Ave atque Vale

by Sheila Connolly

I first posted here almost exactly four years ago.  I was honored to be asked to join the blog, because back then I was a relatively new writer (my first book had been published a year and a half earlier), and I was still learning about the universe of writers and readers.  PDD’s writers had always struck me as thoughtful and intelligent and well-informed, and I had learned a lot from their posts.

Being part of the blog forced me to be thoughtful too. Sometimes it’s easy to toss off a quick post about whatever strikes your fancy at a given moment.  You can be cute and glib and make a few people laugh or smile, and then they forget about it.  There’s nothing wrong with entertaining people--isn’t that what fiction writers do?  But making readers take a step back and think is harder.

The world of publishing has changed dramatically in the past four years.  Early fans of Dick Tracy might have seen it coming (remember that wrist device?) but probably the rest of us who yearned to become writers had grown up with a very different model, one that involved sitting in an unheated garret with a quill pen.  No sooner did we think we had learned something than the publishing universe made a 90-degree shift and we had to start all over (more than once).  When we did master a medium, such as one of the social networking sites, it collapsed of its own weight or was taken over by somebody else or its managers decided it should be something different.

I’m sounding like a Luddite, aren’t I?  I embrace technology, and the expanded opportunities to communicate with many people in a timely fashion.  And there’s no stuffing the genie back in the bottle: the Internet is not a flash in the pan, but a part of our daily lives.  But that comes with its own problems, not the least of which is the demands that constant, instant communication place on our time.  We’re afraid we’ll miss something critical or be left out of the loop, so we’re always checking this or that.

And that can be a challenge for bloggers.  Remember when blogs were new? They were a novelty and a curiosity.  Then for a while, everyone believed they had to have a blog, or participate in multiple blogs, often egged on by their agents, editors and peers. Predictably, thousands of blogs popped up, and now it’s very hard to stand out, much less attract new followers. No one person can follow more than a handful—and that includes me.

So we at Poe’s Deadly Daughters are folding our tents and slipping away. (I was thinking of quoting Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poignant poem The Day is Done, where this image originated, but since Longfellow tended to be a bit longwinded, it’s better to read the whole thing here. Don’t worry—the Daughters will all be around, just not in this space.

Thank you all for following us.

Souvenirs Redux

by Sheila Connolly

By strange coincidence, I was gifted with a highly unlikely souvenir this week, and I'm still trying to fit it into my worldview of collecting mementos.

The backstory:  a Philadelphia friend and former colleague was the model for one of the characters in my Museum Mystery series.  She was going to be a background character, except she's kind of shoved herself into the foreground and plays an increasingly important role in the ongoing stories.  Disclaimer:  I didn't originally tell the real person about it (the character was always one of the good guys, not an evil killer), but now she knows and she's tickled pink by the whole idea, especially since I told her I'd add a love interest for her in a coming book (in both the books and in real life she's divorced).

I initially included her because she has a long and intimate association with Philadelphia history, through a string of ancestors whose name she still bears.  That led to her involvement at the historical society where I worked, when she was on the board (as were her father and grandfather before her). She (the character) was the perfect go-to individual for anything to do with who's who in Philadelphia, going back a couple of centuries.  Since my protagonist is not a native Philadelphia, she needs just such a resource person on hand.

Anyway, to jump to the present…  The National Museum of Korea, in Seoul, recently mounted an exhibit they called Art Across America, and a lovely 18^th-century portrait of one of those (real) ancestors and his family became the emblem for the exhibit.  Now, my husband has spent time in Seoul, over several years, and he has visited that museum on various occasions.  He will attest that Koreans are fascinated by all things American.

My friend, intrigued by all the hoopla that her ancestral family had occasioned in far-off Korea, decided to go see the exhibition in place.  She brought back souvenirs.  She shared a couple of those souvenirs with me.  The prize of the collection was…a towel with the iconic portrait on it.

No, not a tidy tea-towel such as you might find in an English palace (I think I have some of those squirreled away somewhere—the English do like their tea, and their bone china must be dried properly, of course).  This, in contrast, is a fuzzy if thin plush towel, made in Korea.

What do you do with a commemorative towel?  What were the Koreans thinking?

You can't dry the dishes with it, can you?  Isn't it kind of insulting to swab off your pots and pans with an historical figure?  If you do, is it some kind of obscure implied insult to our culture? Or major ambivalence?

If you are Korean, do you hang it on a wall, where it will sag, fade, and collect dust?  Do you frame this towel? Or do you store it carefully with all your other commemorative towels, and then on important family gatherings, take out the towels and pass them around for group admiration?

