Wren Winters runs a gaming store – a store where lots of board games are sold. Just before a big event, Wren arrives at the store to discover the dead body of her landlord. He has been murdered and, of course, Wren and her assistant Charlie are primary suspects.
Wren and her crew – besides Charlie, there’s Esther the librarian and Jo the nurse, begin doing some sleuthing. The landlord, it turns out, is disliked all over his town. Then his estranged daughter shows up.
Vandalism on the store and the real possibility Wren will lose her space threaten her and her friends.
Lots of fun. As a former passionate D&D player, I remember what is what like playing involved board games. (I also remember when a local library was under the gun by a local group for ‘devil worship’ for holding the gaming sessions. Really.)
Very light but the mystery is cleverly planned. Recommended.
Will Rees, the main character in my mystery The Long Shadow of Murder, is a traveling weaver, called factors. Like many professions then, weaving required an apprenticeship of about seven years. (This may explain the ‘Luddites”, many of them weavers who saw their professions disappearing.) About nine spinners were required to keep a weaver in business. And looms were big, heavy and expensive, hence the word heir-loom.
In colonial times, and stretching into the early USA, larger towns, like Williamsburg, had a resident professional weaver and cloth from overseas did come into the ports. Smaller towns might have a weaver who also farmed. The further away these towns were located, the less imported cloth the women had access to. In the beginning, this expensive cloth was expensive also although, as the Salem ships brought cloth from India, this cloth dropped in price. By 1802, when Long Shadow takes place, Rees is facing a huge drop in his business.
Besides the traveling weavers, other professions took to the roads. Some men made brooms. This was a craft the Shakers took on as well; they sold their wares which included brooms, whips, boxes and other items, from wagons. Tinkers, who not only sold pots and pans but mended them as well, were also a familiar sight.
In these agrarian times, the goal was to make enough money to buy a farm. Usually, once a man had a good farm, he settled, at least for most of the year. Although still a weaver, and a reluctant farmer, Rees has begun to focus more on the farm where he and Lydia and their children live.
Some of the accounts from the women married to such men speak poignantly of the loneliness and isolation, to say nothing of the struggles in keeping a farm going by themselves.
Had a great time at Mocha Lisa’s on Saturday evening with my fellow Mavens: Amy Patrica Meade, Frankie Bailey, Liz Irish, Chris Keefer, Jacqueline Boulden, and Shelley Jones. Great coffee, great pastries (just ask my husband) and a wonderful and engaged crowd. I also picked up some new books. Expect reviews.
This week I read The Last Wizard’s Ball, by Charlaine Harris. It is number six, and listed as the final volume in the series. I hope not since it ended on several cliffhangers.
Lizbeth Rose accompanies her sister Felicia to the Wizard’s ball in the Holy Russian Empire. The ball is similar to the Regency London season, a chance to see and be seen. Since Felicia is a powerful death wizard, and beautiful as well, she is much in demand. But, on one of their outings, someone fires an arrow which strikes Felix, another death wizard and Felicia’s mentor. Another attack occurs at a ball, and then another. At the same time, Lizbeth Rose experiences several odd conversations. What is going on?
War is brewing in Europe. It seems far away to Lizbeth but the Germans and Japanese are represented at these events, and they are desperate to add Felicia to their stable of wizards. Lizbeth realizes her husband and her sister are keeping secrets from her, serious, earth changing secrets. Then Felicia, who is only sixteen, does something so reckless, so dangerous, and so earth shattering, it changes everything.
Indigo is probably the most familiar dye in the world and has a long history of use. The first identified use is from 4000 years ago in Peru. Our word indigo, however, comes from a Greek root word meaning Indian dye since it was from India that indigo traveled to Europe via the Silk Road. The use of the dye quickly spread. From the Tuaregs in the Sahara to Cameroon, clothing dyed with indigo signified wealth.
Prior to the arrival of indigo in Europe, woad was the tradition dye. It produces a lighter blue. (One of the theories is that blue previously meant a shade similar to cyan.) In the New World, enslaved people were put to work cultivating indigo which became a significant cash crop. There were large plantations in South Carolina. (See Death of a Dyer.)
During the time of Will Rees, all of the yarn he worked with would have been dyed with these natural dyes. Indigo, by the way, was very expensive.
Indigo is not water soluable and so has to be treated to make it useable. One of the pre-industrial processes was soaking it in stale urine. Many accounts do not mention this particular fact but the pungency of the process is regularly described. (I used indigo a library program and when it was ‘curing’, it smelled so terrible, we all left the room.) The result is known as indigo white. Fabric dyed in the indigo white turns blue with oxidation. Indigo is also toxic so there is plenty of opportunity for indigo workers to become sick. And despite the processing, indigo fades slowly over time. Just take a look at your jeans. Denim is dyed with indigo and fades.
