I’ve always been interested in the public’s fascination with unsolved mysteries. In how people become invested in events that happened decades or even thousands of years before they were born. I’m curious about why some mysteries endure while others simply fade away in the sands of time.

Cable television and streaming services like YouTube have fueled our appetite for the truth - or at least some version of it. They’ve sparked our interest in events we may not have known occurred until we saw a clip about it.

There seems to be a niche for everyone. Did aliens build the pyramids of Egypt? Did they later crash in Roswell in the 1940s? Is Bigfoot real? Did Amelia Earhart survive? What happened to Atlantis? How did the Roman Empire fall?

The Kennedy Assassination certainly qualifies as such a mystery. Its lasting appeal is easy to understand. The Kennedy Era was Camelot. JFK was America’s King Arthur. He was the dashing young president with the fashionable first lady and their two adorable young children. He was the first president of the television age and he used that medium to maximum effect. He used it to further his ambitious political agenda.

In the sixty years following his death, generations of researchers and conspiracy theorists have plumbed the depths of that which took place in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Books, documentaries, articles and movies have examined every aspect of President Kennedy’s murder. Did Oswald act alone? Was it a conspiracy? How many shots were fired in Dealey Plaza? Was there an official cover-up? There’s even a recent documentary that said the assassination was a hoax concocted by the president to run off with a mistress. I’m still shaking my head over that one.

I’ve always considered myself a skeptic when it comes to conspiracy theories. I was a government employee for twenty-five years. I know the myth of the hyper-efficient government is more worthy of ancient Greece than modern day. If a government agency had played a role in the assassination, it would have required hundreds of people to maintain their silence for the rest of their lives. It simply isn’t a feasible hypothesis.

But even a skeptic like me must admit that the facts as reported to us simply don’t add up. Even a cursory review of the evidence reveals inconsistencies and oversights in the official findings of The Warren Commission. Important questions went unanswered. Relationships with individuals close to Oswald were glossed over. Evidence and conflicting testimony were simply ignored.

Incongruities are fertile ground for thriller writers like me. They lead to intrigue and conspiracy. Suspense lives in the gray areas of such events. That’s what compelled me to write about it. To relate facts I had uncovered in my own way that would appeal to readers.
Writing about an important historical event can be daunting. The challenge of the Kennedy story is that everyone knows how it ends. Somebody planned to shoot the president and succeeded. The end. What more can be said?

But knowing the destination doesn’t make the journey any less interesting. My research led me down several paths I did not expect to find. I discovered events and relationships that proved to me that we didn’t know the whole story. It is there where my idea was born.
My ‘Dallas ’63’ trilogy doesn’t pretend to be a true crime work. The first book in the series – THE TWILIGHT TOWN - is a hardboiled novel that depicts fictional and historical figures in a factual context. It’s about Dallas in the early 1960s, a place where the criminal underworld mingled with the public overworld. Where corruption was almost respectable and part of the Dallas way at that time.

The book begins in early 1963 where Dallas PD Detective Dan Wilson is secretly working with the FBI to investigate corruption in his own department. When an informant – Lee Oswald – tells Wilson about Jack Ruby’s upcoming arms shipment, Wilson asks his ex-partner, J.D. Tippit to help him track where the weapons are going and why.

Over the course of the next several months, Wilson and Tippit find themselves being gradually pulled deeper into a conspiracy that will change the course of a nation forever.
My goal with this trilogy isn’t meant to inform or entertain, but to hopefully do both. My research has taken me on a wonderful and unexpected journey that I hope the reader will enjoy.

Terrence McCauley is an award-winning, bestselling author of thrillers, crime fiction and westerns. A resident of Dutchess County, NY, he is currently working on his next novel. Please visit his website at www.terrencemccauley.com

I find the trappings of the Golden Age of crime fiction irresistible: a gifted amateur sleuth, the closed circle of suspects, the isolated country house, the 1930s setting. There is something about those books by Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, Anthony Berkley, and their contemporaries that resonates with me. It is all to do with the puzzle element, I suppose, the game between reader and author to solve the case before the solution is given, but I think it also has something to do with the restoration of order. The Golden Age (and those modern practitioners of it) was careful to make sure that the guilty were punished and the innocent saved, and after the upheaval and chaos of murder, the world was put back to normal. There was – and is – something very comforting about that.

But is it all a little too cosy?

Several years ago, after decades of having short stories published and radio plays performed, I decided it was time that I wrote a novel and, not surprisingly, my mind drifted towards an homage to the Golden Age detective novel. I didn’t want to write a pastiche nor did I want to send up the genre.  That is too easy to do.  But nor did I want it to be a cosy novel. Don’t get me wrong: I have no issue with cosy mysteries. They are very popular and they have a wide audience. But I didn’t want to write a novel where the crime centred around a dog, a cat, or a canary; nor did I want to write a murder mystery that was just as concerned with baking, painting, or pottery making as it was about violent death.

Instead, I wanted to write a serious novel set within the confines of a detective story.  P.D. James had done it so well – her novels were, in effect, Golden Age stories, but they were populated by believable people, whose lives were affected by the murder concerned.  I became fascinated with the idea of writing a traditional whodunit with realistic undercurrents, where the suspects would be relatable people, with feelings and emotions a reader could recognize.  Their motives and secrets, uncovered during the investigation, would be serious human conundrums and problems, not simply the embezzlement of church funds.  They would touch the darker recesses of the human soul.

