Mornings on Horseback, by David McCullough, is a selective biography of Theodore Roosevelt. McCullough does not discuss in depth Roosevelt’s political career, although of course it is touched on in several places.
Instead, McCullough concentrates on Roosevelt’s childhood and youth, and the family which had so much influence on him. His father, Theodore Roosevelt Senior, was almost a god in his children’s eyes. As with many of the wealthy, Senior was a philanthropist, something that influenced his son.
The family was almost unbelievably wealthy and the children enjoyed every privilege. That did not, however, prevent serious health issues. Anna (Bamie), the eldest daughter, was born with a twisted spine. Elliott suffered from seizures (possibly epilepsy) and died young from alcoholism. (He is Eleanor’s father). Theodore himself suffered throughout his life from asthma and McCullough compellingly makes the case that Roosevelt’s interest in the outdoors, the open spaces, the hiking, hunting, birding and so on, stemmed at least in part from an early treatment for his asthma.
At Death’s Dough is the fifth in Mindy Quigley’s deep dish mysteries. Delilah runs an upscale pizza restaurant. But it is winter, and custom is slow. She is gearing up for Valentine’s Day, and hoping for a good turn out. Dominick Capone, Delilah’s boyfriend’s cousin, has a plan. But a few days later, his body is discovered frozen in the frozen lake outside.
Even more than who murdered him is the why. As Delilah pokes into it, she discovers his murder leads to a long ago death, and a treasure.
I did not even come close to identifying the killer. The characters are engaging and the recipes are good too. Recommended.
I read the Lace Widow on the recommendation of a friend. This is a historical mystery that takes place just after the American Revolution and involves the duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton.
Eliza Hamilton, Alexander’s widow, is almost prostate with grief at the death of her husband. But she is convinced her husband was murdered and is determined to bring Burr to justice for it. Her questions bring her into contact with a house of widows on Pearl Street, but also to the notice of a band of conspiracists. A brick with a warning note is hurled through her window. And her son, Alexander Junior, is targeted as the murderer of several other men, all friends of his father.
I found the details of early New York City fascinating. The Hamiltons lived in Harlem, which was the country then! Each trip back and forth takes hours. But I didn’t love the main character who, although she is praised for her strength, is always falling into tears, fainting, and sleeping. I would give this a mixed review. Parts are very good, others not so much.
The slogan above should be familiar to every American since it featured hugely in the run up to the War for Independence. As we approach our 250th anniversary, I thought a review would be interesting.
After the War between France and Britain, Great Britain was deeply in debt. Parliament thought they could raise money by taxing the colonists. The first was the Stamp Act. To make a legal document, the paper had to be imported with a stamp on it, and every document, newspaper, even decks of cards had to use this paper. The tax met with resistance, the colonists believing that since they had no representation on Parliament, that body had no right to tax them.
Although the Stamp tax was mostly repealed, the Townshend Acts soon followed. Although there were several parts, the five most commonly accepted are:
raise revenue in the colonies to pay the salaries of governors and judges so that they would remain loyal to Great Britain,
Create more effective means of enforcing compliance with trade regulations,
punish the Province of New York for failing to comply with the 1765 Quartering Act and
establish the precedent that the British Parliament had the right to tax the colonies.
The Quartering Act was an effort to make the colonies provide British troops with housing and food – in essence inflicting a military force on a civilian population. Needless to say, it was met with stiff resistance.
Although most of this act was also repealed, not all of it was. Parliament felt they had the right to tax the colonists so they kept the tax on tea. We know the result of that. A group of colonists dressed as Native Americans dumped the tea into Boston Harbor.
In response, Parliament passed the Intolerable Acts, also known as the Coercive Acts. These were a series of punitive acts designed to punish especially Massachusetts for the Boston Tea Party. Many in Massachusetts considered these acts a ‘virtual declaration of war.’ By choosing to punish Massachusetts, it seemed that Parliament hoped to convince the other colonies to stop resisting British authority.
Instead, these acts further enraged the colonists. They felt that their rights as Englishmen had been violated. The Acts were also viewed as so harsh and cruel that any moderate voices had a hard time defending Parliament.
To paraphrase a line from Star Wars, the more Great Britain tightened their grip, the more colonists slipped through their fingers.
This is a quick summary and the real history is more complicated. But I think the lesson is clear. Increasing repression, rather than quelling resistance, usually serves to encourage it.
When we first meet Will Rees in A Simple Murder, he is pursuing his son to a nearby Shaker community.
David has run away from his aunt’s rough treatment. When the boy was eight, his mother died. Rees drops his son on his sister and leaves, ostensibly to pick up weaving jobs. The truth is, though, that Rees, besides grieving the devastating loss of his wife, is also dealing with a huge amount of guilt. He is running away. And David views that as abandonment and it takes many years, and a lot of work, before the estrangement is resolved.
Through the series, we see Rees evolve from an indifferent father, at best, to an engaged and caring father. In Cradle to Grave, he and Lydia adopt several orphaned children, increasing the number of children to six.
By the Long Shadow of Murder, Rees and Lydia have a little girl of their own and she is pregnant with another child.
