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All you need to know about Victorian poisonings

The Secret Poisoner: A Century of Murder by Linda Stratmann
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this book as part of my immersion in nineteenth century London and New York, and it had exactly what I needed to write an episode on a poisoning mystery. Poisonings were all the fad during the Victorian era since only a few poisons were traceable. It was an easy way knock off a rich relative who wasn't dying fast enough, a complaining wife, a drunken husband, the boss who fired you. It seems that the leading forensic scientists of the day were in a race with the more creative poisoners to identify especially plant-based poisons in human tissue.

I found the poison I intend to use, and I learned some of the procedures then used in the laboratories to separate the poison and identify it. The main obstacle to solving a poisoning was often the coroner, especially in nineteenth century New York. The position was a political appointment, and many were corrupt drunkards more interested in getting a payoff from the funeral home for the quick delivery of a body than performing a proper autopsy -- which they didn't know how to do anyway. If someone wanted a decent autopsy done, Bellevue Hospital was the only game in town. Hope I am not conflating this bit about coroners with another book...I've been speed reading so many of them for research lately. Anyway, highly recommend this one for Victorianageophiles.


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My interview with ROMANCING THE BOOK

Regarding the January 1st release of "THE ADVENTURES OF DRAGOS AND HOLMES" on Amazon, here is a portion of my upcoming interview with ROMANCING THE BOOK, to appear on their site on February 2. I'll provide the link later.  Meanwhile, you can preorder it here.


Are you a plotter or pantser?As impulsively as I have lived my life, and as much as I have always trusted my intuition, when it comes to writing I’ve turned into a downright methodical plotter. I lay the book out chapter by chapter and scene by scene on Scrivener (which I now could not live without!). I write brief descriptions of the action and notes about the comings and goings of characters in each and every scene, even if it is only a sentence or two, all the way through to the end. Then I go back and fill in more information, looking it over carefully for structural problems that I want to fix early, before they get harder to find behind too many words. I print it out in this skeletal stage, and go to a café to drink strong shots of expresso, marking the physical copy with various colored markers. I’m looking for plot points that were left dangling or need reordering, or researched more thoroughly. My writing professors drilled into my head that a good writer takes the hand of his or her reader and leads them through the plot at a reasonable pace, making sure that “red herrings” not withstanding, they never feel abandoned or confused. Once I am confident that I am not going to be embarrassed later by structural missteps, I can relax and let my creativity flow.
Do you have a writing routine? I work about six hours a day, sometimes more, in two sessions: between 9 and 2, and then again after dinner. When my brain announces it is dead for the day, I turn to Netflix, where I am currently binge-watching “The Crown.” I usually keep my writing schedule seven days a week, but in my project completion projection on Scrivener I give myself the option to work only six days. Right now Scrivener tells me I must complete 960 words per day to finish the next book on schedule. No problem!
What kind of research did you do for this book? I read at least forty books, maybe more, before I got very far into writing Dragos & Holmes. I wanted my research on Victorian London, shipping routes, sailing ships, communication (telegrams and mail delivery), and many other details to be resident in my brain so that I didn’t have to pause in my writing to look something up. I had a map of Victorian London embedded in my memory, as well as the major European ports and rail lines. As further research on small details became necessary, I tried to bunch it all up so that I could spend a day doing nothing but research, and then go back to writing. Looking things up as I write can easily send me down a fascinating rabbit hole from which I may not emerge for hours!

As I start the sequel, I am following the same procedure to bone up on New York City in 1895, where Dragos and Holmes will spend the first two episodes rescuing a child and finding a serial killer whose weapon of choice is aconite poison.