All this pondering resulted in the first book in my Everett Carr mystery series, A Talent for Murder. That first novel was typically Golden Age: a closed community of characters, isolated in an English country mansion, and a locked room mystery to boot. A locked room mystery is an artificial construct, but it must make sense in its own terms. A criticism of John Dickson Carr, the doyen of that particular type of detective story, is that his solutions are sometimes so contrived and unwieldy that they can be unsatisfactory.  I wanted my locked room to be believable despite its artificiality.  By blending this fictional construct with the realism of believable characters and motives, I hope that the Everett Carr mysteries give a contemporary twist on traditional Golden Age tropes.
​
It seemed appropriate to honour Dickson Carr, so I named my amateur sleuth after him.  Everett Carr is a former High Court judge, who retires when his wife is murdered in a failed assassination attempt on Carr himself.  A stray bullet is lodged in his knee, leaving him lame and serving as a physical reminder that his wife died in his place.  Carr’s pain is both physical and mental. But a character cannot remain stagnant – they must progress and develop. Each book, I hope, tells something new about Carr and his world, not least in his psychological trauma. Although his physical wound remains constant, the books show Carr’s mental trauma over the death of his wife begins to deepen, as he comes to realise that he is manifesting the symptoms of what would later become known as Survivor’s Guilt. How he manages with this consequence of his personal tragedy is a developing and progressing subplot to the novels – which I hope is another way of elevating the Carr mysteries from simple whodunit puzzles to novels of some character depth.   

Since the publication of A Talent for Murder, Carr has investigated several Golden Age whodunits. He has braved The Dangers of this Night, the second in the series and he has tackled A Killing Amongst the Dead, which is the third. This year, in the latest mystery, he comes face to face with The Serpent’s Fang, due for release in March. This latest case involves the murder of a faded actress and Carr’s attempts to save a woman from the gallows.

Everett Carr is my homage to sleuths such as Hercule Poirot, Lord Peter Wimsey, and Gervase Fen. He is also my attempt to make such a character psychologically interesting to a modern audience. 

I hope he and I have done the Golden Age proud.

The Everett Carr Mysteries are published by Level Best Books and are available in paperback and e-book formats.

As a lifelong aficionado and expert on Sherlock Holmes, Matthew Booth is the author of several books and short stories about the famous detective. He wrote a number of scripts for a Holmes radio series produced by Jim French Productions in Seattle, as well as creating his own series about a disgraced former barrister investigating crimes for the same production company.  

He is the creator of Everett Carr, an amateur sleuth in the traditional mould, who appears in his debut investigation in the book, A Talent for Murder, a traditional whodunit, which offers a contemporary twist on the format.  

An expert in crime and supernatural fiction, Matthew has provided a number of academic talks on such subjects as Sherlock Holmes, the works of Agatha Christie, crime fiction, Count Dracula, and the facts and theories concerning the crimes of Jack the Ripper.  

He is a member of the Crime Writers’ Association and is the editor of its monthly magazine, Red Herrings. He lives with his wife in Manchester, England.

I am a cozy mystery writer who decided one day to write what I call a historical cozy.  I enjoy reading historical fiction, but I would never consider myself a historian. But I loved the idea of using a historical event as the setting for a cozy mystery. That’s when Dot Morgan became my latest heroine. I placed her in the early sixties and gave her the not-so- glamorous job of secretary. This occupation was a splendid vehicle to put her in various work settings, but always in her small town in Texas. It also meant Dot would keep losing her job. To date, she’s lost three jobs, yet amazingly keeps getting hired.
​
In the second book in my Swinging Sixties Series, If I Had a Hammer, I placed Dot and her cousin Ellie on the grassy knoll on November 22, 1963. Think about the writing hurdles here. Everyone knows this scene because they have seen it or read about it countless times, both in fiction and nonfiction. The assassination of John F. Kennedy is an event that some generations use as a “Where were you?” moment. Readers know the history of this day, so the thought of getting it wrong is not something I wanted to do.

The writing challenge was intimidating since my cozy characters pretty well plotted their lives around bake sales and beauty shop gossip. A presidential assassination brought a very non-cozy element into my story. I took a cue from historical writers and immersed myself in research. I studied black-and-white photos of the people who stood along the parade route on November 22 and then wrote my two characters in the middle of them. They were elbow to elbow with people in headscarves and boxy black glasses.  As the motorcade approached, I focused on my two young women.

What would they be thinking before the assassination?

They would look at Jackie Kennedy. My mother was obsessed with all things Jackie. She bought clothes in Jackie style and even mimicked her hairstyles. Yes, these characters would look at the first lady’s outfit and feel the way I remember my mother feeling. They would have great respect for a woman they had never met. They would refer to the president and his wife as Jackie and John, as if they knew them personally.

When the shooting started in my story, I zeroed in on Dot who was winding the wheel of an Instamatic camera. My reason for doing this, instead of her witnessing the entire horrific scene as her cousin did, was to keep Dot’s viewpoint at a safe, cozy distance. Ellie, the cousin, sees the whole thing and goes through PTSD after this scene. Dot, who I’ll need to solve a murder in her small town, remains a bit more removed. She never looks up, but only through the eyehole of the lens, and then to the wheel on the back of the camera to forward the film roll.

Cozy mysteries are about a sense of safety in the middle of a murder investigation. Miss Marple was rarely in danger, and if she were, she carried knitting needles. In writing a cozy historical mystery, I put my characters in a little more danger than Agatha Christie did, but they are still cozy with their three-network television, wind-up watches, and Instamatic cameras. I typically borrow more from Mayberry than the realities of that Dallas parade route in 1963.

After this book, I put Dot to work in a radio station in Listen, Do You Want to Hear a Secret? and in 2025 she’s working in a funeral home in the upcoming release, I Can’t Get No Satisfaction. It was the only job she could get because people kept dying in her other jobs.

Dot Morgan tackles the sexism and racism of the sixties, along with overcoming her own stereotype of being a young, attractive, blond secretary (she must be simple-minded because she’s blond). I love including the history of this period because it gives my cozy mystery another layer of story. But don’t worry, even historical cozies will have plenty of bake sales and beauty parlor gossip.
 
 
Teresa Trent writes the Swinging Sixties Cozy Mystery Series as well as several other cozy mystery series from her home in Houston Texas. She is also the voice of Books to the Ceiling, a podcast that features narrated excerpts from new mysteries coming onto the market.  You can find her online at teresatrent.com and teresatrent.blog.

