Category: Research

Guest Blogger ~Joanne McLaughlin

~ patyjag ~ 2 Comments

Repeat That Name, Please  

            Identity is a big deal in my novels. Maybe it has something to do with all the Superman comic books I read in the barbershop while my dad was having his hair cut. Lots of identity stuff in those stories, secret and otherwise. Midwestern farm boy or big-city newspaper reporter? Mild-mannered, bespectacled guy or visitor from another planet able to leap tall buildings in a single bound?  

            Names—specifically, who we are versus the person we allow the world to see—are a common thread in my first four published novels, three darkly romantic vampire tales and a thriller. Vampires reinvent themselves from century to century; the rest of us sometimes do, though over shorter lifetimes. And, of course, in literature and in life, often all we know of a person at first is the name presented to us.

            In my fifth novel, A Poetic Puzzle, one name sets my protagonist, M. Irene “Mimi” Jones—an under-recognized, under-employed poet/English literature professor—on a mission. It’s the name she shares with internationally acclaimed poet Mary Irene Jones, who has vanished, but not before sending Mimi a cache of her heretofore unpublished manuscripts. Is the timing of these two events a coincidence? Are the manuscripts clues of some sort? And if so, why entrust them to Mimi, of all people? The same-name thing must be significant, right?

            I should mention here that the house Mimi lives in is one she inherited from yet another Mary Irene Jones, the paternal grandmother for whom she was named.

            About that: The name Mary Irene Jones is what prompted me to write A Poetic Puzzle.

            You see, my own father’s mother was a Mary Irene Jones, too, before she married my grandfather. She didn’t disappear, per se, but I never got to know her. My dad scarcely did—he was only nine years old when she died in 1931 of what was apparently characterized as “women’s trouble.” My mother suspected that meant some sort of reproductive or breast cancer. I’m not sure anyone now living would know. My father was the family’s youngest child; he, his older brother, and his two older sisters are gone now.

            I look like my father, as does my son. Both of them more closely resemble George McLaughlin, Mary Irene’s husband, my paternal grandfather. But in the lone photograph I have of her, I can see myself.

            That photo, actually a picture of a photograph, may be the only one that still exists. I don’t know whether she had siblings whose children or grandchildren might have family photo albums. I have never had close ties to my McLaughlin relatives, let alone any Jones descendants who might be her family. Judging from her husband’s birth year, I think this Mary Irene was born in the United States in the late 19th century, but I don’t know when or where. I know she married a man from northeastern Pennsylvania and ended up living in Philadelphia, but I don’t know the circumstances. Except for the year, I don’t know the date of her death or where she was buried.

            That sepia-tone image of my grandmother sits next to my laptop as I write this. I’ve studied it endlessly, searching for clues beyond the obvious. In it, she has dark hair, brown, I suppose, since my father and I and at least one of his sisters had dark brown hair. She has a long face not unlike mine—my late Aunt Vera, whom I resemble a bit, had the same long face.

            Pince-nez eyeglasses sit on my grandmother’s nose—maybe she was near-sighted the way I am. Her light-colored, lacy long-sleeved dress is cinched at the waist with a bow. And she is standing outdoors, with trees in the background. Holding her left hand is a small boy, maybe sandy-haired, maybe five years old. He is dressed for warm weather. My mother told me that she had been told that the boy was not my dad, but who offered that information, I don’t know.

            Were my grandmother and this boy, presumably her other son, standing in their backyard? Were they having a picnic in a park? Were her daughters—one older than the boy, one younger—playing away from the camera’s lens? Was my father an infant napping nearby?

            How my mother came to give me this photo, I don’t recall. Did my uncle’s wife, a distant cousin of Dad’s who married his brother, give it to my parents? My mother always suggested that particular aunt-by-marriage was the source of whatever McLaughlin family history we were aware of. Ancestry.com shows any number of second and third and more distant cousins with whom I share a bit of DNA, but because I have no details about my grandmother’s forebears, I can’t readily know which of these many cousins, if any, sprang from the same branch of the family tree she and I came from. Answers might lie at the bottom of a deep and daunting rabbit hole, to add another garden metaphor, or it might be a fruitless search.