I saw items dyes with indigo in the highlands of Peru. The hanks of wool were all different colors from a light royal blue to such a deep blue it was almost navy. Truly beautiful colors.
Synthetic dyes have now almost taken over for indigo and the other natural dyes.
Murder in the Trembling Lands is the newest Benjamin January mystery by Barbara Hambly. It is Carnival time, and Ben is working asa musician at all the balls and fetes. He is therefore present when one man calls out another, accusing him of being an Octoroon instead of a white man. A duel ensues, and Ben is asked to attend as a physician.
One of the men, Corvallis, is shot. When Ben examines the body, he realizes the victim has been shot by a rifleman in the trees, not the other duelist. Moreover, the other man has recently had all his gambling debts paid off. So the murder of Corvallis was murder, and a carefully planned one as well.
Shortly thereafter, Ben is asked by his white stepbrother to search an old and abandoned plantation of something – papers or something else – by the daughter of a disgraced man who was accused of treason during the War of 1812. Ben, himself, fought in that war, primarily at the Chalmette Battlefield. In that battle, a large and professional army of British soldiers was defeated by Andrew Jackson’s hastily assembled army of volunteers, including the free blacks like Ben.
Now Ben has several tasks before the murder can be solved. He must discover what exactly happened during the War of 1812, and the battle at Chalmette. He has to help his step brother, and protect him from his foolishness. And, Ben has to accomplish all this while working, and trying to survive the men trying to kill him.
This is a rousing story with an intricate plot. But for me, the attraction is always the exotic culture of New Orleans during this time and the complication interpersonal relationships. The rules governing the whites, the free blacks, and the slaves are complicated to say the least. This is a society where the wealthy white planters choose placees, beautiful women of color, as their mistresses. Thus, it is common for the white children to have half-siblings from ‘the shady side of the street’. The white family demonstrate a variety of reactions to their darker family members, from complete acceptance to outright hatred. I certainly don’t blame the Americans, recent entries into this society, of being confused by the complex rules governing it.
Madder (rubia tinctorum) has been used for centuries as a red dye. It is well known as the dye for Turkey Red or, as I mentioned in an earlier post, the red coats for the British during the eighteenth century. Wild madder yields a subtler pinky brown. (When I grew my own, I ended up with a pale salmon pink.) Unlike many natural dyes, madder contains natural mordanting agents and does not need to be mixed with iron or tin or other materials.
When Spain entered the New World, another source of red dye became available to Europe; cochineal. ((Cochineal was already known to and used by the Aztecs and the Maya people as well as the Incas and pre-Incas in Peru. It was also known in Bronze Age Crete.) Insects similar to small beetles live on the cactus found at the higher altitudes in countries such as Peru. A visitor to Peru will see this grayish bloom on the cacti growing wild in the Sacred Valley. It looks like some form of fungi but is actually an insect colony. Cochineal is the blood of the female of this species and dyes vibrant red, pink and purple. I have read that the Pope’s robes were dyed with cochineal. Without a proper mordant, cochineal is not colorfast.
Spain held a monopoly on cochineal for years, making the bright scarlet very much sought after and very expensive. It was the color of the rich and paintings from this era contain frequent splashes of red clothing, wherein the subjects demonstrate their wealth and high status. Efforts to transport the insects to Europe failed, although they were brought into Australia and caused a whole raft of problems.
The bright red is similar to the use of Tyrian purple in earlier times in the fact it displayed the wearer’s status and wealth.. The purple dye was discovered in antiquity and traded by the Phoenicians. It is made from the shells of the common Mediterrean Sea Snail. It was both rare and expensive (the Phoenicians held on to their monopoly for years) and became the color of royalty. It has never been produced synthetically commercially.
Cochineal is still used as a dye and appears in both candy and lipstick. Think of that when you put something red on your mouth.
I chose this mystery for the book discussion group at the library. We had a very lively discussion.
Olivia Watson moves into a house in Knightsbridge, New York. One night, she sees a man appear at her door and then disappear through a wall. After she sees him three more times, she speaks to him. He responds and they discover they are living in the same house, only, while Olivia is in 2014 Stephen Blackwell is in 1934. A detective on the police force, he is currently involved in investigating the murder of the bank manager and the theft of a significant amount of money.
His investigation proceeds as his relationship with Olivia progresses to a tentative friendship.
The settings, particularly the 1934 world, are wonderfully rendered. Some of the touches are really clever. They discover that they both know some of the same people. But Stephen knows Annabel, for example, as a fourteen-year-old, while Olive knows her as an old woman. Unsettling to say the least. Fun and thought provoking. Recommended.
