The annual Bouchercon is held this year in California – Long Beach to be exact. I always look forward to Bouchercon. This year, I am on a panel with other historical mystery writers. Looking forward to it. It should be fun.
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Silly superstitions and more
Here are some of the superstitions I find silly. If a cow moos after midnight, someone in the immediate family will soon die. Since cows moo all the time I think we can all be glad this one isn’t true. Or maybe it is. Since a cow moos all the time, it’s bound to coincide with a death, right?
If someone places three chairs in a row, someone will die. (really?)
Opening an umbrella in the house means someone will die in six months.
If a young girl sleeps with an apple under her pillow, she will dream about the man she will marry.
If a cat sharpens his claws on a wooden fence there will be a heavy downpour later that day. In fact, there are quite a few involving cats. Perhaps this is so because cats were so often seen as witches’s familiars.
Many superstitions relate to unmarried girls seeing the face of their future husbands or superstitions guaranteeing a happy future marriage. The tradition of “Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue” is one of these. Not following this prescription is supposed to result in an Unhappy marriage.
Silly or not, there are quite a few old beliefs that we still sorta kinda follow today, as with the above. Another one: it’s bad luck for the groom to see the bride right before the wedding.
Poor man’s fertilizer: A snowfall in April or May means a good harvest. This one is actually true: a late snowfall puts nitrogen into the soil which is good for plants.
Speaking ill of the dead will mean someone close to you dies within the year.
The one who gets the bigger piece of a wishbone will achieve their wish.
A black cat means bad luck.
13 is an unlucky number. Some hotels still do not have a thirteenth floor.
Here’s a big one: Halloween. It may have degenerated into a candy collecting orgy but the costumes and the connection with food have a long history back to times before the Romans.
The groundhog and his shadow. With all the furor around Puxatawney Phil one would think the rodent some form of royalty.
What I find so interesting about these old beliefs is their staying power. My mother used to quote:
“Red sky at night, sailor’s delight
red sky in the morning, sailors take warning”
as a predictor of the next day’s weather. I still think of it when I see a particularly fiery sunset.
True, many of them have become celebrations for children or ones that adults enjoy with tongues firmly planted in cheeks. But I know that there are many conversations about the groundhog and his shadow so there still is some belief.
Salem, past and present
One of the things I like to do when researching a book is visit the location where it is set. I did that with Salem when I was writing Death in Salem.
I like getting the feel of the place and a sense of the geography.
Salem is a good place to research since they have kept a lot of their past. Not all of it but enough. And a number of reminders of Salem’s past. and the past of the United States, are still present. The Burying Point, the cemetery, is there. I like that you can still visit this place and see the headstones from the distant past.
Not the accused witches, however. Witches were not allowed to be buried in consecrated ground so were dumped. Families, although forbidden to do so, frequently found the bodies and buried them properly. This meant a great deal in this religious past. But the burying point does have memorials to these men and women. (even two dogs were accused and executed!)
The witch trials are well remembered and some of the houses were built in that time, 400 years ago.
Salem still has many houses from the period of the merchantmen also. Below is the Derby house, built within sight of Derby wharf. Although there are many fine houses on the waterfront, a short walk to Chestnut Street reveals a block of beautiful houses, many from the late 1700’s.
As the merchantmen grew wealthy, they built houses on Chestnut Street. And many of these houses are still occupied.
Although the 1790’s are not ancient compared to Europe and their long history, for these United States it represents the early part of our history and so I find it exciting.
Pinterest pages
I’ve set up pages for both A Simple Murder and Death of a Dyer and have started thinking about Cradle to grave. I want to add pictures of various types that represent the book. Most of them have played a part in my research and I’ve based my descriptions upon them. They are listed under Eleanor Kuhns A Simple Murder and Eleanor Kuhns Death of a Dyer.
Salem Merchantmen
In 1797 Salem was the wealthiest city in the new United States and the sixth largest city. The customs duties were basically supporting the new Federal government.Salem had always been a whaling city, along with New Bedford and Nantucket. And whaling continued. But, once the restrictions on shipping with the Orient were removed (as long as we were a colony of Great Britain, they called the shots) the merchants of Salem headed out to open new markets. And, in 1783, the Grand Turk brought back a cargo of pepper from Sumatra and earned a profit of 700%.
That is not a typo. It was 700%.
So even the cabin boys who signed on to the ships carried something they could trade. If they survived, for this was a dangerous profession, they could earn enough to begin investing in other ships. As a consequence, vast fortunes were made.
Some of the captains were barely in their twenties.
The wharves, of which only a few remain, were bustling with warehouses and imports of exotic fruit, opium, tea, textiles – you name it. (The Derby wharf, shorter than it was during the 1790s is home to the Friendship – the reproduction of a merchantship, and the Union wharf, now called the Pickering) Salem became one of the first truly cosmopolitan cities, a fact often forgotten in the fascination with the witchcraft trials, and home to one of the first East Indian immigrant populations.
Derby wharf and Friendship with a sample of a warehouse
Sisters in Crime blog hop
As part of Sisters in Crime SINC-UP blog round robin (www.sistersincrime.org/BlogHop) I thought I would address the question: what authors have inspired you?
First and foremost, Agatha Christie. I have read all of her books, some of them multiple times. The success of the many dramatizations and most recently the PBS series, several with different actresses for Miss Marple and of course the wonderful David Suchet as Hercule Poirot, speaks to the enduring popularity of Christie’s works. There is even a new Hercule Poirot mystery coming out by a different author who, in an article in Library Journal, said she was trying to remain faithful to the original character.