At the moment I am reading The Alienist by Caleb Carr, a very badly written (but informative) book that is an instructive example of how not to write historical fiction. Critics have called it “flabby with historical detail.” To me, it read like a high school essay on New York City history with a plot and stiffly drawn characters stuck in around the edges—a cautionary tale for all writers of historical romance.
What writers have influenced you? From a very young age I have been drawn to expansive romance-adventures written by masters like Alexandre Dumas (The Three Musketeers and Count of Monte Cristo), Miguel Cervantes (Don Quixote), Voltaire (Candide), Lord Byron (Don Juan) and Mark Twain (Huckleberry Finn).
What’s the most interesting comment you’ve received about your books? I wrote a book many years ago, called “Hair Suit,” which I just revised and republished as “Her Perilous Journey.” Two years after the early edition appeared, a very long, complimentary review appeared on an early internet review site, in which the reader concluded that I must have left the country, or even committed suicide, because I had never followed up with another book. I had led such a perilous life, he said, and seemed so determined to gain experience no matter the personal risk or the foolhardiness of my choices, that exile or suicide were the most logical explanations for my “disappearing.” I wanted to find the gentleman and tell him I had only been distracted from writing by husbands and children and was still quite alive and writing again. But he signed his review, “anonymous.”

Excerpt from forthcoming "Her Perilous Journey: A Young Woman's Voyage"

Note to Reader: I've been struggling with this book for many years, and this is the third edition! In this latest and last attempt, my intent was to leave it open for a second and third volume to follow. For those reader who find their way here, I am offering a limited number of free ebooks, in exchange for an honest review on Amazon.  You can find it here:

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https://dl.bookfunnel.com/ocf5r0v4hn
Below is an excerpt to give you a taste:

The next day, Mary and I met in the playground again. I wasn’t ready to invite her over to my house yet—Mother could be so unpredictable. We sat in the swings again, this time more relaxed and personable. “I’ve heard Catholic school is hard,” I said. “Academically, I mean.”“Harder than your school. But we get lots of holy days off. Like, this is the Month of the Holy Souls, so we’ve spent more time on retreat than in class.”“Doesn’t sound too shabby.”“Well, it is! Reeeallyshabby! Retreat is, like, being shut up in an auditorium with an old fart priest who’s trying to, like, scare you into staying chaste.” Mary saw my clueless expression.“Chaste?” I asked.“It means you are still a virgin. You haven’t had sex.” “Oh. That must be weird,” I said innocently. I had crossed the chastity frontier long ago.  “Yeah. So, he tells us stories meant to keep us on the straight and narrow. Want to hear one?” I was always ready to hear an interesting story. “Well. There was this guy. He asked this pretty girl out for a date and he took her to a movie. They went for a sundae at Gifford’s. Then he drove her up to Lover’s Lane.”“Where’s that?” “Right. You and I wouldn’t know where it is, because it doesn’t exist—except in the priest’s prurient mind.” “Prurient?”“It’s a Catholic word that means “anything to do with sex.”“Oh,” I said. “So, it’s dark. And the car is parked on this deserted street and the guy makes a play for the girl. Remember, she’s chaste. He lunges at her and she is petrified to death! It was the last thing she expected.” “Ha!” I laughed, doubtfully. “She fights him off, of course.” Mary’s swing made metallic screeches as she swung back and forth, preparing the next part of her story. “He was frustrated, so he turned on the radio. He thought it would distract her for a while and then he would try again. But a news bulletin came on. A convict had just escaped from a nearby prison!” “How nearby?” I gasped.“Like, a five-minute walk from where they were parked.And the convict wasn’t just a thief or pilferer or something like that, he was a convicted murderer. The radio said he would be easy to spot though, because one of his arms had been severed at the elbow and replaced by a steel hook.”  “Did they lock the car doors?” “Well, she did. She wasn’t about to lose her chastity andget killed.!”“Right!” “But the horny boy had one thing on his mind. Getting into her pants. She fought him off, screaming, ‘I’m scared, I’m scared! Please take me home! So he got really pissed off. He turned the key in the ignition and took off so fast the girl’s neck got jerked out of whack. He pulled up in front of her house. When he went around to open her door, guess what he found?” “A hook hanging in the door handle!”I yelled, excited.Mary paused, disappointed. “How did you know?” “Because I’ve heard the story before. Like a hundred times. But you tell it better than anyone else!” “Really?” Mary skidded her sneakers on the blacktop to stop her swing. “That son of a bitch.” She was talking about the priest.

