Dear Readers,
It’s been a very cruel winter in New England, as in most of the country, and we’re more than ready for spring. Besides wanting to see what has survived under the many feet of snow, I’m anticipating the publication of The Body in the Gazebo in April.
It’s a book I’ve been thinking about for some time, starting with the notion of solving a crime that occurred not just a few years ago, but many decades in the past. As I ran through various possibilities, I realized that the best way to tell the story was to have an eyewitness describe what she had seen during one fateful summer on Martha’s Vineyard in 1929 when she was young, a wise and observant child now seeking the whole truth as she nears the end of her life. Ursula Lyman Rowe has appeared in earlier books, notably The Body in the Basement, where she solves a crime with her daughter, Pix Miller, and granddaughter, Samantha. I liked the idea of three generations of women each bringing a different perspective to the deadly puzzle confronting them. Now in The Body in the Gazebo, Ursula takes center stage as she relates what happened all those years ago to Faith Fairchild, her dear friend and the wife of her minister. Faith’s curiosity is aroused not only by Ursula’s request that she not reveal what she is about to say to her daughter Pix—Faith’s neighbor and friend—but by Ursula’s words, “When we get to the end, I will need your help.”
As I wrote I came to regard Ursula’s voice as a kind of Yankee Scheherazade and tried to set her story against a backdrop of history. She starts by telling Faith:
“My story has a number of pieces, which will come together at the end. Just now with this piece, I’m trying to give you a sense of what it was like in Boston—for my parents and for me. They grew up in another century and the changes the Twentieth brought were rapid and must have been bewildering to them at times. Especially the changes during the 1920s. I’ve often thought this was the beginning of the notion of a generation gap. Young people in the Jazz Age were so very different from the kinds of young people their parents had been in what was still the Victorian Age. Maybe it’s a little like Samantha and her cell phone—all this new technology. We had ‘Talkies’ and Lucky Lindy flying across the Atlantic. Pix thinks Samantha’s frocks belong in the rag pile and the flapper’s mothers must have thought the same way. Despite everything that was going on around me, though, as a little girl, my day-to-day life wasn’t so far removed from that of my mother’s growing up.
“We skated on the Frog Pond on the Boston Common in the winter and the arrival of the swan boats in the Public Garden was the first sign of spring for us, along with snow drops in Louisburg Square. My brother and his friends sculled on the Charles River straight through until late autumn when the water started to freeze.”
Along the way, I became fascinated by the research I was doing into the Depression Years and facts I had not known about Boston and Martha’s Vineyard history. In particular, I had never been acquainted with Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language, which developed in the early 18th century due to the extremely high percentage of hereditary deafness and continued to be used by hearing and deaf individuals alike until the early 1950’s. It became a plot element, as did the 1851 Charles Street Jail in Boston, now an upscale hotel, The Liberty, with an Alibi Bar and a restaurant, “Clink”. I never enter the towering atrium, now the lobby, without thinking of the cells that led off the balconies and the suffering these stones witnessed—notably Sacco and Vanzetti’s.
Ursula’s story involving a false accusation is mirrored in Faith Fairchild’s own life when a large sum of money from the Minister’s Discretionary goes missing—a fund to which only the Reverend Thomas Fairchild has access.
And down in South Carolina Pix Miller is meeting her future in-laws at a bonding vacation in Hilton Head followed by a visit to their home in Charleston where she has discovered that she already “knows” son Mark’s future father-in-law, “knows” in the Biblical sense from a college romance many years earlier!
One of the best things about writing mysteries in the current Golden Age is the freedom to write about places and relationships—never forgetting, or obscuring, the whodunit and suspense. I am endlessly fascinated by individuals and families. I will happily sit and listen to anything you want to share and will be in the front row for your home movies, or Flickr photos these days. I am an unabashed eavesdropper and have had to shush my husband on occasion in a restaurant in order to hear the juicy conversation at the table next to us.
I hope you will enjoy the book. Yes, there’s a gazebo and I’ve always wanted one myself, although at the moment it would be under an avalanche of snow. There are some recipes, and even more food descriptions—my favorite being the spread hosted by the South Carolinians at the top of the candy cane striped Harbour Town Lighthouse in Hilton Head.
With best wishes,
Katherine
(Photograph by Jean Fogelberg)Copyright Katherine Hall Page and Proximity Internet Productions, © 2003