“The job at Marco’s restaurant seemed a godsend. Best of all was the dapper piano player who entertained diners on Friday and Saturday nights. Smitten by his panache, talent, and sleek good looks, Lizzie flirted with him shamelessly. But although he was friendly enough, he never encouraged her affection. It took her longer than it should have to figure out why.” – Running in the Shadows
           
When I started writing Never Try to Catch a Falling Knife, the first book in my Lizzie Crane Jazz Age mystery series set in the mid-1920s, I decided to make the pianist in my protagonist singer’s band gay. That would enable them to work together companionably, without the complications of a romantic relationship. I also saw this as an opportunity to depict a close friendship between a gay man and a straight woman, especially in Running in the Shadows, the fourth book in my series in which the pianist’s former lover is murdered and he’s a suspect. Additionally, I enjoyed creating tension between Lizzie’s beau and her friend, showing the two men’s initial suspicion of each other and their jealousy, but not in the ordinary sense.
 
As the series evolved, I became interested in how people at that time viewed homosexuals–– men and women both––and what challenges they faced. During the early part of the Roaring Twenties in Manhattan, where my characters live, the subject of homosexuality gained popularity in novels, plays, and nightclub acts. Rockland Palace’s Hamilton Lodge in Harlem hosted elaborate drag balls that drew thousands of attendees including high-society notables. New York’s prestigious Savoy, the Astor Hotel, and Madison Square Garden held drag beauty contests. Cross-dressing men and women performed in Times Square and Greenwich Village as well, during what was known as the “Pansy Craze.”
 
Then in 1927, the State Legislature banned the appearance and discussion of gay men and lesbians onstage. Musicians, actors, and others risked having their careers ruined if their sexual preference became known. Anti-sodomy laws had been on the books in all states in the US since the end of the Revolutionary War, but now police earnestly enforced those laws. People found guilty of engaging in non-reproductive sex were sentenced to prison––up to ten years in New York, twenty in Massachusetts. The laws weren’t repealed nationwide until a Supreme Court decision in 2003.
 
When I began writing my fifth book in the series When the Blues Come Calling (scheduled for December 2025 release from Level Best Books), I learned that on June 11, 1926, police raided a Greenwich Village teahouse known as Eve’s Hangout, owned by a lesbian couple, Eva Kotchever and Ruth Norlander. Popular with artists, writers, and intellectuals including Anais Nin, Henry Miller, and Emma Goldman, the nightspot had become a haven for lesbians and counterculture types. Supposedly, a sign at the entrance said “Men admitted, but not welcome.” Police confiscated a self-published book of stories written by Kotchever (aka Eve Adams), titled Lesbian Love. She was arrested, found guilty of obscenity, and imprisoned in Welfare Island’s workhouse. Seventeen months later, she was deported to her native Poland, and in 1943 she died in an Auschwitz concentration camp.
 
Her story became part of my book, for surely if my characters had been real people they would have known Eve Adams and frequented the teahouse. Not only did relating her sad fate allow me to share a story of discrimination unknown to most people outside Manhattan, it also gave me a chance to depict a friendship between my straight heroine and a notorious lesbian, at a time when such relationships could be dangerous.
 
Currently, I’m working on the seventh book in my Lizzie Crane mystery series, which centers on NYC’s fashion industry in 1927. As my tale unfolds, I expect to discover more about the prejudices LBGTQ+ individuals faced a century ago and how some of those problems still exist today.
 
About the Author
 
Skye Alexander is the author of nearly fifty fiction and nonfiction books. Her stories have appeared in anthologies internationally, and her work has been translated into fifteen languages. In 2003, she cofounded Level Best Books with fellow crime writers Kate Flora and Susan Oleksiw. So far, her Lizzie Crane mystery series includes four traditional historical novels set in the Jazz Age: Never Try to Catch a Falling Knife, What the Walls Know, The Goddess of Shipwrecked Sailors, and Running in the Shadows. The fifth, When the Blues Come Calling, is scheduled for release in September 2025 and she’s working on the seventh book now. After living in Massachusetts for thirty-one years, Skye now makes her home in Texas. Visit her at https://skyealexander.com 

​A Short History of the Long Road to Decriminalizing Sexuality in the US

Trailblazing: A History of Gay Rights in New York

In the Early 20th Century, America Was Awash in Incredible Queer Nightlife

After decades as an art historian, journalist, curator and director of a historic house museum, ten years ago I felt the urge to write murder mysteries. I was not, however, inspired to make them up out of whole cloth. For some unexamined reason, I choose to do away with real art-world characters who are, in fact, dead but who (with one exception) didn’t die when or where I kill them. All of them meet ends different from their actual deaths. 
 
Scholars aren’t supposed to make up stuff like that, so I don’t think my grad school advisor would have approved. Journalists are also expected to be factual, though as a New York Times art critic I had license to express my opinions, but not to be inaccurate. Museum directors and curators need to get their information right, too. Honest mistakes happen, but none of those lines of work tolerate outright liars.
 
