Very excited to announce that the Suffolk Mystery Convention will be held on March 6. I will send along information in a week or so.
I will be discussing my new Novel Death in the Great Dismal.
It is an appropriate choice since Suffolk is the town nearest the swamp.
It is an amazing experience to go from the streets of Suffolk and the small peanut farms nearby to the alien environment of the swamp. It is also very buggy!
So excited to reveal the cover for my new Will Rees mystery: Murder on Principle. I am not sure when it will be released. Death in the Great Dismal will be available Jan 5, 2021.
I am guessing sometime this summer. Stay tuned for more information!
I am so excited to announce a giveaway for my new book: Death in the Great Dismal. Will and Lydia travel south, to the Great Dismal swamp, They have been asked to rescue Ruth, a woman taken from Maine and sold down south. She has escaped to a village in the heart of the swamp and is living there with other fugitives.
Of course, Will and Lydia are in the village no more than a few days when the first murder occurs.
The Giveaway ends the first week of January.
After being delayed for several months because of COVID, the new Will Rees will be released in the United States on January 5.
The Great Dismal Swamp, the setting for the ninth Will Rees, is my favorite so far. Will and Lydia are asked by a friend, born free but sold down south and now escaped, to accompany him to the swamp to rescue his wife. Of course they agree, and several murders occur.
Yes, the swamp still exists. It is much smaller, though, than it was when George Washington first explored it (and first saw the potential for development.) But it still feels like a trackless wilderness. Bears and bobcats still live within the swamp as well as many species of birds and aquatic life. And insects, lots and lots of insects.
This is a peat bog and in some places the peat is fourteen feet deep. A man could be swallowed up with no one the wiser.
Many slaves escaped to the swamp. Estimates range from a few thousand to one hundred thousand. Many were caught but quite a few managed to make a life for themselves inside the swamp. These fugitives were called maroons.
When the escaped slaves fled to the swamp, they bedded down first under the pines. They grow only on the drier islands. Daniel Sayers, an archaeologist has been excavating these drier patches and has found evidence of small communities.
Most of the swamp resembles an impassible green curtain.
Now the swamp is passable via boardwalks. This one leads to a memorial honoring the maroons.
I realized – and I’m not sure why it took me so long – that although I have blogged about many many topics, I have not discussed Maine. My detective, Will Rees, is a Mainer and many of my books are set in this state.
At the time the books are set, Maine is not yet a state of its own. Originally populated by tribes of the Algonquin Nation, whose names remain in names like Androscoggin, Passamaquoddy, Penobscot and more, Maine was considered part of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. It was officially called the District of Maine. Maine was brought into statehood as part of the Missouri Compromise of 1820. (Maine came in as a ‘free’ state. The following year, Missouri came in as a slave holding state, thereby keeping the balance between free and slave.)
Maine is called The Pine Tree State for obvious reasons.
Maine has a long, and rocky coastline.
Although part of the temperate climate, and frequently warm and humid in the summers, it also has a long cold and snowy winter. I have seen it snow the last week of April, and not a dusting either but several inches.
But winters in Maine have their own beauty.
Since the rebirth of the circus in Great Britain was begun as an equestrian show, it is no surprise than many animal species have long been the stars of the animal world. At first, the horse was supreme. Horse acts continued right through to the modern age.
But, along with clowns and acrobats, animals acts were added to entertain the audience between equestrian feats. And, before the exotic animals became a feature of the circus (the elephant was first brought to the United States in 1794), dogs, pigs and bears were pressed into service as acts. Again, similar to the horse, these animals have continued to mainstays of the circus.
Almost from the first, less common animals were featured. In 1779, Philip Astley (a Serjeant-Major who set up the first circus in Great Britain after a century), put a zebra on display. Other exotics, elephants, camels, monkeys, and eventually the big cats were added to the exhibitions.
With the expansion of the European powers into Africa, the types of animals employed expanded. Wild animals, especially the big cats, became a profitable business. It was not a big jump from exhibiting the animals to including them to performances. To the acrobats, jugglers and ropedancers was now added a menagerie of animals, many of them dangerous. Of course, with the animals, came animal trainers.
Some of these animal performers became big stars. In the 1940’s Jumbo, the elephant became so popular that jumbo, meaning colossal, became part of the language.
The heyday of the American Circus occurred in the early 1900s. Hundreds of circuses, both small and large, toured the United States, performing for audiences of a few hundred or several thousands. Trains took the circuses all over the country and by then the circus was the circus we think of. Canvas tents had been invented and adopted in the mid-nineteenth century and exotic animal acts became a feature of the performances. The trapeze, invented in France, was added to the line-up.
But in 1800, if the circus came to Durham, Maine, it would be far different. As discussed in previous blogs, there were no tents; the circus constructed a small roofless amphitheater. Instead of elephant and lion acts, the animals were dogs and pigs. The trapeze, adapted from the tightrope, had not been invented. And trains did not carry the circus across the country,
Horse drawn wagons would have been the vehicle used.