Want to add more punch to your prose? Sometimes a little research into the setting of your story is what’s needed. Research adds depth and authenticity to novels. It can be the defining feature between a work and a work of art.
 
As a historical fiction writer, I have to make my readers feel at home in Eighteenth Century Colonial America. In order to do that requires a great deal of delving into the details of daily life in this time frame. How did people dress? What did they eat? What were the social norms? People did not wear underwear in the 18th century. Underneath their clothes they were remarkably well ventilated. Modern underwear did not come into being until later in the 19th century.
People and societies evolve over time. What was commonplace in one time period would be flat out weird in another.  One example in the Western world between the mid 16th century and the late 19th century young boys and girls dressed alike in gowns between the ages of two and up to eight. The gowns were seen as gender neutral and made toilet training easier among other reasons. The goal of a good historical writer is to propel their reader back in time so that they feel they are walking those streets and living in that era. A well-developed setting creates the perfect framework for a story to take place.
 
Getting the information wrong jars the reader and casts doubt on the reliability of the author. It’s been several years ago that I was reading over a friend’s manuscript set during the American antebellum period. I was lost in the sultry south until the scene shifted to an airport.  Airport? Yes, she had absentmindedly put an airport in the 1850’s. My mind was hit with a situation I knew could not be true unless the story was about time travel-which it wasn’t. 
 
The most important component of research is using credible resources – places  you can rely upon to be factual and true. The reference desk at your local library can help you discover many reliable resources for your writing project.  It’s also important to realize that if an event really happened it will be recounted by more than one source.  For example, Washington crossing the Delaware on Christmas Day 1776 is recounted in many places.  Washington chopping down a cherry tree – one. Mason Locke Weems was an early biographer of our first president who made up the story to show demonstrate the president’s honesty at an early age.
 
I like primary sources for my research when I can find them. These can be letters, memoirs, maps and newspapers. Colonial America had quite a few newspapers many of which are online. Reading them gives tremendous insight into the minutia of daily life some of it is funny, some of it is tragic The advertisements seeking information on runaway slaves never ceases to break my heart even if it was normal for this time period.
 
I utilize period maps as well as Google Earth to get a sense of a place. The beauty of Google Earth is that it utilizes satellite technology to put you in a precise location. You can walk the streets of a city or  neighborhood utilizing the street level option. Period maps tell you what was there in that time period and what they considered relevant. For my current WIP I have located a few maps of Valley Forge at the time of its occupation so I know where all the barracks are, Washington’s headquarters and all of his generals.  I can easily locate the roads, the artillery and geographic features such as Mount Joy and Mount Misery. The encampment was between the two.
 
Taking time to learn about the time and place you write about enriches your story in a multitude of ways. It enhances the narrative and provides a note of authority that you know what you are talking about. I love learning the details of life in time periods in which I write because it not only tells me what they did but gives me insight into why.

Julie Bates’ first novel Cry of the Innocent, premiered in June 2021. The Eight book Faith Clarke series is set in the America Colonies during the Revolutionary War. Needless to say she is an avid history buff – some would say nut. She is a member of Sisters in Crime, Triangle Sisters in Crime, Mystery Writers of America, Southeastern Mystery Writers of America (SEMWA) and The Historical Novel Society. She enjoys doing crafts, working in her garden and experimenting in the kitchen. When not plotting her next story, she spends time with her husband and son, as well as a number of dogs and cats who have shown up on her doorstep and never left.

Why write historical fiction? Let’s review some stats. Regarding genre, mystery and thrillers account for 47% of all book sales. Good news for us crime fiction writers! More great news, historical fiction makes up 20% of total book sales in the United Kingdom. Audiobooks are outselling ebooks by a wide margin, with historical fiction seeing a 17% increase in audiobook sales in 2023.

I have a theory about why historicals are so popular. I believe that the readership of crime fiction skews older This is not based on anything more than anecdotal evidence. I recently returned from Bouchercon, the grand-daddy of the crime fiction conventions, and the attendees skewed older. This has been true for several years at the crime fiction cons I’ve attended. I would say that it is likely that the attendees at any panel are, by and large, my contemporaries, and I’m not young.

So why did I write a historical crime novel? Although research into the slang used in the 1920s is a trip down a delightful rabbit hole, the ins and outs of cell phones, computer code, and the latest surveillance equipment leave me baffled and bored. I use a smart phone, and I was a technical editor for many years and have worked on several textbooks, but I struggle to keep up with the latest in modern sleuthing techniques. I think that is why cozy mysteries have an edge over hardcore thrillers. There is a lot less demand for the more technical aspects of crime-solving. It’s the candlestick in the library with Miss Scarlett as the murderer. The same holds true for a historical novel. There are other facts to pin down, but not blood-splatter patterns or the velocity of an AK-47.

I set my recently published historical mystery in 1930 San Francisco. I’m old enough to remember when you wore white gloves and a hat to visit the City. It was a world where high-end department stores ringed Union Square and where you shopped for clothes you needed for an “event.” When I was ten, we flew back to Ireland to see my grandmother, and my mother bought a suit at I. Magnin’s for the journey. My sister and I didn’t rate dresses from I. Magnin’s, but we wore dresses on the plane! And it wasn’t that many years ago when the department stores tried to outdo each other with their windows at Christmas. That was worth a special trip. I’m a December baby, and one year my parents took me to buy a gift at the City of Paris department store. I remember that amazing rotunda even if I don’t remember the present. When the City of Paris closed and was replaced by Nieman Marcus, I had no interest in crossing their threshold even though they kept the rotunda. Buying something at Nieman Marcus, the bastion of Texas excess, doesn’t have the same appeal.

