Valerie Webster's Blog, page 2

She Done It

Back in the day when I rode my bike 100 miles to school – in the snow – barefoot – I learned that there were competing ideas about who was the first real fictional detective. Edgar Allen Poe gets first dibs as his short story, “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” arrived in 1841. There are those who argue that it should be Wilkie Collins with his mashup of Poe’s original detective trope with Dickens’ world in The Moonstone. Little did we know there is one dark horse entry, “The Mystery at Notting Hill,” that some claim as the first. The author used a pseudonym, Charles Felix, and it took years to reveal his name as Charles Warren Adams whose serialized the story in 1862 for Britain’s “Once A Week” magazine.

  These mysteries and their investigators were all male. I began to wonder who were the first fictional women detectives. I drew forth my literary research shovel and began to dig. Here’s what I found.

  In 1864, James Redding Ware, authoring under the penname, Andrew Forrester, delivered The Female Detective. 

It was a collection of detective stories narrated by “Mrs. Gladden.” Mrs. Gladden, while seen merely as a dressmaker, investigated for clues, used deductive reasoning and her own knowledge of medicine. She called herself a professional detective. What’s more, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s epitome of observation and deduction, Sherlock Holmes, used these same techniques much later in 1887 when he published his first Sherlock story, “A Study in Scarlet.”

 Mrs. Gladden, like most PIs, thought the police a bit dim as connecting dots. This is a trope that has endured to this day; the private detective is always smarter than the cops. In her mysterious murder-solving, she is as dogged and detailed as C. Auguste Dupin in Poe’s “Rue Morge”. She rifles the dead man’s pockets. She observes the hair and skin of the victim to deduce he was murdered by a foreigner.       

Mrs. Gladden set the model for all fictional private detectives that came after: observation and hypothesis, followed by deduction and solution. 

The lady as sleuth took off in the Victorian England. In 1880 William Stephens Hayward created Mrs. Paschal for his 10-part series, Revelations of a Lady Detective. Mrs. Paschal was far more daring than her predecessor. She smoked. She carried a handgun.  She would even rip off her crinoline to descend into a sewer to search for clues. A widow, left in dire financial straits by the death of her husband, Mrs. Paschal was certainly not considered as performing “a woman’s work.” In these stories, she works with the official police force, though she also occasionally makes herself available as a private detective.

 The rest, as the cliché rolls, is literary history. A man may have created our first female sleuth, but quickly others followed.  The Victorian era bookstores soon exploded with new women investigators.

  There was Mollie Delamere,  another fictional detective, appeared in 1899. She was a young widow employed as an international pearl broker who had to outsmart the countless burglars after her wares. In 1900, Hilda Wade arrived.  She was a brilliant nurse solving medical mysteries to get close to the physician who framed her late father for murder and who ends up on a globetrotting adventure to catch him. Dora Myrl, who first appeared the same year, was a youthful woman in ankle-showing skirts with an advanced degree in mathematics from Cambridge – a medical doctor who couldn’t find work as a physician, she begins working as a private eye. There were also many more ladies saving the day: Loveday Brooke (1893), Lois Cayley (1899), Hagar Stanley (1899), Florence Cusack (1899–1900), Judith Lee (1911–16).  American counterparts included Laura Keen (1892), Amelia Butterworth (1897), Frances Baird (1906), Madelyn Mack (1914), Violet Strange (1915), and Millicent Newberry (1917).

The detectives above are but a small selection of women who got it done as they charged the boundaries of male sleuthing.  They slipped the bonds of female stereotyping and we’re going to keep on reading their adventures. For fans of historical fiction and champions of women’s competence, I encourage you to explore these lady investigators. You will be richly rewarded. There’s good reason their stories are still in print.

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Who is Beverly Hills?

When I had my first inklings of writing a detective novel, I considered that my main character would need a posse.  Every detective has a posse. So what sort of people would comprise Rita Mars’ inner circle?  They had to be fun, trusted, effective.  I discovered over time that some of the most knowledgeable and effective folk didn’t always look the part.