I'm baffled.  As I said before, I treasure many, often obscure souvenirs, that evoke strong memories in me.  But I have never envisioned cherishing a towel. 

Released June 2013

Criminal History

by Sheila Connolly

I spent much of the past few weeks on the road, both at the Malice Domestic conference (where I saw two other Daughters, Sandy and Liz, if all too briefly) and doing research for my current work in progress, the nameless #5 in the Museum Mystery series, which in this particular case is set both in Philadelphia and in one of its suburbs.

In the first book of that series, Fundraising the Dead, part of the plot hinged on the creation of a new history museum in Philadelphia.  I didn't make this up:  it was a concept that was talked about within the Philadelphia museum community (which I was once part of) for quite some time, over a decade ago.  Happily it finally came to fruition, and the new and improved Philadelphia History Museum opened in 2012.  This trip gave me my first opportunity to visit it.

It was a slightly weird experience because the new museum acquired many of the paintings and other objects that once belonged to The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, where I worked for several years, so at every turn I kept meeting old friends and familiar faces. Everything was handsomely presented, and I was glad to see that they had found a new home.

But I also encountered some items on display that were new to me, and one in particular intrigued me:  a police mug book from around 1900. (Note: I took several pictures, a practice that was once prohibited in most museums, but the advent of the cell phone has made it all but impossible to regulate, so in this museum at least it's permitted.) A quick online search reveals that it was Allen Pinkerton who invented the mugshot in the 19^th century. The Pinkerton National Detective Agency first began using these on wanted posters in the Wild West days. By the 1870s the agency had amassed the largest collection of mug shots in the United States.

The mug book in Philadelphia was both familiar and unfamiliar.  As you can see, it's a large bound volume.  Miscreants are included in the familiar two photographs, from the front and from the side. The first thing that struck me was that all criminals were allowed to wear their hat for the frontal photo.  Given the era, some of those hats, particularly among the women, were rather elaborate.

Yes, there were women criminals in the mug book.  Regrettably it was possible to view only the one double page on display (from December 1903), so I couldn't do a meaningful assessment of the ratio of men to women, but those two pages included four women. All were respectably dressed and behatted.  I couldn't decipher the crimes, save for one: Ethel Larson (wearing a very strange hat) was accused/convicted of Larceny. I presume the "Sus." that appears under many of the photos means "Suspect."  Other crimes included pickpocket, burglary, embezzlement, conspiracy (of what was not recorded), and breaking and entering.  There were two black faces on the pages.

The pictures are crisp and clear, the details written in legible script.  To a genealogist this is a strange treasure trove; to a mystery writer it's a delightful glimpse of crime in another time. There is a curious aura of respectability to the photos, despite the fact that the people depicted are accused of a crime.  All were allowed to clean up and dress up for the important act of being photographed.  Contrast that with the quick and dirty mugs shots of today.

How I wish it were possible to spend time leafing through this book, and others like it!  Would we find differences between the faces of then and now? Did a psychopath look different in 1903?  

Why is Betty White Wearing My Clothes?

by Sheila Connolly

Earlier this week I was sitting in a doctor's office waiting for my appointment.  The ubiquitous large-screen television was on, tuned to a morning talk show.  Normally I don't watch these, because my brain works best in the morning so that's when I write.  But in this case I was a captive audience. 

Betty White was one of the guests.  I admire Betty White:  she's smart, she's funny, and she just keeps on going at 90 (her 91^st birthday is next week).  But what I realized was that she was wearing my clothes. My public uniform, my go-to outfit for conferences, dinners, public appearances, etc.  Black pants, black top, colorful tailored jacket, low-heeled black shoes.  Did I mention that she was 90?  I'm not.

So how did I get it stuck in my head that this was how to dress "nicely"?  I grew up in an era where there were clothing rules for everything.  Things had to match (shoes and purse, for instance).  Underwear was never supposed to show ("ahem, it's snowing down south"), except in some rather bizarre Maidenform ads.   

In my childhood, going to visit my grandmother in New York meant a frilly dress with petticoat, black patent leather shoes (always too small) and socks with lace trim, and white gloves (don't ask me why).  Ladies who lunched wore hats at the table, and applying lipstick in public was considered crude.

I also lived through the seventies when all those rules blew up, but we got past that. And then I lived through the professional "power suit" for women era—you remember, the ones with shoulder pads?  And the blouse with the bow at the neck?