So why would I go against the accepted ethical norms? Well, to be honest, just for the fun of breaking the rules and keeping my readers guessing. Locate the fictional crime in an authentic setting inhabited by people who were, or could have been, there at the time, have them interact with imaginary characters, and it’s hard to tell what’s true and what’s false. That’s how I’ve constructed all my Art of Murder mysteries, set in the creative community that migrates between New York City and the Hamptons on eastern Long Island, where my husband and I have lived for nearly fifty years. It’s such a rich source of potential victims and suspects that I’ll never run out of material.  And while the art world may seem opaque to outsiders, its machinations and motivations are entirely recognizable to the average reader.
 
As one of my fictional characters breaks it down, there are five universal motives for murder: jealousy, deception, rivalry, greed and revenge—words to live (or die) by in the world at large. Each of my novels takes a different slant on one of them, with predictably fatal consequences. In the first, An Exquisite Corpse, titled after a Surrealist parlor game, greed is at the forefront. Number two, An Accidental Corpse, hinges on jealousy. Revenge is the motive in the third, An Artful Corpse, while deception is at the heart of number four, An Elegant Corpse, and the latest, number five, A Willful Corpse. I’ll examine rivalry in mystery number six, published in April by Level Best Books. 
 
The Art of Murder series develops chronologically, decade by decade, starting in 1943, when a contingent of Surrealist artists and writers fled Hitler’s Europe and camped out in New York City during World War II. Those who know the true story have asked me why I decided to kill Wifredo Lam, one of the exiled Surrealists, who died in 1982 and who wasn’t even in the city during the war. The answer is, he was the perfect victim to lead the narrative in intriguing directions, and to rope in colorful characters who were his real-life associates. 
 
Two fictional NYPD officers, Brian Fitzgerald and Juanita Diaz—yes, there were female cops back then—who investigate the crime fall in love and marry, and their family story carries forward through the series. By 1956, they’re vacationing in East Hampton with their eight-year-old son, Timothy Juan, known as TJ. He helps solve the mystery of what looked like an accident but may have been the murder of Edith Metzger, a passenger in the car crash that killed the painter Jackson Pollock. (This is the only one of my novels in which the victim dies when and where, though not how, it really happened.) 
 
TJ takes the lead in the next book, set in 1967 New York City amid anti-Vietnam War protests and the heyday of Pop art, when the controversial artist Thomas Hart Benton—who died in 1975 and, like Lam, wasn’t in New York at the time—is stabbed to death at the art school TJ is attending. At age 19, TJ, who’s also studying at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, is torn between a career in law enforcement and life as an artist. He resolves the conflict by giving up on art class, but not on his classmate, Ellen Jamieson. Fast forward to 1976, when TJ, now 28 and a licensed private eye married to Ellen, investigates the murder of his friend and mentor, the wealthy artist Alfonso Ossorio, who is found dead—14 years before his actual demise in 1990—in his East Hampton mansion. Ten years later, TJ is hired by Francis V. O’Connor, the leading expert on Jackson Pollock’s work, to track down an art forger, but winds up trying to find out whether O’Connor’s sudden death was an accident, suicide, or murder. Book number six will circle back to 1939, with Brian Fitzgerald as a rookie cop patrolling the soon-to-open New York World’s Fair, where muralists meet with mishaps—one fatal—that are definitely not accidental.
 
As a New York City native and longtime Hamptons resident who trained as an artist before studying art history, I’m intimately familiar with the milieux in which my mysteries are set. Many of the real characters were my friends or acquaintances, so I have an insider’s view of their personalities and behaviors. I knew Pollock’s long-suffering wife, Lee Krasner, and his lover, Ruth Kligman, as well as several of the artists in their circle. Ossorio and his life partner, Ted Dragon, were much as I describe them, and I was especially close to O’Connor. After reading An Exquisite Corpse, he told me I had a flair for mystery writing—high praise from a very judgmental critic. Sadly, A Willful Corpse, the book in which I kill him, was published in April, more than seven years after his death in 2017, so he will never know whodunit.
 
During her 34-year tenure as director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in East Hampton, New York, Helen Harrison began writing mystery novels set in the art world of which she’s a denizen. A widely published author of nonfiction books and articles on art, she enjoys making up stories in which fictional characters interact with people from her own background and experience as a New York Times art critic, NPR arts commentator, curator at the Parrish Art Museum, Guild Hall Museum and the Queens Museum, and a practicing artist. Her second novel, An Accidental Corpse, won the 2019 Benjamin Franklin Gold Award for Mystery & Suspense. A Mystery Writers of America active member, she and her husband, the artist Roy Nicholson, live in Sag Harbor, NY, with the ghost of Roy’s beloved studio cat, Mittens.