            Truly, Mary Irene Jones McLaughlin is a mystery to me.

            Which got me thinking back in spring 2022: What if I immortalized her (sort of) in a mystery? What if, given that I knew little more than her name, that’s where my story began?

            I dropped her married name from the plot line, lest someone think this book was nonfiction. Also because, as names go, Mary and Jones are definitely common ones.

            As A Poetic Puzzle opens, the reader learns that the two Mary Irene Joneses not only have the same name, but also the same occupation, and are affiliated with the same small college in suburban Philadelphia. It soon becomes apparent, however, that what’s in a name is a confounding, confusing bit of business.

            Mimi Jones discovers much as she scrutinizes the pieces of A Poetic Puzzle, not the least of which is this:

            How well do we really know anyone?  

A Poetic Puzzle

Internationally acclaimed poet Mary Irene Jones has vanished—calls and texts unacknowledged, bank accounts emptied, car abandoned. But before she disappeared, she mailed never-published manuscripts to a lesser-known namesake poet, M. Irene “Mimi” Jones. Are the manuscripts clues only Mimi can decipher? And what about the handsome Philadelphia cop assigned to the case? He seems as intrigued by Mimi as by the missing celebrity poet. Talk about a person of interest…

Amazon.com: A Poetic Puzzle: A Mystery in 32 Pieces: 9781951967130: McLaughlin, Joanne: Books
A Poetic Puzzle – Kindle edition by McLaughlin, Joanne. Romance Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.

Joanne McLaughlin began telling stories in second grade, creating superhero fan fiction in the Philadelphia rowhouse where she grew up. She has worked for public media and newspapers in Philadelphia, upstate New York, and northeastern Ohio, involved in award-winning coverage of topics from politics and public health to fashion and financial markets, as well as Pulitzer Prize-finalist architecture criticism and a Peabody Award-nominated podcast. For several years, she also served as vice president of a firm that managed and booked blues musicians. Her novels include the romantic mystery A Poetic Puzzle; Chasing Ashes, a crime thriller; and Never Before Noon, Never Until Now, and Never More Human, a vampire trilogy. Her latest short fiction appears in Ruth and Ann’s Guide to Time Travel, Volume 1; the short stories Peppina’s Sweetheart and Grass and Granite are available on Amazon. Joanne is inspired by strong women like the ones who raised her, determined to meet challenges head on. Joannemclaughlin.net

Social media:
https://facebook.com/joannemclaugh

https:Instagram.com/joannemclaugh

@joannemclaughlin.bsky.social

Joanne McLaughlin (@joannemclaugh) / X

Joanne McLaughlin | LinkedIn

Guest Blogger ~ M.E. Proctor

~ patyjag ~ 5 Comments

Bop City Swing, or When Writers Click

By M.E. Proctor

We should write something together, I’ve heard these words many times. The suggestion is always vague and about as binding as the clichéd ‘let’s do lunch one of these days’. Many years ago, a friend and I planned to write a book. He was a big science fiction fan, so that’s what we decided to do. I delivered the first chapter. My friend never produced chapter 2, and I ended up doing the entire thing. It turned into a four-book dystopian series, The Savage Crown.

So, when fellow crime writer Russell Thayer typed in a social media chat that “Tom should go after Gunselle someday. Imagine the interrogation scene!” I agreed that bringing our two recurrent short story characters together was a cool idea, but I doubted it would go anywhere.

I was wrong. We’re a year later and Bop City Swing is on the bookshelves. Even better, Russell and I are working on another mystery featuring the same two leads.

Russ’s creation is Vivian Davis, aka Gunselle, a contract killer. He has written more than twenty short stories spanning the late 1930s-early 1950s with her in the starring role. My guy (he’s in a dozen stories so far) is Tom Keegan, a homicide detective in 1950 San Francisco. A professional killer and a cop, in the same place at the same time … sounds like a match made in Noir heaven.