I never saw my grandmother wearing a pair of pants.  She wore a girdle and stockings to take out her trash (down the hall within her residence hotel).  My mother wore pants:  double knit polyester with elastic waistbands.  I still have flashbacks when I walk into the Women's department at a big department store, because my mother is everywhere there. I wear blue jeans, often. It is beyond my imagination to picture either my grandmother or my mother in blue jeans.

What does this have to do with writing?  Well, for one thing, we're supposed to describe our characters, so we as writers have to make decisions:  would our protagonist wear blue jeans to this event?  If she's going out to a nice dinner, what does she wear?  How does she judge someone she sees, based on their clothing? And what do those choices tell us about the character?

Industry studies show that most genre readers are women forty or older.  I'm making a wild guess that most cozy protagonists are slightly younger, in their thirties.  My operating theory is that that age is ideal: old enough to have some life experience, young enough to have options for the future. And while the clothing rules may be more relaxed these days, I think I can still describe how a thirty-something woman would dress.

I'm going out on a limb with my new series, where my protagonist is in her mid-twenties.  And she's blue-collar.  She's been raised by an immigrant grandmother, and she's had to work most of her life, after school and now that she's graduated from high school.  She has no life plan beyond getting by.  When her grandmother dies, she's completely unmoored—no family, no home, no clue.  (Don't worry—her life improves quickly, I promise.) And so far, she wears mainly blue jeans, with one slightly better pair of pants for funerals and such.

Lena Dunham of Girls

But I'll admit it's a stretch for me to write about someone the age of my daughter (who has opted for a kind of classic retro style—button down shirts, cashmere cardigans, pencil skirts and the like).  But I look at something like the popular HBO series Girls and what the protagonist there is wearing, and I go, huh?  Is this fashionable, or is the young woman supposed to appear clueless?  I have no idea.

Are there consistent basic standards for appearance?  Is there some timeless dress code that transcends generations? 

And why are Betty White and I wearing the same clothes??

There and Back Again

by Sheila Connolly

Recently I found myself browsing in a used bookstore in Brooklyn.  I was with friends, and we were waiting for a table at the restaurant next door, and of course I spotted the bookstore before the car even stopped moving. And of course I bought something.

 

What I found and fell in love with was a thick and yellowed volume titled Scarborough's Official Tour Book for New York, New Jersey, Canada and the East, copyright 1917, issued under the aegis of the New York State Automobile Association.  Since I had great-grandparents and grandparents who lived in New York, New Jersey and New England about that time, and I grew up in New Jersey (and learned to drive there), I had to have it. 

 

Consider it the Google Maps or MapQuest of its day, because the book provides step by step directions from getting from here to there—when the world was a very different place.

 

The entries are arranged by trip.  Let us say we wish to travel from Atlantic City to Philadelphia in 1917, some 61 miles. The details appear on p. 138, and begin by informing us that there is a very good gravel road as far as Berlin, then macadam thereafter.  I won't give you the entire itinerary, but it includes such details as "go south on Atlantic Ave., following trolleys," followed by "bridge."  At 9.3 miles you pass a cemetery on the right; in Elm, at 34.9 miles, you go under a viaduct, then over two viaducts in short order.  At 41.1 miles, "Danger.  Turn left under viaduct, then curve right, and cross railroad."  When you arrive at the Pennsylvania Railroad Station in Camden, you take a ferry across the Delaware River to arrive in Philadelphia.

 

Or say we wish to voyage from Morristown, New Jersey to New York City, a trip I made with my family countless times when I was young.  Start at the east corner of the park (what park? Where?) in Morristown.  Go under the railroad—Washington's Headquarters will be on the left (yes!).  Go straight at the four corners, then follow the stone road to a bridge.  At Florham Park (just down the road from my high school), go straight, "soon leaving macadam (for what?)." A school will be on the right.  Go over the bridge, and the macadam reappears.

 

Then we wend our way through South Orange, Newark (cross a couple of bridges there, then "turn sharp left at open space into park…bear right at fountain), Jersey City, and Weehauken, where you have to take the 42^nd St. ferry.  Apparently you arrive in New York only when you reach Columbus Circle.

 

These trips take place in fairly well settled areas (relatively speaking). How about taking a trip from New York to the Hamptons on Long Island?  When we arrive at Amagansett, after 109 miles, we are warned of a mile of "sandy dirt road" and then at 113.5 miles we find this:

 

From here … you will have very poor road of deep sand.  Follow directions of the occasional white pointed boards.  The red pointed boards point out the worst ways. (These board pointers are changed occasionally owing to the trails becoming cut too deep in sand.) After reaching mileage 18.9 you have mostly dirt road with occasional sandy places.