And what is the part of Rita Mars’ assistant and work confident?  That role had to be someone Rita would trust when her natural approach to anyone was keeping her distance.  Rita Mars does not often ask for help.  She does not assume a person is a friendly just because they

present as such.  She relies on those she knows have been through the fires of battle, whether that battle is prejudice or war or plain old garden variety bigotry players in the Rita Mars saga.

When I considered Beverly Hills as a character I thought of a good friend I worked with so many years ago. Larry was a gay, black man.  In 1967 he was attending Boston University. On his way to class one day, he drove through Boston’s Roxbury district where he was surrounded by a mob, dragged from his car and thrown through a plate glass window.  It took more than a year for him to walk again.  He emerged from his trauma strong and determined not to let haters dictate his life.  I knew he would be the right model for Rita’s right hand.

 In The Rita Mars Series, Bev meets Rita as she’s working on a serial case where gay men are stalked and killed in a Baltimore at a notorious “meat market” park in a very upscale part of Baltimore. Rita is determined to find the killer when she mistakes Bev for the murderer as he’s presenting himself for bait to try and catch the killer himself. In the backstory from my first book, DRIVEN, Rita and Bev team to successfully solve the case.

 Beverly Hills served his country in Afghanistan when he was known as Charles Tyrell Wheatly. As a kid from the projects in Baltimore, his opportunities had been limited so he joined the Army. Bev served admirably in her tours in Afghanistan. She had taken IED shrapnel when she tricked a suicide bomber into prematurely detonating his explosives vest which saved a platoon. For th0se heroics the Army awarded Bev a Purple Heart and the Distinguished Service Cross.  

 When she returned home, she not only had PTSD to manage but that notion that she had fought all her 30-some years.  The time in hospital for her wounds made it impossible for her to stuff the idea that while her body might be male, her head was definitely not. Bev has not yet chosen transition. That idea remains a chasm to leap for her. In the meantime, she’s dressing as it pleases her and the hell with the haters.

Teaming with Rita on the serial killer gave her not only an accepting friend but gave Bev a safe place to work as she considers where decision and circumstance takes her. She is devoted to Rita and often acts as her bodyguard. It is Bev who keeps the office running for her adrenalin-fueled friend and boss.

So why did I tap Larry as my main model for Beverly Hills? Like Bev, he stood up to hate with strength and dignity. He was never out-of-control angry; something it took me a long time to understand. However, he was also not going to allow the prejudice of others to shape his character. Bev, like Larry, is a person of courage, of loyalty and one never swept away in the grip of hate.   She will always be one of my most favorite players in the Rita Mars saga.

Check out the Rita Mars Thrillers on Amazon.

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Where did Rita Mars come from?

 In the upcoming monthly posts, I’m going not only to present the profiles of my thriller cast, I want to share how they got to be who they are.

IN THE BEGINNING…

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.  Me – I need to create make-believable characters.  Not as hard, one would think, as I only had to personify the traits from which each player operated.   These would be traits I wanted to exploit or explore.  And, while I wasn’t going literally to breathe them into the physical world, I knew that I had to make them real.

RITA MARS

If I told you that I am not a part of Rita Mars, you’d know I was full of it.  I think of each book’s protagonist as a construct incorporating the author’s view point, a bit of the author’s personality, hunks of author ideology and her larger-than-life response to the main character’s challenges.  In thrillers and mysteries, we get to be the protagonist as hero in the end.  (Of course, I love this bit!).

 Where did Rita Mars come from?

This author has been a rebellious sort forever.  I was the bane of my mother’s social senses.  I spent a good deal of my youth protesting wars and racism and hate in general.  Rita, therefore, is that woman who will charge like the Light Brigade if she believes in the cause.  She views people in high places as simply another human who puts their underwear on same as everyone else.  Rita speaks her mind and sometimes gets away with it and sometimes she doesn’t.  She’s just not going to stop speaking out when she disagrees.  Rita will always let the chips fall . . ..

