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Behind the Book by Priya Parmar

by Priya Parmar

Priya Parmar is a former freelance editor whose first novel, Exit the Actress, was based on the 17th-century actress (and royal mistress) Ellen "Nell" Gwyn. Her second novel, Vanessa and Her Sister, is based on the life of the artist Vanessa Bell. In this behind-the-book essay, Parmar explains how important—and how personal—choosing a historical fiction subject can be.

For me, choosing a subject for a historical novel is a tricky thing. Historical fiction is a guess, a hat tossed into the ring. But it is a guess that is based upon a real life. Choosing the historical figure is a bit like choosing a roommate for my brain. I have to want to see this person first thing in the morning and last thing at night. I have to not mind if she does things that might irritate me. Things like leaving dishes in the sink or singing in the shower. I have to feel an immediate kinship, a recognition that this is a person I could spend an enormous amount of time with. Because it can take years to write the novel.

"Choosing the historical figure is a bit like choosing a roommate for my brain."

First comes the research. After the initial honeymoon period, the wrong historical figure could start to grate. If her choices feel illogical or her decisions poor, or her laughter shrill, she can quickly fall off her pedestal. But the right person from history will only grow more dear, more beloved and more real.

After the honeymoon, comes the immersion, the falling down a rabbit hole period. It is the part where I become completely absorbed in a character’s life and time. This is the fun part. This is when I am committed, devoted and off and running. This is also the time when the history blurs and fiction gallops in. The facts are cemented in truth, but the moral, emotional reasoning is an educated guess. The figure becomes a character and the engine of the novel turns over.

My research for Vanessa and Her Sister began with a letter. In the summer of 1906, Clive Bell proposed to Vanessa Stephen. No. She would not marry him. But she strayed from the usual, demure sort of letter a young woman of her social class was expected to write. She told the truth. She told the whole truth. She sort of liked him but was not truly mad about him and had no idea if this would change in the future. She began this letter at home but finished the postscript in pencil at the dentist’s office. She apologized and explained that she was in a hurry and was off on holiday the next day. The letter reads like an email written circa last week.

Reading this letter roughly a century later, I was astonished by her frank, self-deprecating tone and her modern, uncompromising words. She was absolutely the person I wanted to write about. The character stepped off the page fully formed, like a woman alighting from a railway carriage. But Vanessa Bell came as a package deal with her better-known sister, the writer who would eventually become Virginia Woolf. And their collection of eccentric, intellectual, artistic friends would also tag along into the story: the bohemian crowd who would be remembered as The Bloomsbury Group. They are quirky and brilliant and difficult and gifted and daunting but I loved them all, and so I fell down the rabbit hole.

I began to read their letters. I started with their volumes of collected and selected published letters: Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf, Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf and Roger Fry. After the published works, I moved on to the unpublished. I got to know Vanessa’s sloping uphill handwriting and Virginia’s outsized Vs in her signature. I read about Roger Fry’s exhibitions and Leonard Woolf’s cattle problems. Then the circle widened. Like a complicated spider web, the correspondence took me round and round in larger and larger circles. Vanessa’s art world, E.M. Forster’s publishers, Virginia’s teeth and Roger Fry’s building projects. I spent time in archives and museums. I moved back to London and lived in Bloomsbury. I walked their bus routes and photographed train stations. And at each turn along the way, Vanessa Bell did not disappoint. She was exactly the person I hoped she was and more. It was wonderful to have her in my brain. She was such a lovely roommate and I miss her dreadfully now that she has gone.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of Vanessa and Her Sister.

Priya Parmar is a former freelance editor whose first novel, Exit the Actress, was based on the 17th-century actress (and royal mistress) Ellen "Nell" Gwyn. Her second novel, Vanessa and Her Sister, is based on the life of the artist Vanessa Bell. In this behind-the-book essay, Parmar explains how important—and how personal—choosing a historical fiction subject can be.

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction

Two black trailblazers inspire my debut

Behind the Book by LaShonda Katrice Barnett

by LaShonda Katrice Barnett

For me, the first act of writing historical fiction is resistance. There are tropes within the American imagination that pop up readily; it takes a slapping of your own hand to not reach for these tropes and recycle them.

When I began working on Jam on the Vine, I did not want to write about a dysfunctional black family. Nor would I put a black woman protagonist into a role I have seen too often—maid, prostitute, junkie . . . unloved, uneducated, uninspired. Luckily, mining black history, which I have done scholastically and creatively for 20 years, brings you face-to-face with so many wonderful characters that it is easy to resist the tropes.

I wanted to attempt what I believe the best historical writing—both scholarly and fictive—can do: shed light on the seed of a social problem that cripples its current society. I had no idea what the “problem” might be when I set out to write; however, I knew that any articulation of said problem would be found in the newspaper.

More than any institution in black America, including the black church, African-American newspapers have held the government accountable: demanding rights for its black citizenry and disseminating life-sustaining information. I knew my protagonist was an editor and journalist who, realistically, would not find employment at a white newspaper and therefore would have to launch her own.

Two trailblazing black women journalists inspired Ivoe Williams, the heroine of Jam on the Vine: Ida B. Wells (1862-1931) and Charlotta Bass (1874-1969). Driven by the murder by lynching of black male friends, Wells, who wrote for the New York Age newspaper, began to document lynchings and their causes, most notably in her monographs Southern Horrors (1892) and The Red Record (1895). Bass was a suffragist and the first black woman to own and operate a newspaper, the California Eagle.

Like both women, Ivoe is a bookish girl who goes to college. (Ninety-four black colleges and universities thrived in the first decade of the 20th century, yet we don’t encounter their stories in Progressive-era narratives. Ever.) Like Bass, I wanted Ivoe to launch her own newspaper. Like Wells, I wanted Ivoe’s journalism to have purpose, but felt I could not write about lynching for my own mental health.

Drawing on the early 20th-century history of Texas, one cannot help but notice the birth and proliferation of prison farms—the roots of the incarceration crisis we now face. The moment I stumbled across this fact, I knew that Ivoe’s newspaper would call attention to shady police procedures involving the racist arrest and (often erroneous) imprisonment of black men. This crisis continues to plague America.