 

If you survive that, there's a large summer residence on the hill at the left at 113.6 miles.  There is also a saloon one block to the left at mile 115.1 (are the authors suggesting you may need one by then?).  And BTW, look out for the large rock on sharp curve at mile 127.9.

 

Travel must have been a real adventure in those days! No highways, no bridges over the big rivers; no guarantee you'd ever find a paved road where you were going. Most of the navigational benchmarks were viaducts, bridges, trolleys and cemeteries.  You'd better travel with a companion to read the directions out load, since if you stop, you might end up sinking into the sand or mired in mud on an unpaved road.

The book is also sprinkled with illustrated advertisements for hotels ($1.00 to $3.50 per day), plus ads for garages (some of which promise "NEVER CLOSED"—those unpaved roads must have been hard on cars, not to mention the people bouncing around in them. 

 

P.S. If anyone wants to know how to get from Point A to Point B in the eastern US in 1917, let me know.

 

 

Sometimes There Is No Why

by Sheila Connolly

Recently the wildly successful mystery writer Lee Child wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times, titled "A Simple Way to Create Suspense."  While what I write is hardly similar to his books, what he said made a lot of sense to me.  It can be boiled down to this:  Ask a question. Then don't answer it.

At a regional conference, Dennis Lehane recently spoke about a related idea.  As an example, he suggested beginning a book with the protagonist—call him Joe—opening the refrigerator trying to decide what to eat.  Immediately we want to know:  what did Joe decide?  If the author never tells the reader what Joe ate for lunch, we feel cheated, because we humans are hardwired to look for answers.

In both Child's and Lehane's examples, the opening question, trivial or not, creates a sense of tension.  Child takes it a step further by deliberately withholding the answer.  As he wrote,

        "Someone killed someone else:  who? You'll find out at the end of the book.  Something weird is happening:  what?  You'll find out at the end of the book.  Something has to be stopped:  how?  You'll find out at the end of the book."

Keeps you reading, doesn't it?

This is something my editor and I have been wrestling with in the edits for my next Museum Mystery, Monument to the Dead.  Someone dies in Chapter 1, but it seems to be a natural death.  Then other people are identified as having died the same way, but all were called natural deaths.  Question 1:  are these deaths natural, or is someone killing them?  There is no evidence of murder, and nobody has investigated these deaths.

But to say they were murdered, someone has to ask:  why?  Who would want these people dead? There's no obvious reason for killing them.  So my protagonist and her allies go to work trying to find links between them.  And they do find a primary connection, but that doesn't explain the "why". That's because the "why" makes sense only to the killer, and it's not obvious to anyone else.

My editor (with whom I have worked on many books) wants to make this a more typical cozy, with a body up front (got that), and a cast of likely suspects who are first to be identified and then eliminated one by one.  I don't have that. There is really only one person who would have a motive for killing these people, and it takes the whole book to identify that person (and it's my protagonist's very specific knowledge that finally points to the killer).

I read an official FBI report on serial killers that states that motive is not the first thing an investigator should look for. FBI profilers caution against working to identify motive rather than looking for the killer.  And in most cases that makes sense. Follow the evidence first.

But I'm trying to twist it around in my book, because there is very little physical evidence to be had:  the victims are long buried, the autopsies cursory, the crime scenes cleaned up.  For me, the "why" is the important question. And I do give an answer.

The tragic recent events have left everyone asking "why?"  Why would anyone decide one day to start killing innocent children he didn't even know? Why would some guy set his house on fire and start shooting at anyone who came to put the fire out? Investigators are digging for every piece of family history, where the weapons came from, et cetera, et cetera, and reporting every shred of tangible evidence to the hungry press—because people want that "why." 

But what if the "why" is never answered?  Lee Child has got it right: we want the answer.  These awful events will linger in our memories, because that missing "why" will haunt us.

Lee Child, me, and this other guy

Simplify

by Sheila Connolly

Henry David Thoreau once wrote, "Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify!

 

I have a t-shirt that I bought at Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, Thoreau's one-time home.  Yes, there's a gift shop now, with a view of the pond.  The t-shirt says only, "Simplify, simplify," and I wear it when I go to yard sales, flea markets and the like, to try to remind myself not to buy every useless item that catches my eye.  One flaw in that theory is that I can't see the shirt when I'm wearing it, and if the vendor reads it, they'll be encouraged to get rid of the item they can tell I'm coveting. 