I have been a fan of Barbara Hambly’s since she wrote fantasy and science fiction. (The series about the Dog Wizard is an especial favorite.) I love the Benjamin January books.
January is a free man of color in New Orleans. Although trained as a doctor, as a black man he is not allowed to practice so he supports his family as a musician.
In 1840, William Harry Harrison, an Indian fighter, was running for president. January pays only a little attention to politics but since the run up to a large rally in New Orleans is filled with balls and other events, he is busy playing. One day after a fist fight between two suitor for a beautiful flirt named Marie- Joyeuse Maginot, she is found murdered and the only black person there is promptly arrested. January immediately begins investigating to save his friend.
A story that begins with an attack on January by an escaped slave (for his clothes) ends with January racing across roofs to prevent an assassination.
As usual, Hambly’s mystery is excellent. But, also as usual, what strikes me most is the difficulty of living in a slave state as a free man. January always carries his papers, and even then risks being sold into slavery and possibly ending up in the cane fields. A smart man, he must hide his intelligence from the wealthy white men who hire him as a musician. This dynamic gives the Hambly mysteries an added dimension beyond the historical facts, great characters and wonderful puzzles.
When I first began writing the Will Rees mysteries, I made a conscious decision to avoid jumping into that messy part of our history. Not because I didn’t think it was important, I did, but I didn’t think I was ready to navigate this serious subject. I allude to it in several books. In Death of a Dyer, for example, I mention the two people stolen from the village street by slave takers. This becomes important later.
Many books later, I wanted to set a mystery in the Great Dismal Swamp. Even now, although much smaller than it was 300 years ago, is still a pretty hostile environment. I’ve posted before about that previously. Anyway, fugitives from neighboring plantations, the escapees were called Maroons, set up small communities in the swamp. Tobias, the man stolen in Death of a Dyer, escapes and asks Rees to help recover his wife, now living in the swamp. Rees and Lydia travel to Virginia to do that and, of course, run smack into a murder.
Death in the Great Dismal forced me to confront slavery head on with characters who were so desperate for freedom they fled to the dangerous and forbidding swamp.
I continue the story in Murder on Principle. In the previous book, Rees and Lydia have rescued a couple of the enslaved people.
In Murder on Principle, the owner comes looking for them, bringing a grudge and smallpox that sweeps through the village. When he is found murdered, suspicion falls on the people Rees has brought north. I posed several ethical questions. One, if the slave owner intended to recover the people he thought of as his property, would they be guilty of murdering him or was it self-defense? How far does loyalty and friendship go in a case of murder? Are Tobias and Ruth justified in their anger at Rees for suspecting them? And finally, should Rees turn the murderer over to the constable or, considering the circumstances, let him go free? And what about the escaped slave who has lived in the north for years and is suddenly confronted with the prospect of recapture?
In Murder, Sweet Murder, I send the family to Boston. Lydia’s father has been accused of murder. Lydia, who has been estranged from her father for years, is reluctant to go and we soon learn why. He is a slave trader – despite the fact that Boston was the center of the Abolition movement.
Even though I do not address the issue of slavery in The Long Shadow of Murder directly, I feature the ripple effect of some of the actions taken during Murder on Principle. It is not just war that leaves people with PTSD but previous decisions and consequences from those decisions.
I regularly read Science fiction and this week, on the advice of a friend, I read Project Hail Mary. It doesn’t hurt that Ryan Gosling will be starring in a movie soon.
A lone astronaut wakes up with no memory of who he is or what he is doing in this metal room with two corpses. Gradually, as his memories returns, he remembers he is Ryland Grace, scientist/school science teacher, on a mission to save humanity. And how did he go from scientist to teacher? He disagreed with the establishment and left research in a huff.
A space microbe, named by Grace as Astrophage, has infected the sun and is drawing the energy away in such large amounts the sun’s output will diminish by several percent. All life on earth will perish and the Hail Mary project is an effort to reach Tau Ceti and find out why it is not infected. The space ship, hastily cobbled together by the nations of earth, and with three crew members from different countries, have been put into induced comas and sent on this dangerous and likely to fail mission.
And then, as Grace enters the Tau Ceti system, he is met by an alien ship.
There are so many twists and turns in this novel, it is hard to keep up. This is truly hard science fiction, full of physics and math. (It at least all sounds plausible.) I very much liked Grace’s reasons for, not only helping with the research, but pushing his way onto the ship. As a teacher, he feels the kids he teaches are HIS kids so he has a stake in saving them, a feeling I both agree with and totally understand.
