

 In a place with no Constable, with the Captain and his wary sister-in-law her only allies, Bess is in a race against time to stop a murderer driven to kill again and again. And she must take care not to put the Captain and his brother’s widow at risk even as the villagers themselves begin to take the law into their own hands. The sense of urgency heightens as Bess fears the next person in a killer’s sights is Simon Brandon, searching for Bess and unaware of his danger. Meanwhile, not a soul in England knows where she is…

DEBS: I don't want to make this book sound depressing, because it's absolutely not, just gripping and moving. But I cried all the way through the opening scenes, where Bess is working with the injured soldiers in the clinic. How do you two explore these wrenching circumstances without feeling overwhelmed by the suffering of the characters?

CAROLINE:  Sometimes it’s awfully hard to write about real pain, something that affects real people. When the fighting ended in the last Bess, A CASUALTY OF WAR, and through her own tears, Bess saw that the doctor standing beside her was crying too, I realized that I was also crying.  But that’s how some people met the sudden quiet when the guns fell silent—the relief was too powerful for words. It was the hopelessness of shattered men that moved us at the beginning of A FORGOTTEN PLACE, because it had happened in real life. And here it becomes Bess’s motivation for all that follows.   

CHARLES:  Caroline’s right—it’s not easy to write a lot of scenes.  But my experience is, you have to know what your characters are going through.  If you don’t,  if you can’t feel for them and with them, it comes across all wrong. If Bess hadn’t felt deeply about what those wounded men had lost, she wouldn’t have cared enough to go to Wales. And the reader must feel that pain along with her, if they’re to respect her decision to help when no one else would. 

DEBS: How do you come across such interesting settings? The part of Wales where most of the story takes place--the "forgotten place" is somewhere I'd never even heard of. But it was fascinating, and sounds so beautiful. Is it still that isolated now?

CAROLINE:  It’s a national park now, protected and still rather isolated. We took a trip to southern Wales, expecting to see castle ruins, picturesque headlands, and even the coal valleys, which are green once more.  It was an area we hadn’t really explored, and we were excited about that. But we didn’t anticipate writing about it.  To our surprise, a short story, THE TROPHY, which appeared in Alfred Hitchcock and then this Bess came from the trip. Once we saw that bay, so pristine in the sunlight, and heard stories about the storms and what had once happened there, we knew we’d found the right setting for PLACE.

CHARLES:  As you know so well in your own books, you can walk around a corner or turn down a country lane, and there’s the perfect setting, sometimes when you least expect it.  It just draws you in, and you begin to see things there.  A place to find a body, characters with their secrets, a village past that can be woven into the motive for murder.  And the more you investigate, the more potential you find. It’s why you go to England and why we do as well. There’s nothing like walking the ground.  It just catches the imagination.

DEBS; Which brings me to my next question. This book had a very different feel to me than the previous Bess books. Bess is usually, like Ian Rutledge, moving about a good deal, often back and forth between England and France, to London, to Somerset, even to Paris. But this book feels very confined, almost claustrophobic, with Bess being stranded in this remote part of Wales. Was that deliberate, or something that just grew out of the story? It's a great device for increasing tension.

CAROLINE:  We never know until we get there just where Bess’s story is going to take her. The question in Paris was, without her usual support team, could she manage to find a spy on her own?  And she discovered some really interesting new people to help her. When we started PLACE, we knew we’d go to the coal mines, because that’s where the men under Captain Williams had come from.  Then we realized that his story—and therefore Bess’s—couldn’t be finished there.  It held too many memories for him.  But that isolated village on the bay, where both he and Bess were strangers, put them at odds with people desperate to protect a way of life that was all they’d known.  And there was no one to help Bess as matters escalated.  It tested Rachel, it tested Hugh, and it tested Bess, all in different ways because they had to draw on their own strengths if they were to survive. The claustrophobia in the setting echoed their own sense of isolation. 

CHARLES:  Some of the best stories come out of what makes people tick. That’s why we call our books psychological suspense rather than historical mysteries. You’re looking at people who see their world in danger of being changed forever by a stranger, and some are willing to go to any lengths to protect what they have. The question is, where can you put your trust, when you don’t know who is a threat and who isn’t?  And that was the dilemma Bess faced in a place she couldn’t escape and yet couldn’t make sense of.

DEBS: And of course, everyone wants a hint of what's next for Bess. And Simon!

