C.P. Lesley's Blog, page 11

Pushing the Envelope

Yesterday I changed the water bottle in our garage cooler. This was a stretch for me, in part because the bottle is heavy but also because, in a family with two mechanically minded members, I am the outlier. I felt certain that if a way existed to spray water across the floor, the car, and myself, I would find it. But I was the only person around at the time, and it needed to be done, so after a bit of investigation I decided to tackle the problem.

 

As things turned out, the process was simple enough that even I couldn’t mess it up, but it got me thinking about the demands that we as novelists impose on our characters. Except perhaps in a romantic comedy (where everything would go wrong, bringing hero and heroine together), reading about changing a water bottle, even one containing five gallons or so, would be a complete snore. Protagonists in novels have to surmount the kinds of obstacles that would cause most of us to run screaming for the hills. Just to cite a few examples published by Five Directions Press, plots can include an eighteen-year-old asked to defeat an ancient demon bent on destroying the humanity she once created (Gabrielle Mathieu, Girl of Fire); a sheltered sixteen-year-old girl confronting a known murderer intent on kidnapping two royal princes (my own Golden Lynx); and a pair of young men who embark on a voyage to the Amazon River in search of cash, only to endure a series of disasters that eliminates one member of their group after another (Joan Schweighardt, Before We Died).

So what is it with writers? Are we sadists in nerd clothing? “Psychologically distoybed,” in the words of West Side Story? Desperate for adventure but too wedded to our computers (and too isolated by nature) to seek it for ourselves?

Well, maybe some of the last. It is a great deal of fun to invent these extreme circumstances and throw oneself into imagining how a given character might cope with them. Channeling bad guys (and gals) is deliciously freeing too, so long as one can stash them away in their cages at the end of the day. And of course, one can never rule out hidden sadism or other forms of psychological disturbance. The general public probably already has its suspicions of people who claim to hear fictional beings chattering in their heads, even if those writers don’t themselves believe that the beings exist in any meaningful way.

But the real reason we torture our characters is simple: it makes for a good story. As readers, we get to sit back and watch, turn over potential responses in our minds, guess what the characters may do. We can live life in the fast lane without leaving our seats, and in doing so, we can explore emotions we hope never to experience: the yearning for revenge; the terror of facing a superior opponent; the moral quandary of balancing safety or reward against awareness of others’ needs or adherence to the social rules we were raised to respect. We can watch others make appallingly bad choices or rise to heroic heights we can only dream of reaching. In doing so, we prepare ourselves to face future crises. And no one is hurt in the process.

 

Or, to riff on Nancy Kress’s marvelous summary in her writing manual Dynamic Characters (“In life we want tranquillity; in our fiction we want an unholy mess, preferably getting unholier page by page” [159]), in life we want to worry about nothing worse than spilling water on the garage floor. In a novel, we want, if not murder and mayhem, at least an angry demon, a ruthless politician, or an environment filled with tarantulas, piranhas, and a jaguar or two. Much better to face such threats on the page than in real life!

Is He or Isn't He?

I know, it sounds like that old Clairol commercial, but this isn’t a post about hair dye. Like any fictional genre, murder mysteries have certain plot lines that are just too delicious to resist. One of these, beloved because of its potential for ambiguity (at least in the pre-DNA testing or even pre-fingerprint era), involves the unexpected reappearance of a long-missing heir to a title, a fortune, or both.

Personally, I love this storyline, where the complexity of identity and character and variations over time due to accident or maturity are all on display. But I’ve seldom had more fun with an impostor story than I did with Deanna Raybourn’s latest addition to her Veronica Speedwell mysteries. The opening alone is priceless, and the novel just builds from there.

For more on An Impossible Impostor and the series to which it belongs, read on. But then definitely listen to the interview, where we talk about a lot more than this particular plot.

The rest of this post comes from New Books in Historical Fiction.

Starting a new historical mystery series is always fun, but summarizing one at book 7 creates a certain conundrum: how to convey the essence of a character and her development without giving away too much information?

Since her first adventure in 1887 (A Curious Beginning, published in 2015), Veronica Speedwell, a lepidopterist by inclination and training, has had an exciting two years. Early in that book, she leaves a family funeral only to encounter a housebreaker and would-be abductor. She evades the villain with help from an unknown rescuer who promises to reveal a decades-old secret but dies before he can fulfill his promise. Veronica is nothing if not intrepid, and she flees London in the company of the unkempt and misanthropic Stoker. Together they attempt to discover who perpetrated the murder and why without falling under suspicion themselves.