The last value I brought to Jam on the Vine hinged on sexual orientation. Much damage has been done to disconnect the social and political—not just artistic—contributions of homosexuals from the American narrative. Placing a black lesbian activist at the center of an early 20th-century story was a natural choice and also a political one.

In writing Jam on the Vine, my valentine to the black press, I’ve exercised my strong belief that historical fiction can go a long way in restoring marginalized groups to their rightful places within a society’s past, present and future. Today, black newspapers continue to trumpet the age-old call for justice.

Missouri-born author LaShonda Katrice Barnett is also a playwright and editor. She now lives in Manhattan.

This article was originally published in the February 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Fiction

Fiction

A March salute to Irish heroines, real and mythical

Behind the Book by Mary Pat Kelly

by Mary Pat Kelly

Celebrating St. Patrick’s Day and all things Irish during Women’s History Month represents for me a perfect synchronicity. Let me explain.

While I was researching my Ph.D. dissertation in Dublin, it was the heroines of ancient Irish literature who elevated my sense of myself, both as a woman and as an Irish American. I was startled when I first encountered Queen Maeve, the Star of Ireland’s Iliad, The Táin. She led armies, took lovers and insisted that any man seeking to be her husband pass three tests. First, he had to prove he was without meanness because she was “great in grace and giving.” Second, he had to be without fear because “she liked a bit of contention.” And finally, he couldn’t be the jealous type because Maeve always “needed to have one man in the shadow of another.” What a woman, I thought—so different from the stereotype of victimhood often projected onto Irish and Irish-American women in literature.

I realized Maeve was a mythological figure, but I’d learned that the Irish often made myths of their history and history of their myths, so making distinctions seemed less important than exploring the women who existed in the collective imagination of Ireland—goddesses and abbesses, saints and scholars, poets and queens. Many were listed in medieval Irish manuscripts in sections entitled “Ban Senchus,” a kind of “Let-us-now-praise-famous-women” litany that inspired me to look for such figures in my own life past and present.

I found my great-great-grandmother Honora Keeley Kelly, who rescued her children from certain death during the Great Starvation and brought them from Ireland to Chicago. She became the central character in my first historical novel, Galway Bay.

In my new novel, Of Irish Blood, Honora’s granddaughter, Nora, born in Chicago, embodies the next generation of Irish Americans. Though proud of being Irish, she has little real knowledge of her heritage until she stumbles into the Irish College in Paris and meets a scholar from Ireland. He introduces her to the same heroines who awakened me. But because Nora is fictional and lives in the early 20^th century, she can also meet the revolutionary women of Ireland, such as Maud Gonne and Constance Markievicz.

Nora finds that the female figures in early Irish literature inspired these women to leave behind the assumptions of their privileged backgrounds and join the struggle for Irish independence and women’s rights. She becomes part of a sisterhood that includes poets such as Ethna Carbery and Alice Milligan, along with a range of activists, suffragists and labor leaders, as well as a crippled American woman, Molly Childers, who sailed a load of guns past the British naval blockade in 1914 to arm Irish volunteers. There is not a sad sack among them.

St. Patrick himself owes his success in christianizing Ireland to Fidelma and Eithne, the daughters of the High King who were his first converts. If you go to St. Patrick’s Church in New Orleans, you will see their baptism portrayed in the large painting over the altar. The two wear gorgeous gowns fit for a royal French Court—not historically accurate, maybe, but somehow right.

So there are many reasons to rejoice in March, the month of St. Patrick and of women’s history. Sáinte!

Photo of Molly Childers from the family of Robert Erskine Childers.

Celebrating St. Patrick’s Day and all things Irish during Women’s History Month represents for me a perfect synchronicity.

Debut Fiction, Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction Debut Fiction

Fists up for a chance at a better life

Behind the Book by Anna Freeman

by Anna Freeman

If you were born in 1800, there was a 25 percent chance that you would die before your fifth birthday. Popular sports of the day were often bloody: bear- or badger-baiting, cockfighting and, of course, bare-knuckle boxing.

When I was researching British history (for a book idea that ended up being shelved), I came across actual newspaper extracts of the time, in which women challenged one another to fight:

I, Ann Field, of Stoke Newington, ass driver . . . having been affronted by Mrs Stokes, styled the European Championess, do fairly invite her to a trial of her best skill in Boxing, for 10 pounds…

I, Elizabeth Stokes, of the City of London . . . do assure her I shall not tail meeting her for the said sum, and doubt not that the blows I shall present her with will be more difficult to digest than any she ever gave her asses.

Reading those extracts, I had one of those magical moments that drive me to research history: I knew those women were real, breathing people. I felt them. I almost became them. At a time when ladies were expected to occupy themselves with nothing more than sewing, painting and music, Ann Field and Elizabeth Stokes had been standing in front of a howling crowd, fists raised. They had punched and been punched in return, they had seen their own blood stain the boards of the ring. They’d been as desperate and frightened and savagely elated as any of us would have been, in their place.

And what had happened to these women, to drive them to choose such a different, brutal way of life? These were fights with almost no rules; medical science was often ineffective. They were genuinely risking their lives. The prize of 10 pounds was a huge part of it, of course—it was more than many domestic servants would earn in a year. But there had to be more than that.

I was left to imagine how it must feel to choose between making your living by your fists or lying on your back.

The newspaper articles of the time suggest that many of these women came from a background of prostitution. So I began there; perhaps boxing felt like the only other option. Beyond that, however, it proved very difficult to find out much about their real, everyday lives. History is mostly recorded by, and about, people from the upper classes. There are facts and figures about mortality rates and a fair bit about the everyday diet of people living in poverty. But whereas there are a fair few surviving diaries of aristocratic women, recording their thoughts and feelings, most of the working class women who took their chances in the ring weren’t even literate. I was left to imagine how it must feel to choose between making your living by your fists or lying on your back. I like to think that if I were in that position I’d make the same choice that my character Ruth does, and step up into the ring.