My point is that with historicals, the reader can enter the writer’s world, and it’s all vaguely relatable, regardless if it’s ancient Rome, Victorian England, or sixteenth-century Tudor England. If you have a Roman Senator riding a horse, well, I’ve ridden a horse—pretty badly and I was stiff for days—but I can relate to someone on a horse. Someone is murdered in a castle? Hey, I’ve been to castles. I know what it feels like to climb up stone steps and feel the chill of the walls on my face. Holding a cell phone in my hand doesn’t elicit any vibes that I can relate to, and the ones I do feel are largely frustration and irritation. Of course, I’m not saying that everyone is as much of a Luddite as I am, but the stats say that I’m not alone. Welcome, my tech-weary peeps!


Claire M. Johnson’s first novel, Beat Until Stiff, was nominated for the 2003 Agatha Award for Best First Novel and was a Booksense pick. Her second book in this series, Roux Morgue, received a starred review from Publishers Weekly. Fog City, her noir crime novel set in Prohibition-era San Francisco, debuted July 2024 from Level Best Books. This book won the Gold from the Royal Palm Literary Award hosted by the Florida Writers Association and is the first in a series featuring Maggie Laurent, P.I. Ms. Johnson is currently President of Mystery Writers of America’s Northern California Chapter.

Scams and confidence men. From the telephone call that we receive just as we’re about to take that first mouthful of dinner, telling us that we owe the Tax Office $1400, to the message on our mobiles informing us that the bank has inadvertently short-changed us, it seems that scams have become a part of everyday life.

Fake websites, romance scammers, road tolls that we haven’t paid (supposedly), phoney people tried to ‘Friend’ us on Facebook (my latest was Johnny Depp!), Pyramid or Ponzi schemes which make money by recruiting new participants, identity fraud, as well as diets, remedies and treatments that claim to cure all manner of ills, are just some of the hurdles that we must navigate to keep our money (and our mental health) safe.

The rise of social media has highlighted the problem, but when I researched the incidence of  con men and women, and deceptive marketing used to sell or promote fraudulent products, I found a wealth of examples from the past, which served as inspiration for my latest offering in the Reggie da Costa Mysteries, Lies and Deception, which is set in Melbourne, Australia, in 1925.

Jasper Fitzalan Howard is found stabbed to death in his room at The Hotel Windsor. Initially, the police identify him as a wealthy investor and a cousin of the Duke of Norfolk. However, while investigating the murder, Reggie da Costa, The Argus’s celebrated crime reporter, uncovers a web of lies and deception surrounding Howard’s carefully constructed façade. Jasper Howard is not whom he seems. Swindling wealthy businessmen whilst blackmailing their wives, Howard has attracted many enemies, giving Reggie a host of suspects for his murder.

In my research I discovered that it was an American, William Thompson, after whom the term ‘confidence man’ was coined. Thompson would request that the target show confidence in the honesty of a stranger by handing over his watch. Of course, the victim never saw his watch again!

And then there were the consummate salesmen, such as Victor Lustig, who sold the Eiffel Tower twice for scrap metal, and George Parker, who sold the Brooklyn Bridge to a tourist. Britain's most successful serial confidence trickster, Achilleas Kallakis, duped banks out of more than £750 million by pretending to be a Mayfair property baron. In Australia, Belle Gibson promoted herself as a wellness guru, claiming to cure her cancer with a mixture of diet, exercise and alternative medicine therapies.

History is dotted with examples of confidence men and ‘snake oil’ salesmen who have exploited people’s trust, their gullibility and sometimes, their greed.
 
Just a moment … I’ve received an email. Apparently, I’ve won $1,500,000 in a lottery. How’s that for good luck!!! I can claim it if I click on the link. Here goes …

Laraine Stephens lives in Beaumaris, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia. She worked as a teacher-librarian and Head of Library for over 35 years. After retiring at the end of 2013, she became a writer of historical crime fiction. Apart from writing, she is an avid golfer, loves travelling, going to the football and playing Mahjong, and enjoys reading, restaurants and films. For five years she worked as a volunteer guide at the Old Melbourne Gaol.
 
She is a member of Writers Victoria, Sisters in Crime (Australia), the Australian Crime Writers’ Association, the Historical Novel Society of Australasia, the International Thriller Writers and the Crime Writers’ Association of the United Kingdom.

Laraine has a six-book contract with Level Best Books (USA). She has published four novels so far in The Reggie da Costa Mysteries: ‘The Death Mask Murders’, ‘Deadly Intent’, ‘A Deadly Game’ and ‘Lies and Deception’.
​
https://larainestephens.com
https://www.facebook.com/crimewriter3/
​

“Marriage is a rotten deal for a woman.”

When Ella Shane says this to Gilbert Saint Aubyn, Duke of Leith, soon after they meet in the spring of 1899, she’s not flirting or exaggerating; she’s just stating a simple fact of 19th century life, at least from her point of view.

She’s also giving the main reason it takes her three books, several murders, and a brush with death to decide to marry the Duke. (The wedding FINALLY comes in A FATAL RECEPTION, this April!) Marriage seems like prison to Ella, an Irish-Jewish Lower East Side orphan who’s clawed out an independent life and career as an opera singer specializing in “trouser,” male soprano, roles.

It was certainly the end of legal freedom for most women at the time.

Even in the late 19th century, when a woman married, she essentially ceased to exist as an independent person. The legal doctrine was called “femme couvert,” literally translated as “covered woman,” meaning the woman’s rights were covered by her husband’s power. You can see how that could lead to all sorts of trouble.

All of a woman’s money and property, not to mention her person – and her children – were effectively under her husband’s control. She could earn money, but he decided how it was spent. She would bear the children and raise them, but they, too, were his property.

Laws were starting to address the idea that married women might inherit or earn property of their own, but on the ground, men still had close to absolute power over their wives.

By the late 1800s and early 1900s, divorce was just barely possible in particularly egregious cases of abuse or financial neglect – and men could ditch an unfaithful wife. But a woman could not expect to take her children with her if she left a bad marriage, even a horrifically abusive one.

In less extreme cases, women just had to put up with the daily knowledge they weren’t real people in the eyes of the law, with little or none of the power a man had. A woman could do almost nothing without her husband’s consent – and that didn’t change for decades. There are plenty of women alive and well today who remember having to ask their husbands to co-sign on their credit cards.