 

If I'm a hoarder, it is only of the little things (sounds like a book title, doesn't it?  The Hoarder of Little Things).  No, I don't have head-high stacks of old papers and magazines that I really do mean to get around to reading someday: I recycle my paper stuff regularly.  No, I don't have cans of soup that are as old as my daughter (although some of my spices have sentimental value and probably taste like dust by now).  My biggest problem is the endless accumulation of small items that must have seemed important at some point, and that I can't seem to toss.  They cover our most of our horizontal surfaces, and they keep multiplying.  Periodically I toss them into a box, which then sits there for a while.  If I get really frustrated, I put the box somewhere else—in a little-used bedroom or even in the attic.  But you will notice that I don't throw it away.

I'm thinking about this now because (as I have said in various places more than once) I just came back from a trip to Ireland, where I spent ten days in a relatively new cottage (if you can call a four-bedroom stone house with a Jacuzzi a cottage).  The owner bought the property and several others around it to graze his cattle—he's a dairy farmer—but he carved out a patch from each of two properties to build a new house on, intended for sale.  He and his teenage sons built them themselves, and they did a great job. Then the Irish economy tanked, so he rents out one, and the other one sits unfinished. 

 

Our rented cottage had all the essential furnishings—beds, couches, a satellite television, and a well-equipped kitchen.  What is did not have is "stuff"—all those accumulated items that drive me crazy at home.  Horizontal surfaces were clear.  There were only a few pictures on the walls, and even fewer rugs.  There were no "things" everywhere.  And I didn't feel that it was sterile and impersonal; I felt that it was clean and simple. It was a relief. That made coming home all the harder, because I was so aware of my own clutter.

 

This past week I had lunch with a few mystery writer friends.  One is moving to a new city, leaving behind her home of many years and settling into an apartment.  She's wrestling daily with what to throw away, what to keep, what to take with her.  The rest of us around the table have moved at some time in our lives, and we're all fighting creeping clutter, so we know all too well what she's talking about.  We laughed when we all admitted that we keep buying storage boxes, hoping that shifting the "stuff" from one place to another, even putting a label on it, will make things better.  The friend who is moving is shredding a lot of old papers; no one else admitted to owning a shredder.  Me, I've still got my grandmother's cancelled checks in the attic—I'm sure there's a story waiting in there somewhere, a biography of my grandmother based on where she shopped in the grand department stores of New York.

My writing space is a mess.  There, I've admitted it.  I save items that interest me, that I hope might someday find their way into a book—but I never know where to file them, so they sit in a pile, and then I move the pile, and then they're lost.  There must be a better way.

 

Simplify! (And all suggestions welcome!)

Triple Play

by Sheila Connolly

It's finally happened.  I'm finishing the first draft of one book, due October 1^st.  My editor sent copyedits for another book in a different series, edits due October 2^nd.  And she's promised that she'll send first-round edits for the next book of the Museum series to me before the end of this month. Oh, and this is the same week as Bouchercon, a major mystery conference, when I'm supposed to be reading at least a sampling of the books of my fellow panelists.  Cue hysterical laughter.  I may have to skip sleeping for a week.

 

I could say it's a trifecta, a triad, a threesome, a trinity, a triumverate or a triptych.  But no matter how I label it, it's three books in process, all at the same time, demanding my attention.  Well, I asked for it.

 

Back when I first started writing (more than a decade ago), I was boiling over with ideas and characters and plots.  It was a very heady feeling, and I loved it.  I started from a point of pure ignorance—how long is a book?  What do you mean, there's supposed to be a structure?  What's a hook?  I have to have a body when?  But my ignorance did not stop me, and I just took the ball and ran with it.

 

The "on the shelf" shelves (not including
electronic versions)

Predictably my early efforts were awful.  For my third (I think) effort, I used three POVs.  When that received some negative criticisms, rather than streamlining it I added two more POVs.  Didn't help—it was all over the place.  It's on a shelf, as is Book #1 (I won't even talk about that one, except to say that I finished it).  Book #2 is sitting next to it, but I have mined that for some bits and pieces for later books (recycling!).

 

In the early years I regularly found myself writing more than one book at a time—for a while, it was three, sometimes even in the same day.  When I ran out of ideas or inspiration for one, I could simply shift to another one, with a fresh eye.  It worked well—for a while.

 

I sold a series.  Then I sold another series.  The first series went three-and-out, but rather than wallow in self-pity, I proposed yet another series, which my publisher bought, and another, and then a third series.  There are fellow writers who think I'm nuts (and no, I'm not partaking of any artificial stimulants to do this, legal or otherwise, unless you count lots of coffee).

