NEW IN STORES!

 No Mortal Reason

 

            New in stores this April is the third Diana Spaulding Mystery, set in 1888. Published by Pemberley Press, it will be issued in trade paperback and sell for $17.95. The ISBN number to give to booksellers is 978-0-9771913-4-5. The fourth and last book in the series, Lethal Legend, is written and should be out in 2008.

            No Mortal Reason takes place in the town where I grew up, Liberty, New York, and brings Diana face to face with relatives she didn’t know she had. And with murder. This is the area that would later become known as the Borscht Belt. In these early days, the tourism industry was just getting started.

 

Face Down among the Winchester Geese

 in Large Print

 

            Also available this spring will be a large print trade paperback edition of the third book in the Face Down Series, Face Down among the Winchester Geese. Published by Delphi Books, it will sell for $18.95 . The first two books, Face Down in the Marrow Bone Pie and Face Down Upon an Herbal are also available in large print from Delphi Large Print.

 

Third Series News:

 Kathy takes a Pseudonym

 

 

            Since I've always been fond of variety, I've started writing a contemporary mystery series under the pseudonym Kaitlyn Dunnett. The Liss MacCrimmon Mysteries are set in the fictional village of Moosetookalook, Maine and the sleuth is a professional Scottish dancer who has returned to her old hometown after suffering a career ending knee injury. Kilt Dead is the first book in the series and will be out in August, 2007.

 

Forthcoming in the

Face Down Series

 

In the fall, FACE DOWN O’ER THE BORDER, 10^th in the Face Down series, will be out in a trade paperback edition from Perseverance Press. My non-fiction look a mystery writing,  HOW TO WRITE KILLER HISTORICAL MYSTERIES, will be published by Perseverance Press in Spring, 2008.

 

 

 

CRIMINALS IN AMERICA
1888

 

                One of the most interesting sources I came across in doing reserach for No Mortal Reason was a book written by a New York City police detective named Thomas Byrnes. Professional Criminals of America, published in 1886, provides a rogues gallery of real criminals, complete with their photographs. These were individuals guilty of "freelance villainy." Inspector Byrnes, who was Chief of Detectives from 1880-1895, believed that mug shots revealed what he called a "tell-tale"—a feature that the individual could not disguise and which would help law enforcement officials recognize him . . . or her.
                Byrnes, who operated out of police headquarters at 300 Mulberry Street, developed a network of informers and a complex series of treaties with the underworld. He had at his command two sergeants, forty detective sergeants, and fourteen patrolmen detailed for detective duty. It was under Byrnes that the term "third degree" came into use.

                Among those convicted felons featured in Professional Criminals of America are a number of women, from con artists to pickpockets and shop lifters to Tilly Martin, a "sneak." In addition to printing their pictures, Byrnes gives capsule descriptions and arrest histories. For Bertha Heyman, alias Big Bertha, "confidence queen," for example, he tells us she was 35 years old in 1886. "Born in Germany. Married. Very stout woman. Height, 5 feet 4 ½ inches. Weight, 245 pounds. Hair brown, eyes brown, fair complexion. German face. An excellent talker. Has four moles on her right cheek." He gives a bit of family history, as well as an account ofher crimes and convictions. He concludes by saying that her current sentence will expire on March 30, 1887 and that "This remarkable woman used to lodge at the leading hotels, and was always attended by a maid or man servant. At the Windsor and Brunswick Hotels in New York City she had elegant quarters. When plotting her schemes she would glibly talk about her dear friends, always men well known for their wealth and social position. She possesses a wonderful knowledge of human nature and can deceive those who consider themselves particularly shrewd in business matters."
                As those who read No Mortal Reason and the short story "The Tell-Tale Twinkle" will see, Diana Spaulding also made good use of a copy of Thomas Byrnes's book.
               

 

 

Spas, Hotels, and Farm/Boardinghouses

 

                No Mortal Reason takes place in rural Liberty, New York, a real place I know pretty well since I spent the first seventeen years of my life there. I've invented the village of Lenape Springs and the Hotel Grant, to give myself greater freedom in plotting my murders, but they are based on real places.
                Liberty in 1888 consisted of the villages of Liberty, Liberty Falls (now called Ferndale), Robertsonville (now called White Sulphur Springs, and Parksville. I had family in all of them in the 1880s and my source for much of what I say about them is the record left by my grandfather, Fred Gorton, who was born in the Strongtown section of Liberty Falls in 1876. If you go to my index page you'll find a link to the biography I compiled of him based on his memoirs and to other information on my family.
                It is from this source that I took the rumor of "salting" a medicinal spring with sulphur. My grandfather claimed that his uncle, for whom he worked as a young man, did just that to increase business at his hotel. Was the story true? I have no idea, but it made an interesting detail to work into my fiction.
                Genealogy is a gold mine for the writer of historical mysteries in many ways. Not only does it yield interesing family names, such as Jerusha, Cordelia, Myron, Howd, and Parmelia (variously spelled Pernolia, Permelia, and Pamelia) but also family legends. The story of the map to an Indian lead mine comes from my mother's side of the family. Apparently it still existed in the 1920s when her uncles decided to try to follow it. Unfortunatly, the geography had changed in the century or two since the map was drawn and they had no luck. They might have found out more from the locals around Claryville, however, if they hadn't been driving a big black car. Everyone thought they must be with the mob.
                I also have first-hand knowledge of that fine old Sullivan County (aka The Borscht Belt) tradition, the farm/boardinghouse. Until my maternal grandmother died when I was ten, the Hornbeck farm in Hurleyville, New York (pictured below in its earliest incarnation) still took in summer guests.