Women like Ella, single and making a living on her own, were rare at the time, but not unknown. Often, they lived with parents or family, as Ella does with her cousin Tommy, and often (based on advice writing and fiction of the time) the families vexed about having an independent woman around, and what to do with her.

Until the late 19th century, a woman alone with money was usually a widow, and people knew how to handle that. She was taking care of her late husband’s estate for the benefit of her children and needed some legal and social room for the purpose. A single woman? Who knows what she might do?

The one thing she certainly could do, though, is run her own affairs without anything more than advice from a man. Ella is well aware of that fact, and while she’s glad to have Tommy as friend, protector, and manager, she also prizes her independence.

Independence she would have to unconditionally surrender in a match with any man, even a worthy one who is her equal. Maybe especially with a worthy man. If a clerk expects his wife to stop working and tend to his home, how much more would a powerful and well-off man expect? The answer, of course, is everything. Women with careers, whether on the stage or elsewhere, generally gave them up when they married.

Ella has no interest in becoming a bird in a gilded cage.

All of this is in the room when the Duke makes his reply to Ella’s comment: “Depends on who’s setting the terms.”

The terms are what makes all the difference, and why Ella and Gil are now heading to the altar in A FATAL RECEPTION. After more than a year of negotiating their relationship and their future and finally coming to the conclusion that they can’t live without each other, the two have agreed on a marriage contract.

It sounds a little cold for a couple madly in love, but it’s the only way for Ella to keep her freedom – and for Gil to show his respect for it. Marriage contracts had always been a part of aristocratic unions, but the diva and her duke make an unusual deal, keeping their property separate and giving her control over her career. Gil surrenders some of what might be his rights in the eyes of the law out of love and respect.

As A FATAL RECEPTION opens, the couple has finally settled the property and legal matters, and now they’re navigating something almost as difficult: the transition from courting couple to spouses. While, of course, solving a crime or two.

And it’s fair to say both are sure they’re getting a good deal.

Kathleen Marple Kalb likes to describe herself as an Author/Anchor/Mom…not in that order. An award-winning radio journalist, she currently anchors on the weekend morning show at New York's #1 news station, 1010 WINS. She’s the author of several mysteries, historical and contemporary. Her short stories appear in anthologies and online and have been short-listed for Derringer and Black Orchid Novella Awards. She grew up in front of a microphone and a keyboard, working as an overnight DJ as a teenager in her hometown of Brookville, Pennsylvania…and writing her first (thankfully unpublished) novel at sixteen. When her son started kindergarten, she returned to fiction, and after two failed projects, some 200 rejections, and a family health crisis, found an agent for the third book – leading to a pandemic debut. In hopes of sharing what she’s learned the hard way, she’s active in writers’ groups including Sisters in Crime and the Short Mystery Fiction Society and keeps a weekly writing survival-tips blog. She, her husband, and their son live in Connecticut, in a house owned by their cat.

If you want to know if your house is infested with demons, place fine ashes around your bed and in the morning the demons’ footprints will appear like chickens’ footprints, in the ash. If you want to see the demons, take the afterbirth of a firstborn female black cat, born to a firstborn female black cat, burn it in the fire, grind it and place it in your eyes, and you will see them.

That advice might sound like something out of the Brothers Grimm but it’s actually from the Talmud, the ancient, encyclopedic compendium of Jewish knowledge. The sages of nearly two thousand years ago clearly accepted demons—and more—as real enough to be the subject not just of lore, but of law. For example, putting out a light on the Sabbath was forbidden—but exceptions were allowed for one who was fearful of heathens, robbers, or an evil spirit. The distance one could walk on the Sabbath was also proscribed, with a limited extension allowed for one who was forced beyond the standard limit by factors including evil spirits. And one was forbidden to enter ruins because they were often inhabited by demons.

Discovering all this during my continual study of Jewish texts was a revelation. I’d long loved fantasy – I’m old enough to have grown up not on Harry Potter but on The Lord of the Rings – and I’d also long identified with my Jewish faith. But the idea that these two, fantasy and Judaism, might mix seemed to me as unlikely as mixing chocolate and peanut butter (which is why I’m not today a multimillion-dollar candymaker). Of course, they do mix. Publishers have recently given us The Golem of Hollywood by Jonathan Kellerman and Jesse Kellerman, The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker, and The Frozen Rabbi by Steve Stern, for example.

Armed with this insight, I continued to read Jewish folktales (Howard Schwartz is the master reteller of these tales, if you’re interested) but in a new way: as rich ground upon which I might build a modest contribution of my own. That’s how my novel of Jewish fantasy, The Hidden Saint, came to be, inspired by bits of Torah and Talmud, rabbinic legends, folktales, and more.

I knew I wanted my novel to be something other than a typical fantasy clothed in a veneer of Jewish characters and settings. That would have been mere costume Jewry. So I first had to answer another question: what makes Jewish fantasy Jewish? That took me back to those ancient Sages.

What makes their acceptance of evil spirits, ghosts and demons so remarkable was that theirs was not a pagan world with competing supernatural forces, but a monotheistic world. They had to find a way to make a world governed by an ethical, benevolent God consistent with a world of demons and evil spirits. So did I. It’s a puzzle quite similar to the question of why evil exists. A traditional Jewish answer is that the presence of evil is necessary for man to choose good—and that free choice is central to the tradition. Demons and evil spirits also can be looked upon as a mechanism for evil, much as are disease, hurricanes, and wild animals.

But the Sages didn’t just tolerate these supernatural creatures. They used them to validate principles that are linchpins of Judaism (and, in many cases, have become universal values). For example, the Sages say that one is not permitted to allow the ritual fringes of his shirt to drag along the ground in a cemetery, so as to avoid insulting the dead, who can no longer honor God by performing the commandment to wear them. That in turn leads to a discussion as to whether the dead are indeed aware of the living.