CAROLINE and CHARLES:  Well, the war is over now, and Bess will be sent to France to evaluate a situation for one of the Matrons high up in the hierarchy of the Queen Alexandra’s. What appears to be a rather straightforward mission is anything but, and while the Allied powers are trying to hammer out the Treaty of Versailles that will bring the war to an official end, Bess begins to look at her future for the first time.  After all, by Victorian standards, where girls married at eighteen, Bess would be considered a spinster! Does she want to continue in nursing in a civilian hospital? Stay in London at Mrs. Hennessey’s?  Go home to her parents in Somerset?  What she begins to realize, as she once more deals with life and death, is that her own life has been on hold for four years, and now it is she, not the Queen Alexandra’s, who must choose where it will go from here.  And Simon has some decisions to make as well…

DEBS: Oh, I can't wait! And as I've been lucky enough to get a sneak peek at the THE BLACK ASCOT, the Rutledge book coming out in February,  I will just have to read it again. It's that good.

Charles and Caroline will be stopping in to chat and answer questions about Bess and their writing, so please say hello!

Charles and Caroline Todd are a mother-and-son writing team who live on the east coast of the United States. Caroline has a BA in English Literature and History, and a Masters in International Relations. Charles has a BA in Communication Studies with an emphasis on Business Management, and a culinary arts degree that means he can boil more than water.

Ann Parker talks about Objects of Desire

RHYS BOWEN: Ann Parker has been one of my long-time friends in the mystery community and we've done many events together. I adore her Leadville historical mysteries, filled with so many real characters and real happenings that you feel you are there.

I wonder how many stories start with a found object, or a found photograph? They've certainly sparked ideas for me, as they have for Ann. And what better excuse to collect things in the name of research! Welcome to Jungle Red, Ann.

ANN PARKER: Objects of Desire, or Confessions of an eBay Addicted Historical Author

My fascination with historical objects goes waaaaay back, to when I was but a young’un (pre-teen, at least), digging through my grandparents’ basements full of dusty boxes and ancient traveling trunks. I’d marvel over the treasure within: beautiful fans, old tintypes, elegant hats, indecipherable letters written in faded ink, worn buttontop shoes… the list goes on.

So, perhaps it’s no surprise that I browse brick-and-mortar antique stores and eBay when doing research for my Silver Rush historical mystery series. From antique stores, for instance, I have obtained a cobalt-blue, gold-latticed “poison bottle,” a magnificent metal clamp for holding papers, a well-used button hook, an old ceramic “cupel” used in silver assaying, and a table crumb brush. Most of these objects have found their way into my Silver Rush stories, which are primarily set in the silver boomtown of Leadville, Colorado, in 1880.

 The cupel kept me company as I delved into silver assaying for the first book in the series, Silver Lies. In Leaden Skies, the poison bottle makes an appearance and my series protagonist, Inez Stannert, puts a button hook to good use.

I also scoop up old photographs and cabinet cards that catch my eye, and muse over the anonymous faces.

Who were these people, and what are their stories? Sometimes, these people from long ago find a place in my fiction. The three top-hatted gentlemen, for instance, became models for my “Lads from London”—British remittance men, who appear in both Mercury’s Rise and What Gold Buys.

Antique stores are dangerous to my pocketbook, and eBay is even worse.

My most recent eBay frenzy occurred when I was working on A Dying Note, the newest in my series. In this book, my protagonist Inez Stannert has relocated from the wild silver-boom town of Leadville, Colorado, to the somewhat-less-wild city of San Francisco, California. It’s now 1881, and Inez is managing a music store, which is quite a bit different from her previous position running the Silver Queen Saloon in Leadville (how this all comes about is another story for another post!). For plot purposes, I needed to get a better bead on Victorian “trade cards” that stores and businesses used for advertising. So, late one night, I turned to eBay, looking for examples from the 1880s.

Big mistake.

I indeed found examples, including some cards advertising music stores, even some from San Francisco, Inez’s new stomping grounds. But then I also found other cards—one for “Fine Hats” that featured a shoe full of flowers, another touting Coraline corsets, another extolling the virtues of Zoedone (a drink both “stimulating and invigorating, yet non-intoxicating” according to copy on the reverse side), and a card with an impressive image of San Francisco’s Palace Hotel.… Before I knew it, I had clicked “Buy Now” for half a dozen or so.

I haven’t found a place for all of the objects, people, or businesses in my collection, but there’s always the next book!

Ann Parker authors the award-winning Silver Rush historical mystery series published by Poisoned Pen Press. During the day, she wrangles words for a living as a science editor/writer and marketing communications specialist (which is basically a fancy term for “editor/writer”). Her midnight hours are devoted to scribbling fiction. The sixth book in her series, A Dying Note, is being released this month. Publishers Weekly calls it “Exuberant.... brims with fascinating period details, flamboyant characters, and surprising plot twists.” Visit annparker.net for more information.