Early last year, Russ and I both happened to have pieces published at the same time in two different magazines. A mash-up—in the vein of CSI meets Law & Order—was top of mind again and we started brainstorming ideas for a short story. What if she’s hired to bump him off … What if they’re after the same killer… We eventually decided to build the story around a political assassination that would involve both characters, coming at it from their respective angles. The detective investigates the case, in straight procedural fashion, and the contract killer is embroiled in it sideways. She didn’t commit the crime.

We never discussed the mechanics of the collaboration. It felt natural to tell the story from a double point of view (POV), Russ writing the Vivian-Gunselle chapters, while I wrote Tom’s scenes. The differences in our styles fit the particular voice of our respective characters. If there were awkward disparities or rough edges, we figured we could polish them off after the first draft.

Russ sent me a snippet of Gunselle being hired for a job she dislikes—fixing somebody else’s mess, i.e. the assassination (that plot line was discarded later on)—and a few days later, I sent him Tom’s arrival at the crime scene, the ballroom of a luxury hotel. The suspect is a musician in the jazz band hired for the event.

Everybody knows that most of the research should be done before starting to write the story, it’s a lot more efficient, but we were both eager to get something going. Now, with two scenes drafted, we had to make sure we were historically correct on the when and the where.

The when would be 1951, an election year. That November, San Francisco re-elected the incumbent republican mayor, Elmer Robinson. The fictional who (the victim) would be Charles Forrester, the democratic challenger launching his campaign at a June fundraiser. Where would be the Palace Hotel, conveniently located downtown, with a good size ballroom—an internet deep dive delivered period-accurate floorplans.

We knew when, where, and who, but like our two lead actors, we were stumped by the motive. Why was Charles Forrester shot? We wouldn’t find out for a while.

Writing a story is like a treasure hunt. Every sentence, written on the fly, contains potential clues. Here’s an example. The decision to make the killer a jazz trumpeter gave the plot a definite slant. It also gave us the opportunity to dig into the rich Bay Area music scene of the early 50s, the various clubs, the talent on display, the racial tensions, the lure of the city at night, the early involvement of the Mob in the drug trade. Russ had touched on the music angle in some of his stories and brought all that background into the plot, with great secondary characters. One of them, Maggie, became central to nailing down the motive and the final resolution. Through Maggie, we also touched on the war, only six years in the past, and its aftermath, how deeply it scarred many characters in the story.

Very soon, the project was no longer a short story. Bop City Swing had turned into a book.

During the months it took to complete a solid first draft, we had a couple of mini-debates. One of them was about who would enter the scene first.

Homicide cops always get there after the fact, by definition. We decided to start with Gunselle and put her in the ballroom, at the very beginning, before the shots ring out. That gave us the story hook. She was hired for the hit and somebody beat her to it. She’s pocketed the down payment. For doing nothing. As a professional, it sticks in her craw.

Another discussion was about the key confrontation between our two characters. Up to that climactic moment, they’d both gone through their moves separately, with only a glancing accidental contact that showed mutual interest. Yes, this is where it gets sexy … Who would write that scene, in whose POV? We considered writing it twice, in a ‘he says, she says’ tango, but it proved clunky. I wrote the initial scene, from Tom’s voice, then Russ took it and turned it around. It worked a lot better that way, Gunselle initiates the event and is the more active character. It was also fun to write Tom’s reaction afterwards.

We initially wrote our respective scenes separately. After a few weeks, we built a master document that we carried all through to the end, highlighting changes, constantly adjusting things. Russ writes snappy action scenes and I tend to be atmospheric. In the master document, we started blending things. He added bite and I added background.

Mid-way through the process, we built a timeline. The characters were all in motion and the investigation picked up speed. A beat-by-beat sequence of events helped us figure out the ending. None of what happens in the last act was in the cards from the start.