By 1889, Veronica and Stoker have tackled more than a few complicated cases. In An Impossible Impostor, the head of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch asks them for help. Jonathan Hathaway supposedly died during the eruption of Krakatoa six years before, but he has returned from the grave—or has he? His putative grandmother identifies him, but other family members disagree. And the family owns a priceless parure that may be the newcomer’s real target. So off Veronica and Stoker go to Hathaway Hall, a gentry estate at the edge of Dartmoor. There another piece of Veronica’s personal history surfaces when least expected, threatening her partnership with Stoker as well as her peace of mind.

Deanna Raybourn has a gift for writing fast-moving, richly imagined, intriguing, and at times flat-out hilarious mysteries filled with well-rounded and opinionated characters at all levels. I can’t wait to find out where she will send Victoria and Stoker next.

Dressing the Part

This post went up on the Five Directions Press newsletter page last week. You can find more of our writing posts—as well as monthly lists of Books We Loved and other news for writers and readers—by clicking the above link. But this one goes well with my own recent release, Song of the Sinner (Songs of Steppe and Forest 4), so I thought it would be fun to share it here as well.

Imagine that it’s pre-COVID days and you walk into a party. Across the room, you see someone you know but haven’t encountered for a while. What’s the first thing you notice? In my latest novel—Song of the Sinner, released just a few days ago—the heroine, Solomonida, describes her impressions of Anfim, the novel’s hero, this way:

His light brown hair gleamed in the light cast by the torches placed at intervals along walls painted in patterns of scarlet and sky-blue; and he was, as always, discreetly but luxuriously dressed—tonight in rich brown velvet with clasps formed from gold braid. Next to the brilliantly clad noblemen and noblewomen he looked like a wren amid a flock of peafowl, but at the sight of him my heart gave a skip.

Superficial, you say? Well, of course. Yet don’t we all instinctively judge not just character but social position and even mood from a person’s clothes, haircut, makeup or lack thereof, and other external traits?

In fact, Anfim’s clothing choices convey quite a bit about him. He has money—enough to afford velvet and gold braid. Even so, he seeks to avoid standing out in a crowd, because he is not one of the “brilliantly clad noblemen”—which tells us that he is not at the highest level of his society but knows his place in the world and accepts the limitations it imposes on him. He plays by the rules, not reaching for more than he can attain by his own merits . More deeply, as becomes obvious the more we learn about him, he is comfortable in his own skin, willing to appear “like a wren amid a flock of peafowl.”

Let’s contrast him with the novel’s main antagonist, Solomonida’s cousin Igor.

As usual, our cousin had dressed in a style designed to cast every other guest into the shade. Today he’d outdone himself in a cloth-of-gold robe tied with an embroidered cobalt sash, its hue repeated in his leather boots and silken cap trimmed with white fox fur. A gem-studded collar that would not have looked amiss on the grand prince himself adorned Igor’s thick neck.

If Anfim downplays his considerable gifts by dressing modestly, Igor takes the exact opposite approach. He wants to make a big splash, hovering on the edge of inappropriate. In a society where conspicuous consumption acts as a marker of who outranks whom, does the grand prince want his lesser nobles rivaling him in their jewelry or drawing attention to themselves in cloth-of-gold and the rare fur of white foxes? Probably not, but Igor doesn’t care. He may not have achieved the place in life that he believes he’s entitled to, but he’s prepared to do whatever it takes to convince people that he’s better than he is. Fake it till you make it is his motto.

But not always. A man as clothing-obsessed as Igor knows when to use his choice of dress to convey disdain as well as to pump up people’s impression of his rank. During a family meeting intended as a last-ditch attempt to force him to confess the full extent of his schemes and deter him from doing future damage, Solomonida notes her cousin’s uncharacteristic slovenliness. She also contrasts Igor’s appearance with Anfim’s to show their opposing attitudes toward the meeting.

I noticed as soon as I entered the main sitting room that our cousin had not dressed up for the occasion. Even Anfim, resplendent in the russet robe he’d worn for our wedding, outshone Igor. I read our cousin’s plain clothes as evidence of disinterest or disrespect. Not, perhaps, a promising beginning.
 

At other times, though, Solomonida is the one manipulating the social meaning of clothing, as in this scene when she sneaks out of the house with her lover, dressed in a servant’s cloak and a robe usually donned for housework.

When Anfim left that evening, I went with him, dressed in Masha’s cloak—its hood concealing my face. I wore my simplest robe, left my headdress behind, and for the first time since my betrothal seventeen years before redid my hair in the single braid typical of never-married girls.