Another protagonist of The Fair Fight, Charlotte, sprang from those aristocratic diaries. Many of the noblewomen keeping them felt trapped and miserable, imprisoned by the genteel boredom of their day. When I discovered that some ladies did accompany their husbands to watch boxing matches I thought, my god, what must it have been like to step out of your drawing room, bound by the shackles of convention, and watch another woman break them so completely?

In fact there was one “lady of quality,” Lady Barrymore, who was nicknamed “The Boxing Baroness.” She enjoyed watching boxing matches as much as her husband did, and would dress up as a lady boxer and pretend to spar. Reading about her, I could imagine the kind of freedom she must have felt while she was in costume. I wondered how much further she would have liked to go, if she could.

The Fair Fight is intended to be fun to read, and it’s a fiction. Even so, it’s based on real struggles. Every character in The Fair Fight is battling the limitations imposed on them by their class, gender, sexuality or family situation. It’s always been an unfair fight for women, working class people and people outside the heterosexual norm. Some of the characters fight in the ring, and others in drawing rooms and around the dinner table. And every little victory counts.

Poet Anna Freeman makes her fiction debut with The Fair Fight. A visceral take on the world of female prizefighters in 1800s Bristol, England, the novel has already been optioned for TV by the BBC. Freeman lectures in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.

RELATED CONTENT: Read a review of The Fair Fight.

Debut Fiction, Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction Debut Fiction

Imagining the woman behind the wall

Behind the Book by Robyn Cadwallader

by Robyn Cadwallader

What sort of person would choose to be cloistered in the walls of a church, alone, for life? Australian poet Robyn Cadwallader was researching a PhD thesis when she came across the story that inspired her first novel, The Anchoress, the richly told tale of a 13th-century woman who chose to live a circumscribed life in the name of religion. Here, Cadwallader explains how she stumbled upon this remarkable piece of history.

How did I come to write about an anchoress?

It started with a dragon. I had begun research on the life of St. Margaret of Antioch, a virgin martyr who was swallowed by a dragon and bursts from its back, proclaiming herself a hero. The patron saint of women in childbirth, she was one of the most popular saints in medieval England. In the 13th century, this story of female dragon-slaying was bound together with the Ancrene Wisse (Rule for Anchoresses), into a book given to anchoresses.

Anchoress: That was a new word to me; I kept on searching.

Anchoresses were women who chose to be enclosed for life in a stone cell attached to the wall of a church, there to read and pray, committing themselves to Christ in a “living death.” The cells varied in size, but the Ancrene Wisse suggests an anchorhold should have one window to a room for maids and one window to a parlour, where those seeking counsel could come to speak with the anchoress. Both windows would have curtains and the anchoress was told not to look out and not to let others, especially men, look in on her; the only male visitors would be her confessor or the bishop. She would also have a “squint,” a small opening through which she could view the altar to see Mass celebrated, and through which she could receive the consecrated bread.

Anchoresses were women who chose to be enclosed for life in a stone cell attached to the wall of a church, there to read and pray, committing themselves to Christ in a “living death.”

I read all this with fascination and a degree of horror. Sealed in forever? Never to see the world again? How strange these intensely religious women could be, I thought. During the enclosure service, burial rites were read over the anchoress, and some had a grave dug inside the cell to remind them of their living death. Awful, isn’t it? And wrong. That’s what I thought, for a time. Until I began to think about the women themselves, the ones making this choice. Who was I—in my modern, comfortable life, with my opportunities for education and a career—to decide these women were weird or foolish?

photo of a cell and squint at St. Nicholas at Compton, courtesy of Robyn's blog.

The stereotype of the downtrodden medieval woman with no rights or agency is much too simplistic but, for an upper-class woman, marriage or life as a nun were the main paths open to them. It seems understandable that a woman with a strong faith in God, an enquiring mind and an ability to live in seclusion could well make the decision to close herself away.

This living death was the greatest expression of love for God, and anchoresses were honored for their willingness to give up everything in order to suffer with Christ. The status of a village was enhanced where a recluse offered up prayers for her patron and the village, and people often travelled to seek counsel from an anchoress known for her holiness and wisdom.

Yet life in the Middle Ages was intensely physical, and despite the accent on bodily denial and seclusion, an anchoress would be inevitably drawn into that physicality. Attached to the wall of a church, the cell would be located in the middle of the village or town, and at the center of social life. An anchoress would hear church services, festivals, village meetings, people chatting, fighting, making plans; she would hear the fears, pain, loves and gossip of those who came for counsel.

Intrigued, I just had to go to England to investigate anchorholds, or what little remained of them. I found mostly squints and evidence of the cell’s outline in markings on a church wall. I saw squints cut into church walls; I visited Shere, where documents tell of Christine, a recluse who asked to leave her seclusion; I stood in what is believed to be the chapel of an anchoress at Kings Lynn, and though it is now painted and well lit, I tried to imagine what it would be like to stay there within its four dark walls. Forever.

I was disturbed and challenged. Gradually, as I pondered, the questions moved from “these women” to “a woman.” Who was she? Why did she choose enclosure? Was she afraid, excited, certain, doubtful? What about her family? And what would this small dark place be like as a home? In my mind, I went inside the cell. The body she sought to deny could paradoxically become even more present; holy as she may be, she was as human and frail as those she prayed for. My central question was always: What was her experience: bodily, emotionally, spiritually, mentally?

I was fascinated by the idea of her confinement: the moment of enclosure, the door nailed shut behind her; the darkness; the small space, seven paces by nine; the claustrophobia; the threat of madness; her strength; her love of God; her perseverance; her experience of her body, the only physical companion she would have. She was no longer a weird idea; she was a woman. Sarah.

I began to discover the novel’s imaginative space, and I got to know my anchoress and her cell. Through all this, I retained one single commitment: to honor, as best I could, the women who made the choice to be enclosed more than seven centuries ago. And maybe even to learn from this 17-year-old girl who had chosen a life so far away from my own.

Author photo by Alan Cadwallader.