To prove that they are, the Talmud relates a series of ghost stories. But these aren’t horror tales. The most elaborate of the set validates the important Jewish values of justice, care for orphans, and honor to parents. A trustee of orphans’ money has died and the money can’t be found, leading to accusations that the dead man stole it. His son goes to the cemetery to ask his father’s spirit what happened. The father assures him that he didn’t steal the money; he buried it for safekeeping and tells his son where to find it. The son also learns that his childhood friend, also deceased, has been denied entrance to heaven because of sins committed in this world. When the proud father tells his son how highly the son is regarded by heaven, the boy replies that on the strength of that regard, heaven must allow his friend to enter. And that’s what happens. It’s a ghost story, but a very Jewish one.
​
It also inspired one of the set pieces of The Hidden Saint, a scene in a cemetery about spirits with very earth-bound grief to overcome.
 
******************************
 
Mark Levenson is the author of The Hidden Saint (Level Best Books, 2022). His Jewish-themed fantasy writing has won honors from The National Foundation for Jewish Culture and the American Jewish University, as well as a Union Internationale de la Marionnette-USA Citation of Excellence, an award founded by Jim Henson.

Everyone who reads Charles Dickens’s unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, inevitably finds themselves wondering how the story would have concluded had the author lived to complete it.  Did John Jasper, the sinister choirmaster of Cloisterham Cathedral, strangle Edwin, his rival for the hand of the delightful Rosa Bud, dump the body in the Sapsea Family Tomb and dose it with quicklime to hide his crime?  Did the ruby-and diamond engagement ring in Edwin’s breast pocket survive the power of the corrosive and lead to the decomposed body’s identification and Jasper’s capture?   
 
Dickens steers the reader towards believing that the answer to both questions is ‘yes’.  Sir Arthur Conon Doyle, however, someone who should know what he’s talking about, claimed that the mystery writer’s task is to conceal the key idea and emphasize everything which makes for a different explanation.  Was Dickens, then, ladening his text with red herrings to put the reader off the scent, so to speak?  Did he have in mind an ending that would turn everything on its head?
 
Of course, we’ll never know.  Dickens died and the novel was never finished. That, though, has not stopped the speculation.  Quite the opposite, in fact.  The number of attempts in the one hundred and fifty years since his death to discover the ‘true’ ending is mind-boggling.  A 600-page bibliography published in 1998 lists almost two thousand articles and books seeking to unearth clues in the text, decipher how the plot might evolve, and, of course, discover Edwin’s fate.
 
And it was not just Dickensian scholars who were consumed with finding the Drood Holy Grail.  A PBS Masterpiece production, airing in 2012 and featuring Matthew Rhys (The Americans) as John Jasper, presented its own ending to the novel, while the Robert Holmes Broadway musical, Drood, which began its second run in 2012, invited the audience to choose the ending.  Most surprising of all, though, was the mock trial of John Jasper for the murder of Edwin Drood held in King’s Hall, Covent Garden, in 1914. The jury, under the foremanship of George Bernard Shaw, returned a spineless verdict of manslaughter, at which point the judge (G. K. Chesterton of Father Brown fame) promptly fined everyone, except himself, for contempt of court!
 
The half-finished story enticed, begged almost, anyone who read it to come up with their own ending, and I was no exception.  I donned my deerstalker, lit my meerschaum pipe and settled down to see what I could discover in the completed half of the novel.  Nothing probably.  After all, this vein of Drood gold had surely been panned to extinction by this point.  But hold on!  What was that on page 151?  My blood racing, I reread the passage.
 
In a touching scene, Edwin and Rosa decide to separate, and the engagement ring, intended for Rosa’s finger, remains in Edwin’s breast pocket.  And that is the problem.  The young man would never leave such a priceless treasure in his coat pocket.  He’d lock it away in his lodgings for safekeeping.  How then, could the gold and precious stones – that weren’t in Edwin’s pocket – be found on his body and cause the murderer’s downfall?  Suddenly, the vast majority of proposed continuations collapsed to dust!  I’d struck gold!     
 
Once the euphoria of spotting this flaw in the plot had worn off, I had to decide what to do next.  Publish it.  That’s what I would do.  To my delight, my finding was published.  To my despair, it appeared as a two-page comment deep inside a periodical where I knew it would be lost and forgotten as soon as the type was set.  It deserved more.  But what?
 
The shift in location of the ring from pocket to lodgings opened up a raft of new possibilities for the ending to Dickens’s novel.  I determined to find the most plausible.  The one I finally fastened on is fully consistent with the first half of the Drood story (a must for any continuation), avoids the unconvincing placement of the ring in Edwin’s pocket, and reflects Dickens’s approach to storytelling as evidenced by his other novels.  A promising start, perhaps, but was this enough?
 
Having never written a novel before, the idea of transforming my continuation into a fill-blooded work of fiction seemed far fetched.  But the thought prayed on my mind, and at two o’clock one morning, I had my Eureka moment.  Dickens didn’t just die before completing the Drood story; he was killed to prevent him from completing it.  An intriguing premise, but now I needed a motive for the author’s murder and a protagonist clever enough to find something in the Drood continuation to expose Dickens’s killer.
 
The more I read about Dickens, the more I became aware of a darker side to his life.  In the space of a year, he met Ellen Ternan, a London stage actress, half his age; made her his mistress; and separated from his wife of fourteen years and ten live births.  It’s even rumored that he fathered an illegitimate  child with his young paramour.  Fertile ground here, then, for secrets and motives, more than enough for me to embed my Drood continuation in a broader mystery surrounding Dickens himself. 
 
As for my protagonist, I wanted someone who was far from fiction’s stereotypical detectives, neither a Sherlock Holmes nor a Sam Spade.  I settled on a diffident, middle-aged, retired bookkeeper (think of a latter-day Mr Pickwick).  Dunston Burnett, as I named him, does, however, have two sleuthing talents.  He has the uncanny ability to join the dots in new ways, and even conjure up as yet unseen dots to create a picture invisible to everyone else.  Unlike Sherlock’s always-correct deductions, Dunston’s ‘pre-ductions’, as his policeman friend calls them, are usually wrong but on the odd occasion when they are right, they are breath-takingly so.  And he can be determinedly stubborn.  Once he gets his teeth into something, he has the perseverance of King Bruce’s spider.
 