This is clothing as disguise—a trope of historical and fantasy fiction, in particular, where a heroine often dons servants’ or boys’ clothes to evade restrictions placed on women. As such, it gets to the heart of this post: that something that appears to have implications only on the surface can open a window onto a character’s motives and desires.

All these examples come from a novel set in the past, at a time when laws existed throughout much of Europe specifying who could wear what when, giving the details of fashion a punch that they can’t quite sustain in today’s more liberal climate. But in modern life, too, we define the people we meet by the shoes they don, their preference for denim versus corduroy or cashmere, the colors and styles they wear, their devotion to brand names or thrift stores, and the level of interest they show in the details of personal appearance. And we ourselves manipulate those details to convey a particular impression to a given audience, in ways that may or may not correspond to the person we are inside.

So if you are writing a novel in any time or place, think not only about what a character wants and needs but the image that person seeks to present to the world in this set of circumstances or that. And mix it up a bit, because just as wearing a collar worthy of the grand prince doesn’t make Igor equal to his ruler, a character who dons a tweed jacket with leather elbow covers may not really be a professor. Write yourself a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and if the other characters accept the image as reality, you might just have the hints of a plot.

All images public domain via Wikimedia Commons. Find out more about Song of the Sinner at https://www.fivedirectionspress.com/song-of-the-sinner.

Life at the Boundaries

The big news for this post is the release of Songs of Steppe & Forest 4, which I mentioned as imminent last week. On the surface, Song of the Sinner follows the star-crossed love affair of Anfim Fadeyev and Solomonida Sheremeteva, characters who have played bit parts in this series and its predecessor until now. But like most fiction, it also addresses a deeper problem: in this case, the belief held by so many women that a child’s needs are more important than a mother’s—or at least that a mother can satisfy her own needs or her child’s, but not both. The social difference between Anfim and Solomonida exists to spark this inner conflict, bringing it into the light so that it can be acknowledged, explored, and eventually resolved.

Of course, in our relatively liberal world, where money confers status and birth plays a role mostly as a marker for racial discrimination and multigenerational poverty, Anfim’s background (priest’s son, merchant, civil servant) may not seem so distant from Solomonida’s rank as the daughter of a noble clan. She has land and servants; he has cash and, increasingly, connections. Doesn’t that make them more or less equal—complementary, even?

In sixteenth-century Europe, though, “blood” trumped money and skills every time. The language speaks for itself: blue blood, good blood, noble blood, royal blood—as if just being born into a family with a long genealogy could make a person clever or interesting or creative. So for Anfim and Solomonida, the difference in their station represents a real obstacle, one they must surmount, evade, or ignore. Their personalities and past experiences further ramp up the conflict. As the son of a priest, Anfim learned early to lie low and follow the rules, even when he’s on a quest to succeed. Solomonida married young to a man chosen by her father, a husband who looked good on the surface but proved vicious and uncaring toward those he considered beneath him. She survived and even escaped the worst of her husband’s excesses, but she fears giving anyone else that kind of power over her.

Moreover, when Solomonida and Anfim do—for reasons explained in the novel—realize that the costs of remaining mired in the past and constrained by society outweigh the benefits of breaking the rules, their decision has consequences, not all of them pleasant. Solomonida’s daughter feels betrayed; her cousin regards her as a loose and foolish woman and ramps up his plans for revenge; the noblewomen’s wives refuse to visit her in her new home, imperiling her efforts to find the right husband for her beloved child.

This novel is, at its heart, a romance, so in the end Solomonida and Anfim find a solution to their dilemma. In this novel, as in most romance novels, the driving question is not where the hero and heroine will end up but how they will get there, and which obstacles they will encounter along the way.

But their particular problem gets to the underlying heart of this series. In Legends of the Five Directions, every heroine—and every hero—married in what our ancestors considered the “proper” fashion: a spouse selected by the two sets of parents to fulfill specific economic or political goals of the family as a whole. But even in the sixteenth century, some people failed—or refused—to follow the rules. I set out in the new series to explore the escape routes available in every society, no matter how traditional. Juliana, in Song of the Siren, is a high-class courtesan; she married for a short time in search of security, but when her husband abandoned her, she left him without a second thought. She’s not looking for a replacement. Grusha lives as a single mother and supports herself and her son by working as a shaman, another traditional alternative for those whose gender identities or life choices deviated from the rigid categories that our ancestors defined as the norm. Darya toys with the idea of joining a woman’s monastery, which is the Christian version of an escape through religion. Her eventual rebellion, though, is to marry a man she loves—of her own rank and selected by her father but not someone who will satisfy the ambitions nurtured by the head of her clan. Solomonida’s tussle with her emotions, her unwanted realization that she has committed herself to someone of lower rank, could happen to anyone, married or single. But in her case she is also taking advantage of the greater freedom allowed to widows—first by avoiding remarriage altogether, then by going after a man whom many of her friends and relatives consider unsuitable.