In my career of developing law enforcement and security applications, I had the most instructive education ever in work with federal agencies as well as local authorities.   I was honored to work with people who were dedicated.  They were smart.  They understood the stakes. 

I soaked up the war stories from these men and women.  They taught me the nuances of surveillance.  They recounted the cases that haunted them, the murders, the disappearances, the deaths they could not prevent.  Theirs was a passion for holding the line.  The toll it took in broken families and splintered relationships could be enormous.  Nonetheless, they believed in their mission and they carried their grief and fear in silence.  Their stories are part of Rita’s.

Her father had been one of those whose beliefs carried him into the Viet Nam war.  It was not the fear of battle that shattered his sense of place in the universe, it was the disillusion borne of his awakening to the savage stupidity of war and the absurd idea that we must coerce everyone to our personal projection of what is right.  In the end Robert Mars released himself from his loss of faith.  The blow from that escape left Rita Mars clear-eyed about the evils of judgement.  It also engendered a stance to keep that small, vulnerable flame of self-belief guarded; to shun intimacy and embrace emotional armor.

 The last I’ll say about Rita – it is the wall of self-preservation that hampers Rita’s attachments.  While not a battlefield veteran, she’s witnessed the ugliness of betrayal, the infinite appetite of greed, the foundational loss of those we have loved.   Underneath her willingness to step into the cage, Rita Mars harbors the belief in a just world and that she will forever nurture the internal spark of that belief against what may come.

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March Madness

In psych thrillers, it’s always a dark and stormy night.  As thriller readers, we love that brush with evil, that threat that cannot touch us.  We’re safe from the likes of a Hannibal Lecter, but boy, do we love the intrigue, the danger and suspense.  Since March is definitively the “Madness” month, I offer you some of the best of the self-published psychological thrillers that will make the hair on your neck stand up and deliver the chills we crave!

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February, The Month of Love!

It’s February, and groundhogs aside, the fame of this month belongs to Cupids, heart-shaped boxes of cheap chocolate and flowers scooped up at the last minute from the grocery.  So, what the heck do those things have to do with books, you ask?

  I couldn’t make that leap so I decided to have a little imaginative fun – and very stingy on the imaginative, I might add.  I’m an author I said to myself.  Use your writer brain.  What would a valentine from Romeo to Juliet say or Cleo to Antony?  I squandered quality writing time concocting Valentines that some of fiction’s best loved lovers might have sent to their object of affection. 

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The Rise of Self Published Books – 2024

Authors are choosing more often to self publish.  A key indicator in 2024 trends is the uptick in self publishing which outstripped traditional publishing for the first time.  This self publishing market is experiencing a 17% annual growth rate.  Compare that to the 1% growth rate of the traditional publishing market.

Even The Pulitzer Prize and British Book Awards are now open to self published books.  Sorry, The New York Times bestseller list still requires a traditional publishing process. But for us, the serious self publishing authors, this means there are far more opportunities for recognition. 

I was initially dismayed by the amount of work in the more interactive process of book cover math, developmental and format editing and the sheer enormity of how to tackle social media marketing.  Nonetheless, the upside of self publishing vs traditional publishing has definite advantages.  For instance, self publishing is far faster and easier.  Self published authors also score a much bigger chunk of the book royalties.  According to the Alliance of Independent Authors, more than 2,000 authors earned over $100,000 in royalties in 2022 and the earnings continue to increase!

Corporate conglomerates are not the exclusive source of good storytelling and great reads.  As we start another year of authoring and book marketing, I chose three self published selections to share with you and hope you’ll read at least one.  They stood out from the long list of bestselling self published books 0f 2024.  

Frozen Lives

by Jennifer Graeser Dornbush

Chicago surgeon Emily Hartford has never quite shaken off the dust of her hometown in Michigan. She may be a professional success and have a princely boyfriend in the Windy City, but she can’t seem to let go of being “the coroner’s daughter” from Freeport.