And Jerusha, the eldest of the adopted kids, is now in her late teens and hoping to attend The Litchfield Female Academy to become a teacher. Although Rees would never crush her dream, he hopes Jerusha will stay home. He wants to keep his children close.
In my head, I imagined Rees’s evolving – growing up if you will – from a fairly self-centered man to a husband and father whose core is his family.
Simon Rouge, Will Rees’s frenemy in the Will Rees mysteries, is the Constable in the village. Why a constable? We don’t use that system in the United States.
Oh, but we did, once upon a time.
In the beginning, when Boston, New York and Philadelphia were just colonial villages, night watchmen and constables were appointed to keep the peace and provide law enforcement. Constables were, at first, generally unpaid or paid very poorly. Few people were interested in taking on a hazardous job with little pay and low status so the quality of those that did apply was poor.I imagine that little crime was prevented and few crimes were solved.
As the northern cities grew thanks to an influx of immigrants, and dealt with increasing crime, the southern states established patrols to control the large enslaved population.
The spread of people to the frontier created new problems for crime control. In 1789, the US Marshals were created as the first federal law enforcement agency. In1823, the Texas Rangers was formed to protect American settlers from Indian attack in the Mexican territory of Texas.
In 1790, only two US cities had populations over 25,000. By 1820, both New York and Philadelphia had populations of over 100,000. The ability of night watchmen and constables could not keep up.
So, where did our current system of policing come from? Well, just like the system of night watchmen and constables (and sheriffs too), the US copies the ‘modern’ police force of London’s Metropolitan Police force, set up by law in 1829. New York City is the first American city to set up a unified, prevention-oriented police force in 1845. In 1853 they adopted uniforms.
So, in the late 1700s and early 1800s, Rouge would still be a constable, poorly paid and with very little authority. This is also why he earns his living, not as a law enforcement officer, but as a tavern owner.
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.
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.
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.
In the newest Will Rees mystery, I look at several serious themes. One is PTSD. Although not called that in 1802, or for almost three centuries afterward, I am sure that it existed. We know that ‘battle fatigue’ was PTSD. (In WWI, women went around handing white feathers for cowardice to able-bodied men home from war, no doubt making already traumatized men feel worse.)
I remember working with a patron at a library in the nineties. A car backfiring outside caused the man to drop to the floor in reaction. He was the right age to be a Vietnam vet. It was scary for all of us, especially him. His wife had to come and collect him.
In The Long Shadow of Murder, we discover that Rees joined the Continental Army when he was sixteen and served at Jockey Hollow and Valley Forge, both of which have come down to us as beyond terrible. Ephraim Sewell, a young man who is considering joining the Shakers, was even younger, following his brother into war at eleven.
Both are haunted by their wartime experiences. Although Rees has managed to put the memories aside and move forward with a wife and family, Ephraim still has nightmares. The stew of grief and guilt has kept him fixed at that point in time and cost him his family and his farm.
Other characters are also suffering. One from events that occur in A Murder on Principle; the other from the behavior of the British soldiers during the Revolutionary War. As I describe, they took everything they could, stealing chicken and livestock, commandeered people’s houses, and raped women. The resentment felt by the colonists increased accordingly.
TSDAlthough the Revolutionary War happened twenty five years before the action in Long Shadow, and the murder in this novel, the trauma experienced by the different characters continue to affect, not only the characters themselves, but also all the people around them.
In The Long Shadow of Murder, I explore the long lasting effects of past actions.
One of the side threads concerns the Battle of Minisink.
Minisink is an area in Orange/Sullivan County. It was the only decisive battle fought in the upper Delaware Valley. Most of the British soldiers were concentrated in and around New York City.
On July 22, 1779, Joseph Brant, an Iroquois and a supporter of the British, led a party of warriors and Loyalists disguised as warriors, upon Minisink. Only a few settlers were killed because they fled to the fort, but the settlement was destroyed. Riders from Minisink reported the raid in Goshen, New York (where I worked at the Library for many years – but not during this time, of course). A militia under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin Tusten set out. They were joined by a detachment of men from Sussex, New Jersey and, a little bit later, by militia from Warwick under the command of Colonel John Hathorn. Although Tusten did not want to follow the Iroquois, the militia dismissed the fighting ability of the Iroquois. With 120 men, the militia marched out to engage.
Hathorn planned to ambush Brant but before it was set, Brant got wind of the approaching force. (Accounts vary a little here.) Brant took the high ground. After several hours, ammunition ran low and the fighting degenerated to hand to hand combat. At least 46 militia men were killed, including Tusten. Hathorn was seriously wounded but survived. Brant lost only 7 men.
Brant gave no quarter to the captured and wounded men. All were killed. The widows could not collect the remains for 43 years, because of the battle site’s remote location. Eventually, the remains were collected and brought to Goshen, where they are buried beneath a stone obelisk.
In the aftermath, another American force went after Brant. Although they did not catch him, they swept through forty Iroquois villages, killing everyone – men, women, and children – in their path.
Although there was no term for PTSD then, I suspect the soldiers on both sides carried scars from the events of those days, especially the destruction of the Iroquois villages. These were non-combatants, unarmed, and mainly women and children. That would be pretty hard to justify.