Australian poet Robyn Cadwallader was researching a PhD thesis when she came across the story that inspired her first novel, The Anchoress, the richly told story of a woman who chose to live a very cloistered life in the name of religion. Here, Cadwallader explains how she stumbled upon one of history’s lesser known corners.

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction

Writing from a sense of place

Behind the Book by Lucy Sanna

by Lucy Sanna

Having grown up in Wisconsin, I was surprised to learn that German prisoners captured during World War II were shipped across the Atlantic to my home state. They were housed in rural areas—vacated schools, fairgrounds, migrant worker camps—and were put to work in canneries and on local farms. Between 1942 and 1946, Wisconsin housed POWs in 39 camps across the state.

Thinking on this, a story began forming in my mind—a frightened family on one side of the gate, the enemy on the other. But as I looked into it, I learned that in many rural areas, the prisoners were needed more than feared. One such area was Door County, Wisconsin.

In 1944, when The Cherry Harvest opens, my fictional cherry orchard is threatened because there are no workers to pick the cherries. Nearly all the able-bodied men have left for war, and migrant workers have taken better jobs in the Army or at the shipyards. This would be the second year without a harvest and my family is about to lose their business.

In writing fiction, I typically write from a sense of place. I need to know the feel of it to better appreciate my characters’ relationship with their environment. With that in mind, in May 2011, I traveled to Door County with my daughter. To get a sense of the WWII era, I made numerous trips to the Door County Library and also interviewed people who remembered that time in Door County.

Door County is a lush peninsula that juts out into Lake Michigan, a tourist destination dotted with summer cottages, cherry orchards, lighthouses, beaches, and state parks. It’s known as the Cape Cod of the Midwest.

But it wasn’t always so. The name comes from the many ships that crashed along the rocky coast of what was known as Death’s Door. Today you can hire a plane to glide along the coast and view the shipwrecks still resting on the rocks below.

Because The Cherry Harvest is a dramatic story, I wanted it to take place on the stormy side of the peninsula—the Lake Michigan side—and so we booked a stay at a home right on the beach. I later learned that very home was the site of a former orchard. That spot became the location of my family’s homestead, and there, my protagonist, Charlotte, a farmwife, began to come to life.

I woke early each morning and listened to the birds, monitored the weather, walked barefoot in the grass and along the shore as my characters might have done. My daughter and I visited blooming orchards, tasted cherry pies, and learned of the old harvesting processes. I interviewed people who had lived on cherry orchards back when they worked alongside German POWs.

Charlotte came to me strong and brave, insisting on bringing POWs to pick the summer’s harvest. But she has a son, Ben, fighting in Europe against the Nazis. How would bringing prisoners onto the land play into her relationship with her son? Would he come home to find POWs on the land?

Just north of the spot where my daughter and I stayed was a lighthouse. This became the lighthouse where my character Kate would visit her friend Josie. My daughter and I walked across the isthmus to the island and climbed to the top of the lighthouse, which became the perspective of many of my scenes.

Continuing north along the shore is an expansive summer home owned by a politician; this became the home of Kate’s Cinderella boyfriend, Clay.

Thomas was the last character to come clear to me. He flowed out of Kate’s intellectual desires to leave the farm and pursue a writing career. While Charlotte and Ben share a pragmatic, physical sense of purpose, Kate and her father have an intellectual connection through poems and stories. Once the Thomas character developed, I could give him a backstory as well.

By the time I left Door County, I had my story. All I had to do was write it.

Lucy Sanna is the author of two previous relationship books, but The Cherry Harvest is her first novel. She and her husband divide their time between the San Francisco Bay Area and Madison, Wisconsin. Find out more about Sanna and her debut novel on her website.

Author photo by Hope Maxwell Synder.

Historical Romance, Inspirational Fiction, Romance

Romance Inspirational Fiction Historical Romance

A fairy-tale love

Behind the Book by Melanie Dickerson

by Melanie Dickerson

The Huntress of Thornbeck Forest was inspired by the two well-known stories: Robin Hood and Swan Lake. It was also partially inspired by the summer I spent in Germany, in a medieval town next to the heavily forested Harz Mountains.

I spent the summer of 1992 in Hildesheim, Germany. I immediately fell in love with the medieval buildings that were all over the town. The town square, or Marktplatz, was especially enchanting; in fact, it looked as if it was out of a fairy tale. The half-timber guild houses and stone town hall were from another world. The centuries-old churches were maybe even more impressive. I was in awe. I couldn’t stop thinking about how these churches had been standing for hundreds of years before the United States was even a gleam in Christopher Columbus’ eye. They were much older than any building I’d ever seen before. There was also a medieval wall around the town, some of it still standing, and an old medieval tower. Many streets were still made of cobblestones. Everywhere I looked, the past was right in front of my eyes. I was delirious with history and romance.

One day we took a short road trip to another town, Brandenburg, which was on the edge of the Harz Mountains. Being from Alabama, I’d been around thick forests all my life, but these forests were different somehow—older, and just more mysterious. Yes, this was a land of fairy tales, an enchanting place of story and once upon a time.

So in 2005, when I got the idea to write a story based on Sleeping Beauty, I knew immediately where I wanted to set it—medieval Germany.

Fast-forward a few years. I’d written five fairy tale retellings set in my fictional town of Hagenheim. Now I had an opportunity to come up with a brand new series for a new publisher, a series that would be set in medieval Europe and would be based on fairy tales, just like my other series—the same but different. I had already decided it would be fun to make these new stories a mash-up of two fairy tales, instead of just one. I just had to come up with three different ideas for books to put into my proposal.

I had a list of fairy tales that I liked, but I still had not thought of an idea for a book. I remember lying across my bed and thinking that I’d really like to come up with a Swan Lake retelling since that story has such potential for emotion and romance. And then my mind wandered to Robin Hood. Since I like to twist things a bit, I started thinking of a female Robin Hood. At some point I hit upon the idea of having a heroine who poaches deer and a hero whose job it is to put a stop to all poaching.