She finds herself pulled back to her hometown when Jeremiah—the eleven-year-old son of her best friend, Jo—goes missing on the frigid shores of Lake Michigan.  Emily solidifies her role as the coroner’s daughter when she puzzles out a madman’s chilling machinations. Risking everything dear to her, Emily is determined to go the icy distance and end his killing spree. 

My Take: This book was my favorite – good suspense and chilling insight into a maniacal criminal mind.   

Girl, Unseen (An Ella Dark FBI Suspense ThrillerBook 23)

by Blake Pierce

FBI Agent Ella Dark, 29, is given her big chance to achieve her life’s dream: to join the Behavioral Crimes Unit. Ella’s hidden obsession of gaining an encyclopedic knowledge of serial killers has led to her being singled out for her brilliant mind, and invited to join the big leagues.

Ella finds herself in a cat and mouse chase with no way out, and she must wonder if she is hunting—or the one who is hunted….

My Take:  If you love the hairpin turns in a life-threatening crime chase, you are going to find it here!  Girl Unseen is book #23 in a series by bestselling author Blake Pierce, whose book, Once Gone has received over 20,000 five-star reviews and ratings.

The Longest Goodbye

by Mari Hannah

The Longest Goodbye is the ninth in Hannah’s UK series featuring DCI Kate Daniels. Kate tackles a complex case while navigating an on-again, off-again relationship with criminal profiler Jo Soulsby. Three years prior, Kate investigated the murder of a police officer but the perpetrators were never brought to justice.  Now, the suspects have been murdered. Seeking resolution will force Kate to confront her mistakes in the original investigation and put her career and her team’s lives on the line.

My Take:  Nobody has better Crime Fiction than the Brits!  Witness the popularity of Vera and Shetland – both stellar tv series.  Mari Hannah’s work is now under development for UK television and streaming.  You don’t want to miss this one.

Valerie Webster spent a career in law enforcement and national security technologies.  She is the author of the Rita Mars Thriller series: Driven and Objects of Desire.  Book three, The Book of Revelation is due out in the fall of 2025.

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A Tale For Our Times

December 30, 2024
I had the great good fortune to learn of and read Stephen Saletan’s memoir, To the Midnight Sun: A
Story of Revolution, Exile and Return. The prose is sparkling and engaging. It deftly captures the
dreamy attraction of the young Stephen to his grandmother’s recounting of her role in the Russian
revolution, his family’s life in dangerous times, their escape to safety. It was Stephen’s
grandmother who maintained the bond of relationships and culture in a new country. She worked
tirelessly to maintain connections with family remaining in Russia so that a sense of wholeness
survived the political upheaval and the scattering of individuals across the world.
I loved this book. Even if you are not a fugitive from political unrest, this work will engage you
as to the nature of family, how we preserve our sense of self and heritage in uncertain times.

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The Cake of Good Hope

I had a birthday recently. One terrific gift was a cake, announcing in lavender icing “Happy Birthday Valerie.” Did I mention the icing was buttercream? I loved all the bright colors on that bright white field of sugar. I called it the Cake of Good Hope. 

Why name a cake? And why that name? It is my response to the 2024 national elections. I was dismayed by results.   Yeah, I thought of karma and her “bitch” persona. A huge number of the people who voted have no idea of this country’s history or what they bought for themselves.

They forgot their white forebearers came here, killed the native inhabitants, destroyed their culture and stole their land. No amount of lying changes that. But now, there are folk of color entering the country and some descendants of the white invaders are inflamed with righteous indignation that people of color should dare to want to live a better life. 

We were astonished that people who called themselves Christian began trying to snuff out anyone who was not made in their image. They apparently do not believe in their own god. They’re so scared, they feel they need to protect themselves from new arrivals by stealing their children, placing them in camps and shipping them out of the country. I haven’t heard any of them praying about what to do or saying they believe their god will protect them. “Christian” is just a name they chose because it used to mean a person who tried to live a life philosophy like their New Testament Jesus. Surely Jesus would not recognize his teachings in any of these people.