The Drood continuation, the motive behind Dickens’s murder, and my amateur sleuth are the building blocks that underpin my debut novel, Immortalised to Death.  The glue holding them together is the tension running throughout the story between Dunston’s limited detective skills – pre-ductions and tenacity – and the apparently perfect crimes confronting him.  How does he fare?  It’s mixed.  His envisioned conclusion to The Mystery of Edwin Drood takes him a long way to solving the bigger mystery surrounding the death of Dickens, but not all the way.  It’s not until the very last chapter that an unexpected event reveals to Dunston who really took the life of England’s foremost novelist.
 
Immortalised to Death was released on September 26, 2023, and is available on Amazon.com and Bookshop.org.  To learn more about Immortalised to Death and the other two books comprising The Dunston Burnett Trilogy (Fatally Inferior, forthcoming September 2024, and The Séance of Murder, forthcoming September 2025) please visit my website: lynsquiremysteries.com. 
 

 
Lyn Squire was born in the UK and educated at Cambridge University.  He now lives in Springfield, Virginia.  During his career as a development specialist, he served as Director of the World Bank’s Research Department and was the founding president of the Global Development Network, an organization dedicated to promoting scholars from developing countries.  He now writes mysteries.    

When life gives you lemons…

Turns out there’s a lot more to lemonade than juice and sugar, which is part of the reason historian Christian Shaw likes a glass after doing yard work in The Stuff of Murder. Christian, the director of the Unity, Connecticut, Historical Society, finds herself in the middle of a murder case when a fading movie star drops dead on a shoot in town – and ends up tracking the killer with her knowledge of historic household items. And the occasional break for lawn mowing and lemonade.

It’s a good choice for this household historian.

While people have been enjoying cold citrusy drinks since at least the tenth century, lemonade has picked up surprising resonance for a simple beverage.

Starting with the lemons. First, life hasn’t been giving us actual lemons all that long. We know there were citrons, and other kinds of citrus in Greek and Roman times…but there’s nothing that’s verifiably a lemon until the 12th century. The treat from the tenth-century, enjoyed by the Jewish community in Egypt, was probably a citron slushie. Yum.

There’s no record of the person who actually took lemons and made lemonade, but we can verify that it was first sold as a soft drink in Paris on August 20th, 1630. It was made with sparkling water, sweetened with honey (the New World cane sugar industry wasn’t in full swing yet) and sold from tanks on the vendors’ backs. It was such a hot property that the vendors unionized into the Guild of Limonadiers!

Peak Lemonade came in 19th century America. The first U.S. recipe for lemonade was published in 1824, in the Virginia Housewife, and included egg whites. Egg whites or no, for most people it was an exotic treat. Remember, in most places, the lemons had to be shipped in or grown in a hothouse, so it was expensive and exciting.

That might add a little context to the whole temperance lemonade frenzy.

As hard as it is to imagine anyone seriously thinking a workingman would give up his nightly snort for a soft drink, it might be slightly less off the wall if the substitute were something seen as a treat. Maybe.

Still, by the late 19th century, the temperance movement was doing its best to make the case, pushing the slogan: “Goodbye to liquor, here’s lemonade!” It may not have worked for the guys at the corner bar, but it was the rule at the White House, where First Lady Lucy Webb Hayes (inevitably known as Lemonade Lucy) poured out the soft stuff. When she and husband Rutherford B. left, temperance went with them, until Prohibition made it mandatory.

By the end of the 19th century, just plain lemonade wasn’t all that exotic any more. Fortunately, there were new variations. “Portable lemonade” was what we recognize as drink mix: powdered lemon juice, sugar, and citric acid, useful for the frontier and even the military.

And then there’s pink lemonade.
            
There are two origin stories: one is fun and one is icky. The fun one is that someone at a circus accidentally dropped red cinnamon candies in the vat of lemonade and eureka, a cool new drink was born. The icky one? One of the trapeze girls accidentally rinsed out her red tights in the water meant for lemonade, and nobody had time to go get more water…so they made it into lemonade and sold it anyway. Another version of that story is even worse: it’s the clown’s socks!

However we ended up with pink lemonade, it still fits perfectly with the idea of making the best of a setback. So, when life gives you lemons – and wet clown socks! – make lemonade!


Kathleen Marple Kalb likes to describe herself as an Author/Anchor/Mom…not in that order. An award-winning radio journalist, she currently anchors on the weekend morning show at New York's #1 news station, 1010 WINS. She’s the author of several mysteries, historical and contemporary. Her short stories appear in anthologies and online and have been short-listed for Derringer and Black Orchid Novella Awards. She grew up in front of a microphone and a keyboard, working as an overnight DJ as a teenager in her hometown of Brookville, Pennsylvania…and writing her first (thankfully unpublished) novel at sixteen. When her son started kindergarten, she returned to fiction, and after two failed projects, some 200 rejections, and a family health crisis, found an agent for the third book—leading to a pandemic debut. In hopes of sharing what she’s learned the hard way, she’s active in writers’ groups, including Sisters in Crime and the Short Mystery Fiction Society, and keeps a weekly writing survival tips blog. She, her husband, and their son live in Connecticut in a house owned by their cat.           

How do authors select the names of their characters? Some look to lists of popular names. Some hold contests among their fans. Some try to emulate Charles Dickens by selecting names that describe their characters. Readers may assume that writers of historical fiction have an easier time because they pluck their characters’ names from the historical record. Not always.

For my first historical novel, The Murderess Must Die, I established a guiding principle that I continue to use—or I should write aim to use—as I write historical fiction.  When a fact is known, I stick to it. When a fact is unknown, I invent. To figure out the known, I research for months, then I start writing. For that first novel, only well into my writing did I realize I had naming problems.  Many of my characters, the real people who are part of the story, had the same names, or confusing names. If I could barely keep the characters straight, how could readers?