Then the Swan Lake aspect came into play. How could I make my heroine a “swan” by night and something else by day? Of course, if she was a Robin Hood figure, that could be her secret identity by night, while she was a well-known lady of the town by day. The ideas just started falling into place.

To be honest, it’s extremely difficult to remember how my book ideas come about. One idea leads to another to another to another. I don’t usually remember the evolution of it. But I was quite excited when I hit upon the Swan Lake/Robin Hood combination. My agent loved it and so did my publisher—and I hope my readers will too.

Melanie Dickerson is a two-time Christy Award finalist for her inspirational fairy-tale retellings. She lives near Huntsville, Alabama, with her husband and two daughters.

The Huntress of Thornbeck Forest was inspired by the two well-known stories, Robin Hood and Swan Lake. It was also partially inspired by the summer I spent in Germany, in a medieval town next to the heavily forested Harz Mountains.

Fiction, Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Fiction Mystery

Edison-Tesla bad blood in new mystery

Behind the Book by Lawrence H. Levy

by Lawrence H. Levy

Lawrence H. Levy's debut mystery takes readers to the late 19th century, where we meet Brooklyn's first woman detective, Mary Handley. She's investigating a murder with ties to Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, whose famous feud is even darker than you'd expect.

My debut novel, Second Street Station, takes place in the late 19th century and centers around Mary Handley, a real person who was asked by the Brooklyn police department, when there were no policewomen, to help sleuth a high-profile murder. I crafted Mary into an extremely bright, ambitious yet sensitive woman who wants to fulfill her dream of being a detective and to also prove that a woman can do a man’s job. She constantly does battle with the “powers that be” and has to deal with adversity from every direction. Mary is a wonderful protagonist but, oddly enough, she wasn’t the original inspiration to write my book.

Years ago, I was helping my son with a term paper when I came across the Edison/Tesla feud over the electricity market in the late 19th century. At that time, Edison was and today continues to be an American icon, praised for his brilliant scientific contributions to society, where Tesla is just now becoming recognized for the genius that he was. Edison’s current was DC and Tesla’s was AC, which is still our standard and clearly the superior product. However, whether it was for purposes of ego or just pure greed (probably both), Edison wouldn’t admit this simple fact and went to great lengths to discredit Tesla’s AC. He commissioned Tom Brown to invent the electric chair with AC current and arranged public demonstrations where he cruelly executed animals to prove that AC was good to kill things but not safe for the home. He was able to delay the inevitable dominance of AC current until the early 20th century and made a lot of money doing it. When he died in 1931, he was a very wealthy man.

As I studied more about the two scientists, Edison quickly grew feet of clay. Though he is hailed as the “Father of Invention” and had over a thousand patents to his name when he died, only a fraction of those inventions were actually his own. He had talented scientists working for him and simply put his name on their work when he thought it had some merit. He was also known to have “borrowed” other scientists’ work. At best, Edison was a good scientist, a fabulous businessman and a very savvy promoter. At worst, he was an egocentric megalomaniac, a thief and possibly more. The truth is probably somewhere in between the two, but there is evidence, even in the notes that he left behind in his own handwriting, that he had a much darker side.

Though Tesla was a brilliant scientist, he had little acumen for business, had a combustible temper and was considered eccentric. His passion for his projects and his gullibility led him to make the wrong business decisions. George Westinghouse backed Tesla’s AC current, and when Westinghouse pleaded poverty to him, Tesla ceded his interest in AC, thus giving up millions of future dollars. His “Tesla coil” revolutionized modern communications, his research led to the invention of x-rays, and though Marconi, who was backed by Edison, was given credit for inventing the radio, it was really Tesla’s invention. Though a court decision in the 1940s confirmed this fact, schools today are still teaching students that it was Marconi. Thus was the course of Tesla’s life. As his frustrations mounted, his behavior became increasingly bizarre. He wound up dying penniless in a New York hotel room in 1943, claiming he could talk to pigeons.

Edison and Tesla shared a lifetime personal and professional enmity, which prevented them both from receiving the Nobel Price when they refused to share it with one another. I found these two men’s lives and fates to be fascinating, and they do encompass a significant part of Second Street Station. However, I decided it would be interesting to tell their story in the context of a real murder that occurred at that time. Once I found Mary Handley, I fell in love with her, and I think others will, too.

Fiction, Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Fiction Suspense

Truth in Cambodian minefields

Behind the Book by K.T. Medina

by K.T. Medina

Drawing on years of experience in the British armed forces, debut author K.T. Medina delivers a striking thriller that bores into the dark heart of postwar Cambodia, fraught with poverty and superstition. Her heroine descends into the killing fields in search of her husband’s killer—but as Medina reveals in the essay below, evil goes much deeper than murder.

To my parents’ dismay, I was not a normal girl. I dressed in army fatigues, sported a crew cut and used to line my teddy bears up at either end of the lounge and send them into battle. My favorite game was to traverse blocks purely by climbing over fences, cutting through people’s gardens, sneaking through their open back doors and slipping out the front, unnoticed. My mother and father despaired, entirely nonplussed. However, my interest in all things military probably developed from the hours I spent hiding behind the sofa, when I was supposed to be asleep, watching such World War II classics as The Great Escape and The Dirty Dozen through my father’s legs.

When I went to university to study psychology, it felt like a natural progression to join the Territorial Army, where I spent time both in the Infantry and in the Royal Engineers, rising to Troop Commander. On leaving university, I joined Jane’s Information Group, the world’s leading publisher of defense intelligence information. It was whilst working at Jane’s, responsible for land-based weapons, that I was inspired to write my debut thriller, White Crocodile. As part of that role, I spent a few weeks in the minefields of northern Cambodia, working alongside professional mine clearers from two clearance charities, Cambodian Mine Action Centre and Mines Advisory Group. I was privileged to get to know both Western and Khmer mine clearers and to spend time talking with Khmers who had lost limbs to land mines. I also visited many of the locations that appear in White Crocodile, including the great swathes of minefields that dominate the region and the Red Cross Hospital for the victims of land mines, where the novel’s fictional Dr Ung saves lives and rehabilitates. There are huge numbers of amputees in Cambodia, including very young children who, in many cases, thought that the anti-personnel mine they found was a toy.