 

But a decade after I started, I find it's not as easy to hop around between books.  I'd like to think that's a good thing, because it means that I'm more invested in both my characters in each series, and my plots.  I don't know if the plots have become more intricate, but I do hope my characters have grown in depth and complexity.  Now it's almost a physical effort to climb back into the head of one of my protagonists, to slip into a different persona. Maybe some of that is due to my age, but by now there are a lot of (fictional) people roaming around inside my head, and I want to make sure they remain distinct individuals, not generic space-fillers—you know, the Protagonist, the Sidekick, the Love Interest, the array of Villains, to be knocked out of the box one at a time until I arrive at the True Villain.  All of these appear in all of my stories, but they have to be clearly differentiated individuals.

 

So, now I'm back to three at once again, through no fault of my own, wrestling with an array of characters who have different voices, different viewpoints, different histories.  Sure, we're old friends by now, but how do I keep each of them distinct on the page?  Keep them fresh and interesting?  Allow them to grow, slowly revealing more aspects of their character?  How do I allow them to fall in love, without sounding repetitive from one book to another? I'm still working on it. 

 

Do you ever feel that established authors are producing cookie-cutter characters, without changing more than the name and the hair color? And would that make you stop reading that author's works, or do you find that character appealing?

 

 

Chameleon

by Sheila Connolly

 

 

Recently I was invited to be the speaker at a private literary club in Philadelphia.  Since I write the Museum Mysteries series based in Philadelphia (in the very neighborhood where the club is located), I was happy to do it.  I've also been going back and forth with the library in the town that is the model for my fictional Granford from the Orchard Mysteries series:  they want to hold an apple festival event next month—with me as the main speaker.

 

I sat down to put together a talk for the Philadelphia event, and realized that for each series I present myself as a different person. When I talk about my writing to others, I'm three different people—DAR member with a family tree that goes back to 1620; former fundraising professional in the big city; daughter of Erin.  I don't have to make anything up, but they're all different.

 

Some of you may remember that I began writing under the pen name Sarah Atwell, with the Glassblowing Mysteries.  This was a work-for-hire series, a three-book contract offered by Berkley Prime Crime, and I am grateful to them.  However, I told them that I had never blown glass and had never seen Tucson, where they wanted to set the series.  They didn't mind—they liked my writing.  The first book in the series, Through a Glass, Deadly, was nominated for an Agatha Award for Best First Book, but that wasn't enough to save the series, which ended with the third book.  Was that because it didn't feel "true" to readers?  I don't suppose I'll ever know.  What I do know is that it's hard to convey the sense of light and air in the desert environment of the Southwest when you've never been there.

 

Now I write three series:  the Orchard Mysteries, set in western Massachusetts; the Museum Mysteries, set in Philadelphia; and the County Cork Mysteries, set in Ireland.  And I have direct personal ties with all of those.  So when I set out to talk about writing the Museum Mysteries, I could point to my more than twenty years of living in Pennsylvania, first with my parents, then as an adult; I can spin anecdotes about working for Philadelphia's financial advisory firm, at a time when the city faced imminent bankruptcy; and I can refer to my various jobs at Philadelphia non-profit institutions, and what they're really like behind the scenes. 

 

 

Choose Column A, the Orchard Mysteries, and I'll tell you about my hundreds of New England ancestors, and distant relatives such as Johnny Appleseed and Ethan Allen and Emily Dickinson; if I'm in "Granford" I can point to the 1790 census, where I'm related to at least a third of the Heads of Household.  The house I use in that series is a real one, built by an ancestor.  I've been inside it several times, from basement to attic, and I've laid hands of timbers that I know were cut cut 250 years ago by people I can identify and I'm related to.  While I may have moved a road or two in the series, other features, such as the Great Meadow, are real.

 

Column C? My grandfather John Connolly was born in County Cork, but regrettably I never knew him.  I first traveled there more than a decade ago, hoping to understand him better, and to learn about Ireland, which is as large a part of my heritage as all those New England Yankees.  I immediately fell in love with the place and have been back several times since.  As for writing the series, I came to realize that a small Irish town in a rural part of the country is as ideal a setting for a cozy mystery series as is a small Massachusetts town (or an equally small cultural community within a big city like Philadelphia).  Cheers had it right:  it's a place where everybody knows your name—and your grandparents', and when your great-uncle Denis emigrated to New Zealand a century ago and who attended the send-off party.

 

Some writers say that the setting is as important to any book as the human characters, and I tend to agree.  Sure, we writers can all do research online these day, including accessing 360-degree views of many places from street level.  But it's not the same as being there and observing.  There are too many small but significant details that you will not notice on a computer screen.  Like all the gum stuck to Philadelphia sidewalks, or the (to us) amusing names of Irish products such as Fairy Liquid (a cleaning solution), or the fact that half the street names in "Granford" came from farms that belonged to my ancestors.