I digressed. Cake of Good Hope is my sticking point. I will continue to act in good faith in a country founded on the principle of equal treatment for all. I will resist mandates of hate and violence and I will act against it. I will speak out when I see injustice and I will do that without hesitation. We all know what evil requires to sprout and grow – for good people to do nothing.

 I started looking at German resistance efforts in the 1930s. One of the most interesting was “The White Rose” movement started by a brother and sister team who were attending the University of Munich. They were surprised that so many of the educated in Germany supported Hitler. Hans and Sophie Scholl, aided by friend, Christoph Probst, began to print anti-Nazi leaflets and painted slogans like “Freedom!” and “Down With Hitler!” on walls of the university. There were creative resisters, like Oskar Schindler who hired Jews to keep them from Nazi hands and Dutch teacher, Johan van Hulst, who used bicycle delivery as a way to sneak Jewish children out of the country. Swiss diplomat, Carl Lutz, issued official Swiss protection papers to safe houses in Budapest. As thousands of Jews were forced to walk to concentration camps in Austria and Germany, Lutz, with his wife, pulled as many people as they could from the march and provided them protective documents.

 And we have the American, Virginia Hall, the most daring and Reich-feared spy – a Maryland native, I’m proud to add. In 1941, posing as a NY Post reporter, Hall appeared in Paris with a fake id and forged papers. She radioed troop movements and other military info back to U.S. intelligence. She recruited agents for the French resistance. 

Hall eventually had to flee the country. She escaped with Spanish guides across a treacherous 50-mile trek over the Pyrenees mountains into Spain. No mean feat, pardon the pun, when the woman had suffered an amputated foot as a result of a hunting accident years before. 

Virginia returned to France a few months before D-Day via a British torpedo ship. She roamed the French countryside disguised as a 60-year-old peasant woman, organizing sabotage missions against the German army. The Office of Strategic Service (OSS), a precursor to the CIA, credited Hall’s team with derailing freight trains, destroying a number of bridges, killing 150 Nazis and capturing 500 more.

Hall was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, one of the highest U.S. military honors for bravery in combat. She was the only woman to receive the award during World War II.

Meanwhile, back to The Cake! None of us are going to parachute behind enemy lines and blow up infrastructure. We are not Virginia Hall. We do not own a factory where we can hide folk. And I, for one, have no diplomatic powers to employ. But I have faith in the community of decency and the common good. We will not be silent and we will not be silenced.

Originally the point at the southern tip of South Africa was Cabo das Tormentas (Cape of Storms). We know that years ahead of us will be stormy and our work to preserve a decent way of life will work at times, fail at others. It was much later that John II, king of Portugal, renamed the cape. He called it the Cape of Good Hope to reflect the optimism for new trade routes.   

I’m nurturing my optimism; it will need care and feeding. We may get tired, like a boxer keeping his gloves up in a protracted and bitterly contested ring match. Then again, we will definitely have successes. We will go the distance and we will never, ever be those good people who do nothing.

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A Compelling Read: The Barn

Halloween.  The TV is re-selling Freddy Krueger and Michael Meyers.  We think of full moons and the mythical dangers of vampires and werewolves.  Makes me think of the factors that make horror stories the most frightening.  For most it is not the imaginary creatures.  It’s not the improbable Texas Chainsaw guy. 

The most terrifying, the very essence of horror is not the bogeyman.  It is the stories about ordinary people, ordinary objects that turn sinister and lethal that scare us the most.  We expect everyday life to create stability, a sense of normalcy.  We find safety and comfort in the routine of our life.  It is when the familiar becomes malevolent that we experience real terror.

So why I am telling you these things?  I am preparing you as I recommend one of the most compelling reads I have ever completed.  The Barn by Wright Thompson features a simple wooden structure in Sunflower County Mississippi.  An old seed storage barn.  Unpainted.  Worn.  Could anything be less threatening?  And yet –

In 1955, this unremarkable structure housed the torture and murder of fourteen-year-old Emmitt Till.  Visiting from Chicago, the young black boy was the target of a white woman’s accusation that set off his murder.  Two white men dragged Emmitt into that innocuous building.  They beat him into an unrecognizable mass. They dragged him to the Tallahatchie River and shot him in the head.  They tied a 75-lb cotton gin wheel to his neck and threw his body into the river to hide their deed.