As my model for the wagons used in A Circle of Dead Girls,
I used the Burton wagon. It is the oldest example of a wagon used as a home in Great Britain.
The history of the wagon, however, is older. By the late 17th century, most of the roads in Europe were paved. It is thought that the first wagons used as living quarters appeared in France and were designed for the actors of the circus. They were large, horse drawn caravans. By the middle of the 18th centuries, the carriages became smaller and only needed one or two horses to pull them.
The Burton wagons had small wheels placed under the body of the carriage itself and were undecorated. These wagons evolved into the elaborately embellished wagons, with large wheels necessary for going off-road, used by the Romani. According to Wikipedia and other sources, they began using such wagons about 1850 called a vardo.
Since John Asher, the circus owner, is from England and has traveled through Europe, I imagined that he would have seen such living wagons in France and other places and used them for the models of his own horse-drawn circus wagons. These living wagons would be a practical solution to traveling from town to town.
The decorated wagons did not disappear when the circus began touring via train. They evolved into parade wagons, the brightly painted and gilded wagons that paraded through town to advertise the circus. The circus museum in Sarasota, Florida has some fine examples of these wagons.
The circus comes to town in Circle of Dead Girls.
Although there was no canvas tent (not invented for another twenty+ years), no exotic animals (the first circuses used pigs, horses and dogs) or trapeze artists, there were clowns.
The ancient Greeks used figures of fun, which were rustic fools. The English word for clown also meant rustic fool originally. These characters are plentiful in Shakespeare’s plays.
At the same time, the Italian Commedia del’arte used a number of stock characters that includes clown-like figures: Pierot and Harlequin.
Clowns have certain evolved since then.
The clown in the American circus is a direct outgrowth of Philip Astley, who restarted the circus in England in 1768. His circus was originally an equestrian show and clowns were used as the breaks between the trick riding.
The circus comes to town in Circle of Dead Girls.
Although there was no canvas tent (not invented for another twenty+ years), no exotic animals (the first circuses used pigs, horses and dogs) or trapeze artists, there were clowns.
The ancient Greeks used figures of fun, which were rustic fools. The English word for clown also meant rustic fool originally. These characters are plentiful in Shakespeare’s plays.
At the same time, the Italian Commedia del’arte used a number of stock characters that includes clown-like figures: Pierot and Harlequin.
Clowns have certain evolved since then.
The clown in the American circus is a direct outgrowth of Philip Astley, who restarted the circus in England in 1768. His circus was originally an equestrian show and clowns were used as the breaks between the trick riding.
In almost every Will Rees mystery, I include at least one profession and one illness. In Simply Dead, for example, I studied hoop making (for barrels) and lumbering. One of the characters is severely ill with diabetes.
In A Circle of Dead Girls, tuberculosis was the disease of choice. Because the story is set against the early days of the circus, I included details about wagons and early magic tricks.
In Will Rees Number 10, A Murder of Principle, I am including smallpox. Like Covid-19, smallpox was a viral disease and greatly feared.
The initial symptoms were similar to the flu, Covid-19 and many other viral diseases: fever, muscle pain, fatigue and headache. Before the distinctive rash erupted, small reddish spots appeared on mucous membranes of the mouth, tongue, and throat.
The characteristic skin rash form within two days after the reddish spots on the mucous membranes. The rash was formed of pustules with a dot (that became filled with fluid) in the center. These spots scabbed over and then the scabs fell off, usually resulting in scarring.
The origin of smallpox is unknown although the theory says the virus developed in certain African rodents 60,000 or so years ago. The earliest evidence of human illness dates to the third century BCE with Egyptian mummies It is a lethal disease with a fatality rate for the ordinary kind of about 30 percent. Higher among babies. The Malignant and Hemorrhagic forms are over ninety percent fatal. Occurring in outbreaks, it killed hundreds of thousands, including at least six monarchs in Europe. In the twentieth century it is estimated to have killed 300 million alone. As recently as 1967, 15 million cases occurred worldwide.
In 1796, Edward Jenner discovered that milkmaids who had contracted cowpox, a much less serious disease, did not come down with smallpox. He began a trial and proved that inoculation with cowpox prevented smallpox. Inoculation with the live virus had already begun but, although the disease tended to be less severe and less fatal, some people still died. The cowpox was safer.
Later, the vaccine was made of the killed virus. In Great Britain, Russia, the United States vaccination was practiced. However. My father contracted small pox as a toddler and lived to tell the tale. I am old enough to remember my smallpox vaccination and still bear the scar on my upper arm.
A concerted global effort a to eradicate smallpox succeeded with the last naturally occurring case in 1977. (The last death was in 1978. A researcher contracted the disease from a research sample.) WHO officially certified the eradication of smallpox in 1980.