The time we took to consider options, writing them and discarding parts of them, might appear to be a waste but was crucial in coming up with the best solution. The beginning of the story, in particular, was rewritten multiple times. Part of the fun in a collaboration is having your partner put something on the table that you would never have come up with on your own.

Writing is a solitary pursuit. Sometimes, it feels good to share. Russ and I had so much fun, we’re doing it again. There will be more Tom and Gunselle in the future. I’ll keep you posted!

—-

Bop City Swing

San Francisco. 1951.

Jazz is alive. On radios and turntables. In the electrifying Fillmore clubs, where hepcats bring their bebop brilliance to attentive audiences. In the posh downtown venues where big bands swing in the marble ballrooms of luxury hotels.

That’s where the story begins, with the assassination of a campaigning politician during a fundraiser.

Homicide detective, Tom Keegan, is first on the scene. He’s eager, impatient, hot on the heels of the gunman. Gunselle, killer for hire, is no longer there. She flew the coop, swept away in the rush of panicked guests.

They both want to crack the case. Tom, because he’s never seen a puzzle he didn’t want to solve, no matter what the rules say. Gunselle, because she was hired to take out the candidate and somebody beat her to it. It was a big paycheck. It hurts. In her professional pride and wallet.

The war has been over for six years, but the suffering and death, at home and abroad, linger as a horror behind the eyes of some men. And one young woman.

Bop City Swing is the brainchild of Russell Thayer, author of the Gunselle stories, and M.E. Proctor, who occasionally takes a break from Declan Shaw, her Houston PI, to don Tom Keegan’s gray fedora.

Buy Links:

Bop City Swing is available in eBook and paperback

On Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Bop-City-Swing-Proctor-Thayer/dp/B0F4DSSQ9V/

From reviews:

“A wild ride down the neon-lit streets of post-WWII America, with bebop wailing in the nightclub on the corner, the white witch pumping through the veins of the junkie on the barstool, three slugs draining the life from the charismatic politician with a shady past, and enough snappy dialogue to light up the faces of Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain.”

M.E. Proctor (www.shawmystery.com) was born in Brussels and lives in Texas. The first book in her Declan Shaw PI series, Love You Till Tuesday (2024), came out from Shotgun Honey, with the follow up, Catch Me on a Blue Day, scheduled for 2025. She’s the author of a short story collection, Family and Other Ailments, and the co-author of a retro-noir novella, Bop City Swing. Her fiction has appeared in Vautrin, Tough, Rock and a Hard Place, Bristol Noir, Mystery Tribune, Shotgun Honey, Reckon Review, and Black Cat Weekly among others. She’s a Derringer nominee.

Social Links

Author Website: www.shawmystery.com

On Substack: https://meproctor.substack.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/martine.proctor

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MEProctor3

BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/meproctor.bsky.social

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/proctormartine/

Russell Thayer’s work has appeared in Brushfire, Tough, Roi Fainéant Press, Guilty Crime Story Magazine, Mystery Tribune, Close to the Bone, Bristol Noir, Apocalypse Confidential, Cowboy Jamboree Press, Hawaii Pacific Review, Shotgun Honey, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Rock and a Hard Place Press, Revolution John, Punk Noir Magazine, Expat Press, Pulp Modern, The Yard Crime Blog, and Outcast Press. He received his BA in English from the University of Washington, worked for decades at large printing companies, and currently lives in Missoula, Montana. You can find him lurking on Twitter @RussellThayer10.

Pesky little thing called research.

~ patyjag ~ 8 Comments

When I learned about an event that is held every year in the area where I set my Gabriel Hawke novels, I decided I would write a book around that event. How hard could it be to have my character, who is a Fish and Wildlife State Trooper, become involved with finding a person or a killer during a sled dog race competition?

Well… Let me tell you, now that I’ve been digging into the logistics, the multitude of volunteers, the less than 60 hours for the total of the 200 mile race, and that doesn’t even count the weather conditions, I’m starting to wonder if this was a good idea.