  From that point runs a stream of lies, a coverup, a protection of others involved.  But the truth would not be hidden and Till’s own mother, in raw grief, demanded her son’s casket be open to “let the world see.”   That barn still stands, unmarked and unremarkable.  It is the monumental cache of a true horror story and a nation’s shame.

  While I read The Barn, I thought of the hate, running like a poisoned river, beneath our social foundation.  True, there have been strides made and laws passed.  Yet, even so many years after this atrocity, that current of evil continues to run deep in this country. Masked by a veneer of political correctness we may have given ourselves permission to believe was no more.  But at no time in my memory has that hate risen to the level it achieves today.  I think of the school massacres, the grocery store killings and the house of worship murders.

  The true horror of ordinary things turning evil is that it forces us to confront the fragility of our reality.   What could be more ordinary than your child attending school, your going to the grocery store or attending your place of worship. The mundane becomes monstrous, not because it has changed in any obvious way, but because it has hidden depths of danger we never suspected. This type of horror thrives on making us feel vulnerable in the places and with the things that are supposed to offer us comfort, leaving us to question the very nature of the world around us.

 The Barn rips back the veil.  We see the perpetrators seeking to undermine the institutions we believe in.  We feel that cold shiver of fear that our faith might be unfounded.  We feel exposed, alone and vulnerable.

The power hungry wish to scare us into believing that they alone can protect us from the imaginary monsters they have assembled – much like Frankenstein’s creature.  We cannot let fear steal our reason but we can stand together.  We will “let the world see” we will not be overcome.

  I encourage you to read The Barn.  It is a cautionary tale about the endurance of evil and our part in combatting it through the preservation of memory and our responsibility to fight against it.

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My Introduction to Storytelling

I graduated in the first graduating class of Salisbury’s James M. Bennet High School.  That fall I entered Salisbury State College which had just risen from the designation of Maryland State Teachers College in 1963 from a “normal”, or two-year college for elementary school teachers.  The school evolved to a fully fledged four-year institution with expanded academic programs, varsity athletic teams and the SSU Foundation.

The choice I made for my freshman English requirement made all the difference in my life.  I learned only after my selection of Mary Gay Calcott’s English 101, that hers was a class to avoid.  Too hard other students said.  You can’t get a decent grade they complained.  I was worried.

So I did what I always did when confronted with criticism of my themes or style.  I defended my position.  Ms. Calcott and I were not seeing eye-to-eye and my grades reflected it.  After a few papers, I saw clearly the flaws in my work.

Then, she did what she always did, she spent time hours with a student, when I asked for help.  She recommended examples; I read them.  She gave me exercises; I practiced.  She was not the student-punishing ogre I had imagined in all the chatter I heard.  I had begun to learn to write.

In her advanced classes Mary Gay Calcott opened a path to a literary world I had never experienced.  I would love that world throughout my life.  It gave me endless pleasure in reading and appreciating the craft and imagination. 

She gave me an even greater gift in demonstrating how to harness my own imagination into cogent narrative.  She introduced me to storytelling.  How to breathe life into characters.  How to spin a tale to capture readers’ attention.   She gave me confidence in my ability. 

I now have two books: Driven and Objects of Desire.  Both in the Rita Mars Thriller series.  I’m working on my third.  Driven captured an award from the Colorado Independent Publishers Association.  Objects has launched to amazing reviews.

Since my days at “SSC”, I have always been grateful for meeting Mary Gay Calcott.  I was fortunate to have recognized the value of what she was offering me.  I carry those long-ago lessons with me every day.

Now as I remember Mary Gay, I recall the words of Gibran: The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind.  Amen.

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