Excerpt from Dragos and Holmes

For release on January 1st! You can preorder now for the 99-cent sale here on Amazon.



Excerpt

He took my hand and pulled me into the bedroom, then disappeared momentarily. When he returned he was carrying the bowl of butter Mrs. Hudson had brought for the breakfast table. She liked to bring it up early so that it would be soft for the biscuits. He set it by the bed. As I watched, he threw off his nightclothes to expose his satiny white skin, and spread an India rubber mat over the mattress to protect it from stains. He placed lengths of rope and a leather whip beside him on the bed and stretched out naked on his belly. I hadn't seen the leather whip before. This was an escalation.“I have been perusing the works of the Marquis de Sade,” he said, with a hunger in his voice.I had read them, of course, but was dismayed that Holmes was making ever deeper forays into the world of sexual domination fantasy. What Holmes wanted, what Holmes thought he needed, was to be fucked by some mythical buccaneer of the south seas, his safe version of what we Londoners call the “rough trade.”  That happened to be me, Dragoș the Merciless. Very well. The least I could do was to teach him a lesson.I tied him securely to the four posts of the bed and smeared his callipygian buttocks so thickly with butter that I could almost see my face reflected in their convex curves. I wiped my hands off on a towel and unbuttoned my trousers, pausing to observe how eagerly Holmes offered himself to me. His glistening body writhed sensually on the slippery rubber mat and his breath accelerated into an animal pant. I feared he would spend himself before I thrust myself inside.“Holmes, darling. You forgot to tell me the script.”He hesitated for a moment, the spell broken. “What do you mean?”“Who do you want me to be? Not myself, certainly.”“Well, when I saw your eyepatch, I thought you might be…”“Blackbeard?”“Yes. He was such an evil man.”“Before or after he was beheaded?”“Dragoș,” Holmes groaned, “you mustn’t break the mood.”“Yours or mine?”“Ours, silly. You don’t mind do you? I’ve always wanted to be ravaged by Blackbeard.”“Then ravage you I will! But I need a scenario.”“Very well,” he said, sounding exasperated. “You have been hiding down by the river, when you see me walk by, and…”“Not a beach? He was a sea captain, after all.”“Very well, a beach! Will you stop interrupting?”“Do continue,” I said.“You have been hiding in a secluded cove from agents of the British Navy. There is slight rustling noise a few paces to your right. You steal towards it to investigate, alarmed of course. Perhaps you have been discovered! But then you see a slender young man, like those ones you see running around those Etruscan vases.”“And what is he doing?”“Eating a pomegranate under a palm tree.”“Is he naked?” “Not yet.”“Do I pull down his trousers?”“Etruscan boys don’t wear trousers.”“What do they wear?”“For god’s sake, Dragoș, rip off his clothes, would you?”

Do we script our own nightmares?

I rarely have nightmares, but I had one last night. Where do they come from? This one made me yelp loudly enough to wake myself up at about 4:00 a.m. And it was perfectly designed to make me yelp, in the sense that as the object of fear approached, it did so slowly and deliberately, cloaking itself until the final moment when it leapt out at me and nipped me on the face. Alfred Hitchcock would have admired the editing (for it was edited, at times it backed up to slightly alter the route and manner of its approach to make it scarier).

The action can be briefly and incompletely described.  You know how dreams are. There was a man and he was looking for something that had frightened me, perhaps in a hole in the ground? The man was not my friend. He was not trying to help me or make me feel more secure. When he found the creature I was afraid of, he extended his arm towards me. The creature was hidden in the folds of his sleeve, and as it approached I strained to see what it was. The thought of running away, or the possibility of avoidance didn't occur to me.

When the man's sleeve got very close to me, a jet black creature, some kind of lizard or amphibian emerged suddenly and nipped me on the cheek. 

But who designed this little nightmare?

Saul,I haven't quite recovered from seeing you at the air...