Map of the race

I’ve had my first interview with a person who has volunteered for this event for 20 years. She gave me some good insight into logistics and more people I will need to interview. This book won’t be ready to write for at least two more weeks as I talk to the head of technology, mushers, the race marshal, and judge.

What had started out as a “fun idea” has now blossomed into much more of a project. I can’t even start my suspect chart or decide how someone would be murdered or missing without doing all the research. There are so many uncertainties that I can’t even begin to fathom what the motive would be.

This is so out of the norm for what I normally do when writing a book in this series. By the time I’m ready to start writing the book, I have mulled over every aspect of the death, did the bit of research I needed and am ready to roll.

Now I sit, watching one more video, reading one more blog, and waiting to interview people so I can start this book. The next book my fans are waiting for me to publish. But as I dabble in the research, waiting to do the interviews, I may have to start working on the next Cuddle Farm Mystery book or even the next Spotted Pony Casino Mystery book, because my hands and imagination can’t sit idle for that long.

Depositphoto

I’ve already learned a lot that I didn’t know. Especially, about the dogs. A good mushing dog isn’t big and thick. It’s long and lean, like a marathon runner. They have high energy and stamina. The Alaskan Husky is nothing like the Siberian Husky. The Alaskan has been bred through the centuries to be fast and tough. They have a multitude of breeds in them that make them the marathoners that they are.

Now I need to learn more about the tracking of the participants during the race, the area where they sleep, and why someone, in a sport where you are dependent on one another to survive, would kill.

Guest Blogger ~ Skye Alexander

~ patyjag ~ 10 Comments

Clothes Make the Woman

The fashion world is ever-changing, and in the 1920s when my Lizzie Crane mystery series takes place the clothes a woman wore not only expressed her sense of style but also the changing ideas and mores of the Jazz Age. Modern ladies were shedding outdated social roles and restrictions as fast as they cast off their corsets. Hemlines rose to previously shocking lengths, baring ankles and calves. Some daring young women even painted images of their beaus on their knees––their short skirts revealed the pictures when they danced the Charleston. Glittery flapper dresses, resplendent with sequins and fringe, exposed plenty of skin. On the beaches, swimming costumes crept up high enough that policemen known as “beach censors” trod the sand, measuring ladies’ legs to make sure no more than six inches of flesh showed between hem and knees.

Wearing trousers, too, signaled not only a desire for comfort and convenience, but a shift toward equality between women and men as well. In most circles at that time, a lady dressed in pants raised eyebrows. Some towns in the Midwest and South even outlawed wearing trousers and fined brazen women for doing so. In the first novel in my Lizzie Crane mystery series, Never Try to Catch a Falling Knife, my jazz singer heroine from Greenwich Village gets off to a rocky start her first day on the job by wearing trousers when she meets her conservative Yankee employer. Sportswomen, however, were grudgingly allowed to don knickers on the golf course or men’s white trousers while playing tennis. Although off-the-rack pants for ladies weren’t available in the early Twenties, the 1927 Sears catalog offered tweed woolen knickers to golfing girls for $2.98. If you wanted something more in line with what Katherine Hepburn popularized a decade later, you had to have them custom-made or buy men’s and alter them yourself.

The Inside Scoop on Intimate Attire

As women’s outer garments changed, so did their underwear. No longer confined by tight corsets and multiple petticoats, liberated ladies shed the many layers their mothers wore in favor of slinky teddies, camisoles, and bloomers that slid comfortably beneath their slim-fitting dresses. Nylon, polyester, and other synthetic materials didn’t exist at that time, so wealthy women chose undies made of silk whereas ladies of lesser means garbed themselves in cotton, rayon, and wool. Instead of only boring white, lingerie now became available to style-conscious women in pink, peach, beige, light green, and naughty black. https://www.sewhistorically.com/dressing-the-1920s-woman-1920s-lingerie/

Prior to the Roaring Twenties, women wore thick stockings primarily for warmth. Now, with their legs on display in their new short skirts, modern ladies switched to sheer stockings that showcased their calves. Silk stockings were the preferred choice for those who could afford them at $1.48/pair in 1925 (the equivalent of about $25 in today’s money), in colors ranging from champagne to black. Rayon provided a cheaper alternative for cost-conscious women––and if they objected to the material’s sheen, they dusted their legs with powder to soften it.  