"I wanted to use the power of fiction to take readers on an unforgettable journey to this dark and disturbing place."

Cambodia is a visually beautiful country of emerald green paddy fields and ochre earth; the people are friendly and the majority kind; but its traumatic history, including five years of mass genocide under the Khmer Rouge, depicted in the famous film The Killing Fields, casts an indelible shadow. Cambodia is still incredibly poor and the government corrupt, building presidential palaces and grand government buildings while the majority of the population live in unimaginable deprivation and hardship. There is no social security, and unless people make a living for themselves and their families, they quite literally starve. The presence of six million land mines, buried mainly in the northwest region around Battambang where White Crocodile is set, makes the job of survival even harder.

Off the tourist trail, Cambodia is a heartbreaking place to visit that left a huge and lasting impression on me. On coming home, back to England and the privileges that I enjoy here in the West, I felt very strongly that I wanted to use the power of fiction to take readers on an unforgettable journey to this dark and disturbing place—a journey that would have them wanting to read, without pause, until the very last page.

White Crocodile is also a story about families: love and hatred; kindness and cruelty; the destructive nature of some families and the long-term damage these families can cause. As part of my degree in psychology, I studied the effect of poor family dynamics and abuse on children. The fear and helplessness a child trapped in a severely dysfunctional family feels must be all-consuming, and for me was a very powerful emotion to explore in a novel, as was its flip side, intense love and an overwhelming desire to protect.

I am drawn to people who have a different psychology from my own, whether in terms of mass cultural beliefs, such as in Cambodia where the white crocodile signifies death, or with individuals who, perhaps because of their upbringing or life experiences, display an abnormal psychology. The heroine of White Crocodile is Tess Hardy, an ex-British Army combat engineer and mine clearer who, against her better judgment, travels to Cambodia to discover the truth behind the death of her violent husband Luke. However, whilst Tess is strong, clever and independent, she is also a complex character who has her own very personal demons to deal with.

I have always loved to read and write, and much of my childhood was spent immersed in stories. Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series was one of my early favorites, and in common with many other tomboys, I wanted to be George. I am still an avid crime and thriller reader, and I particularly like novels that bring more to me than just a great story. Novels that stay with me long after the last page are those such as Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, novels that explore real-life trauma through the medium of story and unforgettable characters, and that was my aim with White Crocodile.

K.T. Medina lives in London with her husband and three children.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of White Crocodile.

This article was originally published in the July 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Debut Fiction, Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Literary Fiction Debut Fiction

From the dark side of the moon

Behind the Book by Benjamin Johncock

by Benjamin Johncock

As a novelist, I’ve come to realize that the stories I feel compelled to write, the ones that tug at me hardest, have resonated from my childhood. Childhood experience echoes through adult life. The experiences, ideas, themes from my formative years resonate into my adult consciousness and I try to make sense of them through fiction. You see, you don’t choose the story, it chooses you.

When I was about 3 years old, my father would read to me from a book he had about the Apollo missions. It was called Moon Flight Atlas, and it was by Patrick Moore. It was published in 1970 and only went up to the Apollo 13 mission. That mission, dramatized in the Tom Hanks/Ron Howard film of the same name, was the focus of this book. I don’t know why my father read this book to me—it wasn’t exactly Goodnight Moon—but he did. He told the story of the oxygen tank exploding on the way to the moon, and explained how little air they had remaining, and what that meant, and about how they had to slingshot round the dark side of the moon to get home, about how there was only a 10 percent chance of them making it back to Earth.

I was utterly captivated, but it wasn’t space per se that fascinated me so—it wasn’t the rockets and spaceships and stars—it was the men. Those men! Lovell, Swigert, Haise! Laconic, focused and utterly cool under pressure. I remember poring over diagrams and little illustrations of Jim Lovell crawling from the Command Module into the Lunar Module (which was used as a lifeboat of sorts) in grave danger, hundreds of thousands of miles from home, staying calm, working the problem. I was a sensitive child, prone to anxiety, and it hooked my young imagination.

In my mid-20s, I developed a severe and debilitating anxiety disorder, with obsessive and intrusive thoughts. It was a hellish few years. I couldn’t even write a shopping list (really: I tried). I could barely function as a human being. But as I started to get better, with help and support and therapy, I started to write again. And I found myself, perhaps unsurprisingly, returning to those men, those childhood heroes of mine—men who could control their emotions (unlike me!), so calm and collected under pressure (unlike me!) and pushing them into fiction—a story which became The Last Pilot.

From the blackest period of my life, I sailed around the dark side of the moon, and I, too, returned home.

British author Benjamin Johncock's debut novel, The Last Pilot, blends fact and fiction in the story of an Air Force test pilot who suffers a devastating loss and throws himself into NASA's fledgling space program at the expense of his marriage. Johncock lives with his family in Norwich, England.

A British author shares the story behind his lifelong fascination with the American space program, the subject of his emotionally resonant debut novel.

Debut Fiction, Fiction

Fiction Debut Fiction

Finding your way in a world that’s not your own

Behind the Book by Jennine Capó Crucet

by Jennine Capó Crucet

It’s hard for me to explain this, but Make Your Home Among Strangers came to me almost fully formed one afternoon in March of 2010. I was sitting in a meeting as part of my then-job. Like a lot of unreasonably optimistic people, I gave the brightest years of my 20s to a nonprofit—an LA-based organization called One Voice, where I served as a counselor/mentor to first-generation college kids.

The students we worked with were from low-income families, were about to be the first in their families to go to college, and were also bright as hell.

About halfway through our group meeting, one girl—one tough, brilliant young woman who is very dear to my heart because of how much our lives have in common—started crying and saying she wasn’t really smart enough to go to the ridiculously selective and awesome college that had accepted her. And then, as she went on about her fears and her sense that she was destined to fail, that she should go somewhere “more at her level” for college if she even went at all, the other kids in the circle started nodding their heads and saying that they felt the exact same way.