 

What do you think?  Can you sense when an author is making things up and has no real connection to the place?  What details make it come alive to you?

 

Beautiful Machines

by Sheila Connolly

Recently I opened to the Metro section of the Boston Globe to find a large image of an 1891 double-decker streetcar with once ran in Cambridge, MA.  I can't show you the image because it's the property of the Boston Globe Archives (the discussion of using images that do not belong to you is an active and contentious one these days, and I'm not planning to violate any restrictions).  Suffice it to say, it is not only a functional vehicle, capable of transporting a few dozen derby-hatted commuters, under the watchful eye of two conductors and several other employees of the West End Railway Company (which in 1897 was integrated into the Boston Elevated Railway); it is also lavishly decorated.  Its upper roof sports a cheerful broad-striped frill that flutters in the breeze.  Its sides are embellished with painted swags and garlands.  Its front bears an ornately framed panel proclaiming the name of the company.  In short, the planners and owners dressed it up.

 

I know, it's boring to hear me talk about an image you can't see, so I'll swap this for an example of my own:  an 1854 hand-pumped fire engine, built in Philadelphia by John Agnew & Co. (est. 1820) and named "Young Mechanic No. 6," now in the possession of the Middleboro Historical Museum, of which I have taken my own pictures, with the permission of the institution.  And while smaller, it proves the same point.

This fire engine was the direct inspiration for my most recent Museum Mystery, Fire Engine Dead.  I enjoy visiting historical societies and small museums, so I made a point of seeking out my local one (not easy, since it's open Wednesday 12-3 and Saturday 10-1, only in good weather because there's no heat).  I was unprepared to walk in upon this impressive piece of equipment, and I immediately fell in love with it.  It has retained all its parts, including the separate trailer that carried the hoses.  It was built for the New Bedford Fire Department, remodeled in 1860, and remained in active service until 1864.  Since then it has participated in many parades and ceremonies.

 

 

What's more, much of its original decoration remains intact.  It is constructed of solid mahogany, and heavily embellished and gilded.  Many of the decorations serve no function other than to celebrate the wondrous piece.  Even the functional bits are decorated.

For us today, surrounded by marvels of technology all of our waking minutes, it is hard for us to imagine celebrating a simple machine.  It is also hard to imagine a relatively small group of craftsmen putting together something like this fire engine (the history of fire-fighting equipment makes very interesting reading; remember, this was long before the development of the assembly line, so many small companies or groups of individuals more or less reinvented the wheel each time they constructed a fire engine, and a lot of them failed quickly).

 

It was not strictly a functional, utilitarian item.  Rather, it was a marvel of modern engineering, worthy of veneration.  Picture how the humble citizenry strolling the sidewalks of a city must have marveled as the hose and ladder trucks raced by, drawn by a team of horses, boiler steaming, gilt decorations glinting in the sun.  It would be an event in itself just to see one pass. 

 

Today we venerate stark simplicity.  Look at our phones—we've even done away with the buttons, and now we use a smooth rectangular box.  Same with our televisions.  I remember (back in some other century) when the television was a proud piece of furniture encased in polished wood and occupying the place of honor in the living room or family room.  Now it's a flat hunk of black plastic plopped on whatever surface affords the best viewing for the largest number of people.  Not the same thing, is it?

 

So, just for a moment, consider when new machines were rare, and innovations were dressed up with ribbons and (I hope) brought a smile from passersby. 

 

Do you think things are better or worse today?

 

The Storytelling Animal

by Sheila Connolly

My grandmother was fond of saying, "man walks in the direction in which he looks."  She wasn't far off:  if you can visualize your goal, you're closer to achieving it, and you're more ready for it when you get there.

That's one of the interesting ideas included in a very interesting book written by English professor Jonathan Gottschall called The Storytelling Animal, about why humans create stories—something we as writers should all pay attention to.  I read a review of the book and realized that it was something I needed to read, and I wasn't wrong.  The author provides much food for thought.

We all make up stories—not just writers, but everyone.  Take any pair of random facts and put them together, and you'll find yourself trying to create a reason why they're connected. Read any set of words in a novel, and you'll notice that not only have you absorbed the facts the author gives you (the sky is blue, the protagonist is a thirty-year-old male), but you've dressed him in clothes and set him in a three-dimensional universe.  If the author says he's in a forest, you fill in the trees, without any prompting from the author.