Women who still chose to wear girdles clipped their stockings to attached garters. Free-spirited fems rolled their stockings into place and fastened them just above the knee with elastic bands. The bands, sometimes called “jazz garters,” soon became a fashion statement in themselves, decorated with lace, ribbons, and rhinestones in sexy colors such as purple, red, and black. And if a woman wanted to keep a nip nearby in defiance of Prohibition, she could wear a garter flask that featured a pocket with a small silver container to hold her drink of choice.

Shopping for Clothes in the Roaring Twenties

Prior to the 1920s, most women made their own clothes. But as more entered the workforce during the Jazz Age––half of single women were employed outside the home in 1930––they had less time to devote to sewing. In response to this trend, department stores such as Macy’s and Bergdorf Goodman began selling off-the-rack garments. Now, busy ladies could purchase ready-made dresses, coats, and other clothing rather than engage in the time-consuming task of creating their own wardrobes or paying seamstresses to fabricate them.

For people who couldn’t afford to buy at upscale department stores, a shopping alternative arose during the 1920s: thrift shops. Prior to this time, peddlers hawking used clothing and other goods were common in America’s cities and towns––especially in less affluent neighborhoods. Many of these merchants were Jewish immigrants. But during the Twenties, Christian churches began establishing outlets to sell clothing and other products donated by parishioners with the goal of raising money for their churches. Goodwill trucks collected used clothing from more than a thousand households in the Twenties. Proceeds from thrift stores funded half the Salvation Army’s budget. Chanteuse Lizzie Crane, my style-savvy protagonist, realizes that wealthy ladies wouldn’t be caught dead wearing the same evening gown twice, and she buys most of her attire secondhand at church charity stores.

Hemlines and the Economy

Not only do the clothes a woman wears reveal her personal tastes, social class, and ideology, they may also be an indication of the economy. According to the “Hemline Index,” skirts rise during periods of prosperity and lengthen during leaner times. The short skirts of the Twenties celebrated a post-war boom as well as newfound freedoms for women. During World War II and the recession that followed, women’s hemlines dropped again. When times were good in the 1960s, the fashion world gave us the miniskirt and the bikini.

That’s not to say investors should take tips from haute couture––it’s likely that the fashion industry follows economic trends rather than predicting them. But perhaps something more than personal taste or vanity influences a woman’s choice of clothing. Risqué styles reflect a sense of playfulness, confidence, and freedom from limitations or worries, whereas more serious garb suggests a desire for protection, endurance, and the security of tradition. Whether or not these psychological connections have any merit, certainly the Roaring Twenties transformed the way women thought of themselves and their place in the world––and their clothes reflected that transformation.

Running in the Shadows

March 1926: Salem, Massachusetts

A spring equinox party at the mansion of a rich, flamboyant, and controversial art collector promises New York jazz singer Lizzie Crane and her band a fat paycheck, lucrative connections, and plenty of fun. She’ll also have an opportunity to reconnect with a handsome Boston Brahmin she fancies.

But the excitement she hopes for doesn’t turn out the way she expected. On the night of the musicians’ first performance, a naked young woman trots into the ballroom on horseback, sweeps up a talented artist named Sebastian, and rides off with him into the night. The next morning, Lizzie discovers the artist’s body tied to a tree, shot full of arrows like the martyred Saint Sebastian in Botticelli’s painting.

            Soon Lizzie learns that her business partner, pianist Sidney Somerset, once had a close relationship with the dead man––and police suspect Sidney may have murdered him. As she tries to protect her friend and discover the killer, Lizzie gets swept up in the treacherous underworld of art theft and forgery, a world where fantastic sums of money change hands and where lives are cheap. 