I was immediately thrown back 10 years to myself at 18, having the exact same fears, and I lost it. All that dark horribleness, that sense of internalized oppression, rose up out of me—I had to excuse myself from the meeting, and I spent maybe 10 minutes pulling myself together in the bathroom of my boss’ house.

It was there that the narrator’s voice came to me—urgent and clear—as I sat on the closed lid of my boss’ toilet, and it was there that I literally started writing this book, in a small notebook I kept in my bag, which I’d had the foresight to drag into the bathroom with me.

Humble beginnings, yeah, but that voice—that of Lizet, the novel’s protagonist—found me every day, yelled at me when I wasn’t working hard enough, pushed me to write and to tell her story. It was a blessing and a curse, actually: to have a book’s narrator make those kinds of demands of you.

Many elements of the novel never changed from how they came to me that day in the meeting: The book is set in both Miami and New York in 1999-2000, around the time the Elian Gonzalez immigration ordeal was unfolding. Like me and like the students I worked with, Lizet is the first in her family to go to college—she’s the first in her family to graduate from high school, too—and she’s struggling enough on campus as it is when her first year gets abruptly politicized both at school and at home.

Along with the political drama Lizet works to navigate, I imagined the book to be this fictional road map of the first-generation college student’s experience, one that shows some of the ugly things race and class differences force on us. I didn’t know it at the time, but on the day I earned my B.A., I’d become part of a surprisingly small percentage of minority students from low-income families admitted to college in the first place to do so—most of us first-gen kids from that demographic drop out, so the graduation rate hovers at a little over 20 percent. Statistically speaking, I should’ve slipped through the cracks in college. I probably shouldn’t have made it to graduation day.

And I would’ve left that campus, I think, had it not been for the fact that I joined a sketch comedy group halfway through freshman year, and the friends I made there are still the best I have. (Something I told my One Voice students over and over again: Join a club based on some interest you’ve always had but that your high school didn’t provide.)

I also constantly hung out in the office of the professor who would become my mentor via her very existence—the writer Helena Maria Viramontes, the only Latina teaching in the creative writing program at the time—and seeing her on that campus made me feel like maybe I could stick around, too. Professor Viramontes gave me books and introduced me to writers she knew I needed to read, and so it makes sense that, years later, I would write the book I’d needed to feel less alone and afraid, a book that speaks to anyone looking to navigate the unknown—a book, it turns out, that I didn’t have much choice but to write.

Miami-born author Jennine Capó Crucet won the Iowa Short Fiction Prize for her story collection, How to Leave Hialeah. Both a compelling cultural critique and a fulfilling coming-of-age story, her debut novel, Make Your Home Among Strangers, follows Lizet Ramirez as she tries to make her way in a world that’s very different from the one she was born into. Crucet currently teaches English and Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

This article was originally published in the August 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Debut Fiction, Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction Debut Fiction

Tour guide’s chance remarks inspire a sweeping debut novel

Behind the Book by Alexandra Curry

by Alexandra Curry

For me, the story of Sai Jinhua begins on a summery day in Shanghai. It is the final day of a trip I very much fear will be the last one that I and my husband will take with our two sons, both of whom are poised to leave on journeys that are suddenly, although hardly unexpectedly, becoming their own next chapters.

We are in China—and not in India, Vietnam or Peru, all of which were discussed as alternative destinations. China is my trip, mostly. I’ve lived in Singapore and Taiwan; I’ve studied Mandarin. I’ve always wanted to go to the mainland. The men in my life agreed to indulge me.

On this final day, we are in Shanghai’s Yu Garden overlooking the famous Jiu Qu Bridge that—with its nine zigzag turns—was built to confuse evil spirits trying to cross the lotus pool. I overhear a tour guide talking—talking—talking, and he is a droning irritant until he mentions the 19th-century Chinese courtesan who traveled to Europe as the young concubine-wife of one of China’s first diplomats. I am suddenly interested. He says that she is very famous in China. I know nothing more than this about the person I will come to call “my girl.” I don’t catch her name, or know that she may have been a Chinese heroine in a distant past when China and the West were clumsily, violently getting acquainted—or that some people say she was a traitor, a woman of ill-repute and loose morals who collaborated with the forces of imperialist western invaders.

"What was it like in 1887 for a young woman to leave her home in China and go to a Europe that was strange and disorienting and fabulous?"

Standing there at the edge of the Jiu Qu Bridge and knowing almost nothing about Sai Jinhua, memory leads me to a time and place in my own life when I traveled to the far side of the world, to Singapore, which was and still is a fascinating, multicultural place, a place that is exotic and loud and pungent and delicious—and was also hugely alienating to a young girl from the West. I remember watching life unfold in the streets of Singapore, and in the markets, and in sights, sounds and smells that seeped through the open windows of colonial-era buildings. I remember people everywhere—all with faces not like mine.

Now, all these years later as I hear for the first time about this famous Chinese courtesan, I wonder, what was it like in 1887 for a young woman to leave her home in China and go to a Europe that was strange and disorienting and fabulous—where people all had faces not like hers? So I say to my one-in-a-million husband, if I were going to write a book—which of course I am not because it just is not something I would ever do—this would be the story I would like to tell. And right there by the Jiu Qu Bridge, he turns to me and says, well, why not? Why don’t you try?

These are the first of many improbable things that conspire to turn a tour guide’s fleeting remarks into a novel called The Courtesan. Returning home, I begin to work at learning to write, and to read everything I can find about Jinhua and her era. Chance throws many happy opportunities my way. I join a writer’s group with people who are both talented and supportive of my story. My eldest son moves to Suzhou, China, where I visit him and find, quite by accident, the very house at Number 29 Xuan Qiao Alley, where Sai Jinhua lived with her scholar-diplomat husband. Reading the “bones” of her true story, I find more places in my own story that fit together with hers in fictional ways that are magical to me. For her European odyssey, I decide to place Jinhua and her husband in Vienna, a city where I have spent much time and where I have strong family ties. Researching places for them to live, my mother suggests the Palais Kinsky. It is a place I know well; I studied there for a year—and met my husband there. I later learn that during the early 20th century, the Chinese embassy was actually located in the Kinsky for a number of years.