But the process is both reactive and proactive.  When we read, we insert the details into the story based on our own life experience.  At the same time we also create:  we project, we envision, we try out scenarios in our minds, in preparation for potential future experiences.

There is a growing body of scientific evidence that corroborates these observations.  For example, scientists can now demonstrate that reading about an event or experience stimulates the same areas of the brain that actually participating does.  That goes a long way toward explaining why we read (particularly romances!), and why we watch scripted television shows (including the so-called reality shows) and movies.  We empathize with the characters we see, to the extent that our physical responses mirror theirs—our hearts pound, our blood pressure goes up, we gasp or even shriek (tell me you've never done that!).  And this happens not only when we're alone, but when we're in a crowded movie theater—we are all linked by a common response to what we are seeing. And we carry that forward.

What's more (and here's where it gets interesting for mystery writers), we as readers/viewers anticipate a positive outcome.  We want our stories to have moral weight; we want to believe we share a core set of social values.  There is almost always a conflict to be overcome. When someone is killed (in fiction), the violence is condemned, and the villain must pay the price.  However, if the hero(ine) kills in the name of justice, it's acceptable—as long as it's done for the right reasons, to protect the good and the weak from evil.

Which makes murder mysteries the epitome of the general case. Who knew?

Gottschall believes that despite the flood of electronic media, stories will survive, although not necessarily in forms that we will recognize (consider, for example, interactive online games).  He tells us that fiction "will make you more empathic and better able to navigate life's dilemmas"—because we've already visualized them.  Stories reinforce our shared cultural values and bring us together. 

And don't feel guilty about daydreaming, because we learn from our own imagination.  Give yourself permission to imagine—and keep reading!

The Book Problem

by Sheila Connolly

I know—you've heard it before.  Too many books, too little space.  But since I could no longer walk across the floor—heck, I couldn't even see the floor—in the so-called office, I knew it was time to take drastic action.

Of course I gave this much thought, and I came to a realization:  this house does not like books.  Why do I say that?  Because there is no room for bookshelves, or at least, not if I want any other furniture, like to sit on.  What's the problem?  No wall space.

I live in a stately Victorian house with a whole lot of doors and windows—and when I say windows, I mean six-foot windows that begin about two feet from the floor.  Front parlor:  two windows, two sliding doors, each six feet wide.  Back parlor:  three windows, the aforesaid sliding door, two regular doors (side by side, for some reason—you have multiple choices about how to go from any room to the next).  Dining room:  three windows, five doors, fireplace.  Kitchen:  three windows, five doors, and appliances.  Net result:  no space for bookshelves. Upstairs is just as bad.

I am not giving up my books.  Well, not all of them.  Several years ago we built an entire wall of shelves in the office, and they are now filled three deep.  I had not seen the books on the back layer for years until this great purge.  Mysteries take up fully half of the shelves, with the collection of Golden Age mysteries in the rearmost layer.  I'm keeping those.

Then comes contemporary mystery fiction:  books by my friends and co-bloggers; books by writers I truly admire, whose books I will buy no matter what.  (And I even have two shelves of my very own!)  I've been doing triage there, and my local library will be happy (I think I'm up to four boxes for them, and I'm not done yet).

So I filled in the extra space with
Agatha Christie books--hey, we have
the same publisher, don't we?

The other half of the bookshelves:  classic literature, including a chunk of '70s women's fiction I refuse to part with.  I'm seriously considering dumping the romance (where I tried unsuccessfully to fit in when I first started writing), not because they're bad books, but because I have to prioritize, and the mysteries come first.

That doesn't even touch the reference section.  Since I'm writing three different series, each has its own section, both historical and contemporary.  For the coming Irish series I've been trying to catch up with contemporary Irish crime fiction, which doesn't always make it to the US (save for Tana French, whose books I love), and then there's all the Irish history that I never learned in school.  And Irish poetry, and Irish language books.  For the others, there are books about Philadelphia history and society, and books about raising apples, and…

And don't forget the genealogy library—and genealogy is a thread that runs through all my books, so how could I get rid of those?

The reality is, unless I live to be 107 I will never have time to reread all these books, no matter how much I love them.  Why do I keep them?  Because they're old friends.  We've been through a lot together.  I'll admit that one of my newer criteria is, if I pick up a book from my shelf and leaf through it, and don't remember a single thing about it, it can go.  But most of those have been weeded out long ago.

The books that remain comfort me.  I've met many of the authors now, and a good number I call friends.  I'm proud to find myself among them on my shelves.  I'm keeping them—now that I've bought (and all but filled) another 48 feet of shelf space!

Any bets on how long that space will last?