Buy links :Amazon – https://www.amazon.com/Running-Shadows-Lizzie-Crane-Mystery/dp/1685127061/

Barnes & Noble – https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/running-in-the-shadows-skye-alexander/1146168035?ean=9781685127060

Skye Alexander is the author of more than 50 fiction and nonfiction books. Her stories have appeared in anthologies internationally, and her work has been translated into fifteen languages. In 2003, she cofounded Level Best Books with fellow crime writers Kate Flora and Susan Oleksiw. So far her Lizzie Crane mystery series includes four traditional historical novels set in the Jazz Age: Never Try to Catch a Falling Knife, What the Walls Know, The Goddess of Shipwrecked Sailors, and Running in the Shadows. Her fifth, When the Blues Come Calling, is scheduled for release in September 2025. After living in Massachusetts for thirty-one years, Skye now makes her home in Texas.

Visit her at https://skyealexander.com

Research, or the Lure of the Rabbit Hole

~ janispattersonmysteries ~ 4 Comments

by Janis Patterson

There’s nothing more frustrating than a novel which mangles history. Unless, of course, it is alternative history (at best a bastard genre) and clearly labeled as such. What raises my ire is when someone writes what is purported to be historical fiction but has such factual clangers in it as to stop the reader cold. My favorite example of this is from a contest I judged when a Regency hero – handsome, wealthy, arrogant as all of them are – pulls a fountain pen from his pocket to sign some important document.


Really? A fountain pen?


The bladder fountain pen that we all know wasn’t invented for at least fifty years after the Regency. Even the steel-tipped dip pen wasn’t invented until after the end of the Regency. Before that, writing was done with feather quills, usually goose.


Of course I dinged the writer severely for not doing proper research, and sent a rather kindly note of explanation of her low score, hoping to raise her consciousness about the necessity of research. Instead she attacked me viciously, not only in a private letter but on social media, ranting that it was an old-fashioned pen and who would know the difference anyway.


And there is the crux of the matter. Far too many people get their ideas of history from novels (and movies, and TV) and therefore as writers we owe them the honesty of real facts.


Such a high-minded ideal is not without its dangers to us, though. I was working on a fairly early Victorian Gothic where my librarian heroine had to make some ink. Now I knew she couldn’t just pop off to the allsorts shop in the village for a bottle, so I went online and looked up how to make ink.


Who knew there were so many ways to make ink? And there are so many people making it today? Well, it was a plethora of information and I started reading happily. Only thing was, I realized that some of the recipes used items to which my early-Victorian-working-in-remote-Scotland heroine would have no access. But I had to make sure of what was available, which took me to botanical sites and shopping sites and each of them led to other sites, most of which had little to nothing to do with Scotland, libraries or ink, and before I knew it hours later I was deep into the intricacies of making Scottish country cheese. Still don’t know quite how I got there, but it was fascinating.


Now I don’t know if I’ll ever need any minutiae about the making of country cheese in Victorian Scotland, but it did give me a deeper insight into the Scottish rural people of the time, their lives, their chores, their way of living. Besides, I believe that everything is useful in some way, some time, some how. Who knows when some snippet of rural Victorian Scottish life/mores/cheesemaking – or something influenced by them – will show up in a totally unrelated story? It’s one of the dangers and the magic of writing!


Doubtless by now you have figured out that I like research. And, having an inquiring (some say nosy) mind, I must admit I do. It’s one of the most fascinating things in the world. And one of the most dangerous. It can take hold of a story, turn it every way from up, then hand it back to you in a form totally different from the way you originally envisioned it. Or, if you are strongminded enough to corral your story to its original form, those little snippets of research are still there, adding depth and shading – and an occasional surprise – to your story.


A prime rule of good writing is Do Your Research. Another rule of good writing is Do Not Let Your Research Take Over. Usually I manage both, but it’s most definitely a delicate balancing act.