Why is Christie so popular?
Certainly not her characters. Although I find her detectives interesting, Christie employs a variety of stock characters: the silly maid, the ne’er-do-well heir, the wealthy older widow, the vicar and so on. The most interesting thing that can be said of these characters is that they hearken back to an era where middle class families had maids. This is a time not too distant from our own – I know people who remember the thirties – but in many ways it is as much a foreign country to us as ancient Rome.
But the plots, the plots are incomparable. She plays fair and always puts in enough clues so a really sharp reader can figure out the ending. But she is skilled at putting in a lot of red herrings so unraveling the puzzle is not so easy.
She is the Queen of amateur detectives. Miss Marple and Poirot and Tommy and Tuppence and the others do not operate in a world of writs, and Miranda warnings and all the rest. That’s why her detectives have to explain the resolution to identify the killer. Then the killer has to confess so either a tame policeman like DCI Japp can haul him away or he (or she) can commit suicide, thereby saving the police from having to develop a case with pesky things like evidence. I appreciate that model since I write historical mysteries set in a time without a framework of laws and law enforcement professionals. And that doesn’t even mention aids like fingerprints or DNA.
Other inspirations are Barbara Hambly (writer of the Benjamin January mysteries set in the New Orleans of the 1830’s). Now, her characters I find unforgettable, and not just January himself. His sisters, his friends, even the murderers he hunts are all fully-fleshed out characters. Ask me to tell you the story of even the first January novel, which I read years ago, and I can. They are that memorable.
The other piece she does really really well is setting. What a strange culture this was, exotic and captivating all at once. In my opinion, an author not to be missed.
Another author who is rightly famous is the incomparable Anne Perry. She is very good at evoking the setting: Victorian England with all its pretensions and hypocrisy, especially sexual hypocrisy. But I read her primarily for her characters, especially the Charlotte and Pitt series. I feel as if I know them personally. Any author can aspire to writing such believable characters.
Finally, there are the wonderful Ellis Peters’s Cadfael mysteries. The medieval setting and the world of the cloister is so real it serves almost as another character.
Surely there are male authors who have inspired me? Indeed. One of my absolute favorites is Peter Tremayne, a pseudonym for a Celtic scholar. He writes about seventh century Ireland and Sister Fidelma. A woman who is both a religious and a brehon (judge). During the course of the series she marries, this early form of Christianity was quite different than the form that became known as Roman Catholicism.
Surely there are other writers I read? Of course. I loved the 87th precinct by Ed McBain but more as something different from my own experience. I enjoyed the Tony Hillerman mysteries. He did such a good job of putting you into the Navaho experience and both Chee and Leaphorn are wonderful characters. I’m glad Anne Hillerman has taken on her father’s mantle and is continuing the series. C.J. Box’s Joe Pickett mysteries and the superb Longmire mysteries from Craig Johnson are character driven and action filled mysteries.
But it is the historical mysteries that I read of tips on ‘how to do it’. The setting is not just a background for the characters and the unraveling of the mystery, but an integral part of the mystery itself. So you might find that a Crusader, infected with leprosy, is both judge and murderer. Or syphilis is the cause of a graveyard of dead babies. Or a passionate religious disagreement leads to murder.
I try hard to match such seamless interweaving of mystery, character and setting but although easy to admire, it is very hard to do.
Check out other blogs by some of the Sisters in crime blog hop and also my special friend Dora Machado at htttp://www.doramachado.com/
Hunting dog instincts
Shelby is too smart for her own good. Although the yard is fenced, she spends all her time looking for a way out. When she succeeds, she does the hunting dog thing and, as we euphemistically term it, she rolls. Rolls in crap that is. That way, her prey cannot smell her coming.
However, we can’t allow her in the house without a bath.
Boy, does she hate it.
Salem and the scarlet Letter
After my research journey to Salem this spring, I decided to reread both The Scarlet Letter and the House of Seven Gables. I read both but a long time ago – because they were on reading lists. Let me tell you, I missed a lot in The Scarlet Letter as a fourteen year old reader. I don’t know yet what I missed in The House Of Seven Gables – I haven’t read it yet. but I’ll be willing to bet I missed most of the important points.
It was clearly owned by a wealthy family.
There really is a house of the seven gables. Who knew?
This is one of the ceilings. and there was an attic for the servants and slaves to sleep in.
Puritanism and the witch trials are clearly part of the history – and not just the tourist parts either. We stopped at the Old Burying Point.
There were a lot of small gravestones for little children. Some families lost five and six kids. Heartbreaking. But one of the most poignant were the large memorials to the people executed during the witch trials. Since they had been found guilty of witchcraft the victims could not be buried in consecrated ground. It is thought the families slipped out at night and found the bodies and gave them a decent burial. But no one knows for sure. And the graves of course cannot be located.
Each memorial is inscribed with the name and date of execution of one of the nineteen victims. Sobering.
I read The scarlet Letter with an entirely different perspective.
Here’s a fun fact about Hawthorne. He did not want to be associated with the Judge who sent the accused to the gallows ( a direct ancestor) so he added a w to his name.
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Goodreads giveaway
to celebrate the release of Cradle to Grave, the third Will Rees mystery, Minotaur is giving away 15 copies of A Simple Murder. Here is the link
https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/97892-a-simple-murder-a-mystery