Saul,
I haven't quite recovered from seeing you at the airport yesterday. I think it has been thirty years since I knew that you and Mary had moved to the Continent somewhere, Sicily? Greece? Someplace warm and sunny I remember. The letters stopped a decade before that, didn't they? I kept yours bound carefully by date with a rubber band and stuffed in two shoeboxes. I don't know where they are now, probably in the very back of the mountain of belongings stacked in my second-ex-husband's garage, collecting mold. That's not what I intended to do with them. I truly thought we would both be great writers by now, and those letters would be published by one of the big houses, sitting on the shelf beside the letters of Eudora Welty, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer. Did you keep mine? No, don't tell me. I don't want to know. If I had truly believed I would be famous one day I would have kept carbon copies as the great writers did. It just didn't occur to me.

But I poured more of myself into those letters than into any other person or endeavor of my life, and I wish I could see them again. Since that is an unlikely scenario, I want to ask if you and I could take up our correspondence again, restart the conversation we dropped so many years ago. Letters are a forgotten part of our human heritage, what made us human and defined ourselves to ourselves, and to a select group of others, expressing and critiquing each others deepest thoughts and doubts. I have been lonely without them.

So think on it, dear friend. And Mary of course is welcome to chime in. Who would have imagined you two would stay together so long? I was sorry to miss her. You said she was in the bathroom and I had to run to my gate, but I hope you told her about our brief encounter. I want her to feel included, not like the old days when I believe I wanted to keep her separated from our precious philosophical discussions and arguments. It wasn't very nice of me, and I regret it. Tell her that.

Now that I have returned from my ten years in Mexico and you from Europe, and as we enter a new phase of life in our (argh!) seventies, I hope we can dig a new Panama Canal between our two oceans and send our tiny ships back and forth with missals from the other side.

If you say yes, I will celebrate by buying myself a quality fountain pen and some India ink. Remember that I was the only one who could read your handwriting? I hope you have mercy on me now, for my eyes are terrible.

All my love,
X

Saul and Mary

for his daughter’s wedding.

Dipping a toe in Iris

Finished Mailer's 800-page book of letters last night. Moving on to some author's he recommended, Iris Murdoch among them. I remember that I almost went on an Iris Murdoch binge, might have even bought a bunch of her books used in Berkeley years ago, but never got to the first page. Any specific recommendations? Thought I might start with The Sea, The Sea!

Fever can be a muse...hush now, and receive!

5th day of sick. Sore throat and fever, tiredness and blank mind. Slowly getting better. But 2 days ago when the fever was at its highest and I was the most delirious, it happened again. Whole sections of a new book were revealed as if I were listening to a recording of how to do it. So I got up and luckily my cell phone, on the bedside table, has a recording app. So I talked into it, hopefully getting everything I had heard...though the sound of my own voice seemed to wipe out the delicate memory, so I had to talk fast and abbreviate. The only way I can explain it, since it's happened twice now, is that I the conscious day-to-day mind is so crammed full of details having nothing to do with what you are writing that the thoughts you need can't get through. When your mind becomes stupid and empty, as it does during a fever, what you were looking for just floats in.Today I read that Mailer took mescaline for the first time when he was struggling for the ending to his book Deer Park which had a next-day deadline, and the last 5 sentences came to him through a glittering, golden something or other.

Women out for themselves...about time, you say?

It's Sunday. I've got a sore throat and a fever. In between naps, I read short opinion pieces in the NYT, as you have gathered. The article I respond to, "Hire Women Your Mom's Age," can be found here.

As I suspected, the woman who wrote this opinion piece lost her last "real job" in her fifties and joined the "gig economy." Younger women who might be in a position to hire a woman her age, are no more likely to hire her than a man might be. I read this somewhere. Partly because there is no concept of solidarity now. Everyone is out for themselves, busily sweeping other people's concerns outside their darkly drawn "boundaries." And partly because the women now who might be in a position of power sufficient to be hiring, are young enough to still be running as fast as they can away from "mother figures" who might have more experience to offer...and yet not old enough to see the big iron door in front of them, and hear it slam shut for those a few years ahead of themselves. They will be surprised to know that on the other side of the door, once they play hopscotch across the illusive, false promise of the 3-dot elipses, it's a free fall. You have to be ready to consider this sudden loss of footing. Some find it exhilarating. Others, terrifying.