History drops other tidbits into my lap. Fabulous, true-to-life characters who populated the places Jinhua inhabits in my novel, who might have met her, who have amazing stories of their own: the Empress Elizabeth of Austria, who with her fascination for beautiful women would have adored meeting a beautiful, exotic creature from China; Edmund Backhouse, a true eccentric, a brilliant man with profound flaws and more than a touch of evil genius—who lurked in Peking at the time of the Boxer Rebellion and could have been acquainted with Jinhua; Kobelkoff, a man who had enormous physical challenges, who was put on display in Vienna’s Prater for people’s amusement (a common form of popular entertainment at the time)—who clicked perfectly into place as a reminder of Jinhua’s fictional dead father.

Slowly, gradually, Jinhua became a person I knew. She became a person with flaws and vulnerabilities and strengths—and very human relationships. At the same time, the history of her era was fascinating to me, both in its own right and as a context for our modern era. I hope that I have in some small way managed to co-mingle the historically real with what I have imagined and what I myself have experienced in a way that will give readers of The Courtesan a sense of what it was for Sai Jinhua to travel from East to West and back again, and a sense, too, through her eyes, of China’s history with the West.

Born in Canada, Alexandra Curry has lived in the United States, Europe and Asia, and her globetrotting days contribute depth to the various settings depicted in The Courtesan, her debut novel. A graduate of Wellesley College, she now lives in Atlanta with her family.

Debut Fiction, Fiction

Fiction Debut Fiction

A royal life story, told through the eyes of a sidelined little sister

Behind the Book by Emily Holleman

by Emily Holleman

A large-animal veterinarian, the first female Major League pitcher, Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. Like many kids, I had a lot of far-flung ideas about what I wanted to be when I grew up. But what I really wanted to be was my older sister.

Three years my senior, Julia was by definition better at everything than I was. She was taller, skinnier and prettier. She had longer hair and neater handwriting. She came up with better stories, funnier Mad Libs. As we passed into our teenage years, I grew jealous of her boyfriends, the effect she had on men. There was nothing worth doing that Julia hadn’t done better—and first.

And so, when I stumbled upon the name Arsinoe sometime in late 2010, it should come as no surprise that I was immediately drawn to the story of Cleopatra’s forgotten younger sister. An avatar of my childhood and adolescent self, fawning and yearning and aching over her sibling’s successes, she felt deeply familiar. What little can be gleaned about Arsinoe’s life: She metamorphosed from Cleopatra’s close ally (the two fled Alexandria to raise an army against their brother) to the queen’s bitter enemy (two years later, Arsinoe rebelled against her sister). Before I knew it, I was hooked. I wanted to rewrite the famous ruler’s saga, tracing not Cleopatra’s rise and fall but Arsinoe’s: the sisterly bonds fraying and snapping beneath history’s unyielding heft. I envisioned the first scraping of that fray: the moment of their half-sister Berenice’s coup, when their father, King Ptolemy, fled to Rome with Cleopatra, leaving Arsinoe to her fate.

When I first imagined the book that became Cleopatra’s Shadows, it was as a vehicle for Arsinoe’s story, the younger sister’s story. Though the gaps in our experience were vast and obvious—my family, to my great chagrin, has never ruled a dynasty—we shared that acute feeling of abandonment, betrayal. Julia had never left me in a physical or dramatic sense, but by the time I was 8 or 9—Arsinoe’s age when the novel begins—my sister had hit the throes of preteen angst, as keen to shirk familial ties as I was to cling to them. For middle school, for college, for adulthood, younger siblings are by definition always left behind. And so those sentiments came easily, paired with a reimagining of a Hellenistic childhood interrupted, the idyllic days of a princess torn asunder by revolt.

Only later, after the idea for the novel had percolated for some time, did I decide to include a second perspective, that of the eldest sister, the rebel Berenice who seized on local hatred of her father and plotted her way onto the throne. At first, this alternate narrator emerged as a foil: Every protagonist needs an antagonist. And yet, the more I wrote, the more I researched—the body of history devoted to Berenice’s rule is slim, but that concerning Arsinoe’s girlhood slimmer still—the more I became fascinated by the elder sister. A decade before Cleopatra had shunted aside her brothers to rule Egypt on her own, another woman of her family had done the same, sending her own father squalling off to Rome, begging for an army to retake his seat. What brilliant and defiant sort of woman managed that?

I was also intrigued by how family and birth order shaped Berenice’s predicament. Her point of view yielded—for me—a far more alien perspective: the one where life and stability were fragmented by the arrival of babe after squealing babe. As the youngest of four, I was born to my place. No world had ever existed in which I was an only child, no memory where I hadn’t always had a brother and two sisters. Berenice’s identity was rooted in the opposite experience: that of watching her family grow, develop and ultimately collapse. She looked on as her mother’s role was taken by a concubine, as her own was taken by Cleopatra. By the age of 19, Berenice had been dismissed by everyone who mattered at the Alexandrian court—but she refused to accept obscurity. She flailed and fought against it, seizing power at once owed to and stolen from her. Rather than a mirror for Arsinoe, a shadow to the younger sister’s sun, she emerged as a hero unto herself.

The early drafts of Cleopatra’s Shadows were fueled by my urge to explore a likeness, the pathos that I felt for poor, abandoned Arsinoe. And yet the more time I spent in Berenice’s head, the more obsessed I became with her, the other sister, that eldest child I’d never been. I began this novel because I wanted to tell Arsinoe’s story, not Berenice’s. But by the time I’d written the final words, I had come to love both sisters with equal ferocity.

Emily Holleman launches a gripping historical saga with Cleopatra’s Shadows, her debut novel. The Tudor court has nothing on the ruthlessness of the Ptolemaic dynasty, built on alliances as shifting as the Egyptian sands. Holleman, a former editor for Salon.com, lives and writes in Brooklyn. She is currently working on a sequel to Cleopatra’s Shadows.

This article was originally published in the October 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.