Everyone's Here

The Ella Shane Mystery Series has always had an unusually diverse cast for a Gilded Age historical series. The main character, and narrator, Ella Shane, is the daughter of Irish and Jewish immigrants and confronts prejudice against both as she builds her career as an opera singer specializing in trouser, or male soprano, roles. The principal supporting character, her cousin Tommy, is a former boxing champion described as “not the marrying kind,” and he lives as fulfilling a gay life as is possible in 1900, largely because everyone assumes the Champ couldn’t be anything other than a model of masculinity.

Over the series, we’ve also seen a key character who is African-American passing as white for his opera career, and met people from a wide variety of classes, backgrounds, and experiences. I’ve always looked for ways to include people other than the “dead white people in big houses” that fill many historical mysteries.
All of that to say, it’s entirely within my wheelhouse and the frame of the series to have the character of a man living as a woman in A FATAL WALTZ. Still, it required a lot of research and care. I’d toyed with the idea for some time, but it wasn’t until this book that I had the right plotline to create the character.

It’s actually the second major plot of the book: the “A” plot features Ella’s new husband, the Duke, trying to determine whether the Prince of Wales may have committed a succession-threatening indiscretion during his 1860 visit to New York. Ella and Tommy, meanwhile, are working to break up a blackmail plot against her best friend’s husband, Paul, a civil court judge, who’s just been arrested in a raid on a sporting house – a brothel.

As it turns out, he was at the brothel to visit his sister the madam. “But I thought Paul only had a brother,” Ella says to her friend Marie. “He had a brother, but now he has a sister,” Marie replies. Later, their mutual pal Dr. Silver explains that some people feel they have the wrong body for their soul, and there’s nothing science can do for them right now. They all come to understand it through the lens of a recent story of a Civil War veteran who was found to be a woman after their death.

When we meet Alice LaJoy, formerly Paul’s brother Allen, she appears to be an attractive woman, known as the most ethical madam in Five Points. She’s a person with her own agency who’s found a way to live her truth in the world she has. The blackmail plot is an ugly complication for Alice and her brother, and Ella and Tommy put themselves at considerable risk to help them.

No spoilers – let’s just say Alice’s fate is anything but the stereotype of the poor tragic trans person, while still period-appropriate.

All of this, of course, happens as Ella and friends are sorting out that little mess involving the Prince of Wales. Which is part of the point. People of all different backgrounds and experiences have always been here and always will be.
Both stories, of the Prince, and the blackmail plot around Alice, touch on big themes of privilege and power, which are as relevant in Ella’s world as they are in ours. By the end of the book, you’ll have answers to the big plot questions…but you may have plenty of other questions to consider.
 
 
 
Kathleen Marple Kalb describes herself as an Author/Anchor/Mom…not in that order. An award-winning weekend anchor at New York’s 1010 WINS Radio, she’s the author of short stories and novels including the Ella Shane and Old Stuff series, both from Level Best Books. Her stories, under both pen names, have been in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Black Cat Weekly, and many anthologies, and short-listed for Derringer and Black Orchid Novella Awards. Active in writer’s groups, she’s served as Vice President of the Short Mystery Fiction Society and is VP of the New York/Tri-State Sisters in Crime Chapter. She, her husband, and son live in a Connecticut house owned by a large calico cat.