In finishing my third novel, I’ve come to sort my naming problems into two categories: characters in the historical record who have the same name, usually common names for the Gilded Age and the Progressive Age, and characters with names too common to research.

Let me start with the second category, which always produces chuckles. For my newest novel, Inferno on Fifth, I needed to research New York City’s Buildings Commissioner in 1899, a real person named Thomas Brady. Googling him turns up thousands of useless leads to a football player. I’ve also had to research Alfred Pope, an industrialist from Cleveland. I cannot google his full name successfully because newspapers reporters often didn’t know it. During the week that Mr. Pope figures in my novel, American newspapers reported on the serious illness of Pope Leo XIII. You can imagine the results from googling Pope. 

The more common problem I face is common names. They drive me crazy. Were all men who lived around the year 1900 named William or Frank? Two policemen who witnessed the crime scene at the center of my first novel had the name William Maher. I had to give one a nickname. In my second novel, Path of Peril, set in Panama in 1906, I encountered two historical figures with similar names—Elliott Roosevelt, brother of Teddy, and R.B. Elliott, a little-known labor leader. I chose to minimize the role of the labor leader. I encountered two James—valet James Amos and secret service agent James Sloan. I opted to call the valet by his last name.

In writing my third novel, Inferno on Fifth, women’s names become the issue. Two women named Ida figure in my story—Ida McClusky, sister of a detective, and Ida McKinley, wife of a president. I chose to refer to the former as, simply, the sister. I also manipulate three Helens. I allow only Helen Gould, the daughter of Jay Gould, to keep her name. And I grapple with two Alices, a mother and daughter. I’m still pondering how to keep them straight for the reader.

Even less common names cause problems. For The Murderess Must Die, I researched details about the brother of my primary character, a young man with the seemingly distinctive name of Garrett Terhune Garretson, who fought in the Civil War. I found two men with the exact same name, living at about the same time. I spent weeks going down rabbit holes with the wrong man. With that book I also encountered a problem with nicknames. I thought Penelope, my primary character’s mother, was nicknamed Ellen, then it appeared that whether that was right or not, another Ellen was my character’s sister.

In each of my novels I erase the correct names of some of my characters for, as the phrase goes, the good of the story. I choose readability over accuracy. Sadly, and cowardly, I let my more well-known characters keep their names as I weigh how likely readers are to notice errors. In every case, I provide explanations and apologies in my author’s notes. I want to offer a call for action at the end of this little essay—please, parents, chose distinctive names for your children or we will have generations of novelists trying to sort out Rachels, Emmas, Noahs, and Olivers.

**********

Marlie Parker Wasserman writes historical crime fiction. Her previous books are The Murderess
Must Die and Path of Peril. Her latest book, Inferno on Fifth, is inspired by the true story of the shocking fire that leveled one of Manhattan’s elegant hotels twelve years before the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. When not writing, Marlie travels throughout the world and tries to remember how to sketch. She lives with her husband in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

One challenge of writing a thriller set in a historic period is that we know what happened. Even if most of your readers are not history experts, they will be aware of the big picture and can quickly dive into Wikipedia to flesh out the facts. We know which US Presidents were assassinated, who won WW2 and are sure the Titanic sank. A reader can anticipate what is going to happen.

Even if we know our history, tension can be created against a historic backdrop that is fixed, for example in the Phillip Kerr books set in 1930s and 1940s Germany. Innumerable crimes and misdemeanours and cunning plots can be fitted into this ‘Golden Age’ with only passing nods to the historic timeline. Much happened that is not in the history books. Even if writing a thriller faithful to a well-known event such as Robert Harris’ Munich a great deal of the dialogue, plot and behind-the-scenes action needs to be made up.

Crucially, although modern readers know how it all turned out, the characters don’t. The writer needs to convey their hopes and fears and plans when the future is unknown. To them the end is not inevitable, and even the historic outcome need not pre-determine their fate as individuals. Characters should not be granted too much foreknowledge and so take actions that in hindsight we know are mistakes; they may invest in the stock market in 1928 because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Even if the reader is not surprised by the outcome of events, they are rewarded by how the protagonists react.

Historic thriller plots are made easier if the lead characters are minor players in the great game; a soldier not a general, a highwayman not a king. Major historical figures are given only walk-on parts, perhaps spouting lines they actually used. Only a little license is needed for our hero to be one of Columbus’ crewman or a Lady-in-waiting to Anne Boleyn. Take a little more license and one of our characters can play a pivotal role, such as being one of the senators who sticks a dagger into Julius Caesar.

Writing alternative history such as Phillip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle is a bolder step still. It opens up possibilities but requires a suspension of disbelief by the reader. The altered timeline needs to be explained and the bigger the departure from reality, the more thought the writer must put into world-building. Fantastic elements need to be minimised so that once over the initial hurdle everything about this changed world feels logical. The more recognisable elements of the real historic period that are included, the less of a jump it will be for the reader. The history is ‘wrong’, but it should feel plausible.

We are not writing history books so much of the research that underpins a thriller must be set aside, keeping only the nuggets that add richness to the story and provide the context. However, some facts can prove to be inconvenient and box the plot in if not derailing it entirely. Changing just a few of those inconvenient facts raises the reader’s doubts whether we will see history unfold as it should. Perhaps Hitler will be assassinated by our hero, or perhaps JFK will be saved. The character’s uncertainty about what could happen becomes more real if the reader also becomes uncertain. It’s a thriller, and we expect the unexpected.

****************
​
Jason Monaghan is an author and archaeologist. Blackshirt Masquerade by is set in 1935 in a Britain under the rising threat of fascism. The fascist bid for power accelerates during the ‘Abdication Crisis’ of 1936 in Blackshirt Conspiracy. Both are published by the Historia Imprint of Level Best Books.