                As for big hotels, they were everywhere in Sullivan County from the late 1900s until the 1970s. One of the most famous, Grossinger's, was located in Ferndale, one of the villages in the town of Liberty. Like my family's farm, it got its start as a simple farm/boardinghouse. People from "The City" (that would be New York) came to the Catskills every summer to enjoy the fresh air and cooler temperatures and to get away from the threat of disease that plagued more heavily populated areas.

A REAL 1887 SULLIVAN COUNTY MURDER

"The most horrible, cowardly and cold-blooded murder ever known in the history of Sullivan County was committed between the hours of 11 and 3 o'clock p.m. on Saturday last at the house of Ursula Ulrich, about one and a half miles east of Jeffersonville, in which Mrs. Ulrich was the victim."

So begins the account in the Sullivan County Record on October 10, 1887. The murderer, who became known in the press as "Sailor Jack," was soon caught and taken to the county jail in Monticello, where he was held until his trial and execution the following year. He was incarcerated there at the time NO MORTAL REASON takes place, and for that reason I make frequent references to the case. It would have been impossible for people in Sullivan County not to know of it. They'd have been likely to make comparisons had another murder taken place in the same area.

From the accounts of the Sailor Jack case came many details about police procedure at the time. I also learned the identities of the local coroner and the county sheriff. I had to invent more about these two men, of course, in order to have them appear as characters in my story, but the essentials were right there in the newspaper accounts.

In this real-life case, the motive was robbery, the murderer was intoxicated from drinking hard cider at the time of the crime, and the trail he left after killing Mrs. Ulrich was not difficult to follow. Sailor Jack—Abel John Allen was his real name—was English by birth and had been a sailor. What he was doing in Sullivan County, working for a farmer, is never made clear. Apparently he tried everything he could think of to get out of jail after his arrest, from escapes to pretending to be insane to claiming the sheriff was using his case for his own political advancement (there was an election coming up). He convinced a local clergyman he'd found religion and had more than one young woman in the community thinking she was in love with him.

Reading the accounts was fascinating for me. The hard part was resisting the urge to include all of what I read in my novel. I did manage to work in some of the details of the case by having Horatio Foxe take an interest. It will surprise no one who remembers Foxe from the earlier books in the series that Diana's editor wants her to interview Sailor Jack in jail.

Short Stories Now At Website

There are now three free short stories at www.kathylynnemerson.com, two featuring characters from the Diana Spaulding Mysteries and one set in the sixteenth century. The two Diana stories are "The Kenduskeag Killer" and "The Tell-Tale Twinkle," which are companion pieces, both set during the period in 1888 between events in DEADLIER THAN THE PEN and FATAL AS A FALLEN WOMAN. The first features Ben Northcote as sleuth, in his role as a coroner in Bangor, Maine. The second follows Diana's adventures after she returns to New York City.

The sixteenth-century story is "The Curse of the Figure Flinger," which previously appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine (artwork shown above). This story is a bit of a departure for me, since it is written in first person. The narrator is a minor character in FACE DOWN BELOW THE BANQUETING HOUSE but the story takes place many years after events in that novel. Two other characters from the Face Down series also appear. One is Nick Baldwin. The other is a guard from Newgate Prison, who previously played a small role in FACE DOWN BENEATH THE ELEANOR CROSS. Lady Appleton does not show up in this story.

Clocks in the Sixteenth Century

Last fall, on the CrimeThruTime group at Yahoogroups.com, there was much discussion of how people told time in the early sixteenth century. I learned a lot.

Some things I knew already. There were clocks of the sort we know today, although much more elaborate, but they were expensive and not to be found in every home. Palaces and cathedrals often had huge clocks that everyone could see. People without clocks still had some idea what time it was, however, by the ringing of church bells, if they were in a town, and from such things as sunrise and cockcrow if they were in the country. According to one of my sources, a lark's singing is a herald of the dawn.

What did I find out on CTT that I hadn't known before? I discovered the existence of water clocks. Not only were they around in the early sixteenth century, they'd been around for thousands of years by that time and were probably to be found in private homes as well as in monasteries.

I also went back to the standard primary source for information on the sixteenth century, William Harrison's The Description of England, which was written in 1587. Low and behold, there was a section I'd forgotten about titled "Of Our Account of Time and Her Parts," in which Harrison says, among other things, that although minutes were known to exist, most clocks "descend to no lower than the half-quarter or quarter of the hour."

LARGE PRINT FACE DOWN AMONG THE WINCHESTER GEESE

Above is the cover art for the forthcoming large-print edition of the third book in the Face Down series, Face Down Among the Winchester Geese, affectionately known as my serial-killer book. In this one, Susanna's husband Robert is still around and up to no good, as usual. He's brought Susanna to London, although she's not sure why, but the arrival and subsequent murder of a Frenchwoman arouse her suspicions. Her investigation of the death leads her to some unusual places for an English gentlewoman, including the "stews" of Southwark, and she soon begins to suspect that the Frenchwoman was not the murderer's first victim.

I am delighted to have this mystery back in print. It joins the first two books in the series in Delphi Large Print editions.