Future books in the series will continue to explore the edges of this system. At the moment, I envision an interfaith marriage, a runaway bride, a cross-cultural union, and the sixteenth-century equivalent of a career woman who may not choose to start a family at all (although my heroines have a way of falling in love even when I expect them to do otherwise). Even in a past filled to the brim with kings and generals, abbots and cardinals, knights and their dutiful wives, we also find women warriors, queens and midwives, a female pope, and tradeswomen, physicians, and artisans of all varieties. Theirs are the stories I love to tell.

To find out more about Song of the Sinner, the best place to start is the dedicated book page on the Five Directions Press site. There you can find an audio excerpt, an online preview, a summary, and purchase links. Until Song of the Storyteller appears around this time next year, this new book is also featured on the home page at my own site. After that, you can find it on the series page, where the earlier novels are already listed.

Or just stay tuned, as I’ll be talking more about the new novel here as the weeks go by. It’s tremendous fun to release a new novel, but just getting it out doesn’t do much. What makes the whole experience of publishing worthwhile is helping a book find its readers! 

Images: Song of the Sinner book cover © C. P. Lesley and Five Directions Press; Sergei Solomko, The Seventeenth Century, postcard ca. 1880, public domain via Wikimedia Commons; screen shot from Nomad: The Warrior (2005), dir. Sergei Bodrov.

Treading Water

Or was it more like submersion? Not sure how a week where I only worked two days got so crazy, but somehow it happened. Work spilled over into my leave time and prepping for, then recovering from, a routine medical exam gobbled up every other spare moment, leaving me here on Friday afternoon with no good ideas for a post.

But since I have not missed a single Friday since I began the blog in June 2012, I’m writing in to note that I’m still here and I’ll be back next week with more to say.

Meanwhile, Song of the Sinner (Songs of Steppe & Forest 4) is now officially out in print and available for preorder for Kindle, due for release on Tuesday. Stay tuned for more information on that next week.

I also interviewed Deanna Raybourn  this week for the New Books Network. We discussed her latest novel, An Impossible Impostor , due February 15, and the Veronica Speedwell series more generally. There’s even a (very) brief mention of a contemporary novel, due in September, titled Killers of a Certain Age. I’ll be posting more about that conversation when the interview goes live around the release date. But I can only hope that she had as much fun during that hour as I did.

And if you missed my previous post about Jinny Webber’s Bedtrick, check out today’s LitHub post about the book, which includes the New Books in Historical Fiction interview and a transcript.

Have a great weekend, everyone. See you next Friday!

Image purchased via subscription from Clipart.

Gulag Ballerina

On February 2, 1938—late at night, as was the custom—the Soviet police, then known as the NKVD, arrested a suspected German spy in Leningrad. Stalin’s Great Terror was well underway, meeting arbitrary targets set from the center the previous summer: 268,950 arrests, which should lead to 72,950 shootings and 196,000 prison sentences (8–10 years each) within four months. The specificity of the numbers is itself astonishing, not least because it emphasizes the state’s complete disinterest in the guilt or innocence of the accused.

In this case, the person arrested was Nina Anisimova, an acclaimed character dancer and budding choreographer at the Kirov Ballet. She was one of several dancers investigated for past contacts with one Evgeny Salomé, the legal consultant to the German consulate in Leningrad. Salomé, in turn, was a Soviet citizen of German extraction who appears to have been the kind of avid fan that Russians call a baletoman (ballet maniac). He liked to throw parties and invite the cultural elite of 1930s Leningrad, especially if they knew their way around a pointe shoe.

As Christina Ezrahi notes in her remarkable new book, Dancing for Stalin: A Dancer’s Story of Courage and Survival in Soviet Russia (London: Elliott & Thompson, 2021), there is no evidence that Salomé spied for the Germans. Still less is there any reason to suspect Anisimova of anything worse than knocking back a flute or two of champagne in the wrong company. She had even broken off contact with Salomé in 1934. But her arrest came during the height of persecution in Stalin’s Russia, and Anisimova spent months in detention, followed by a sentence of five years in a labor camp in Kazakhstan. She arrived at the transit camp in October 1938, after a nightmare journey aboard a cattle car, and narrowly escaped a further transit east.

So far, this is a tragic story but not, alas, an unusual one—as the records of the Memorial Society in St. Petersburg, so recently closed down on orders of the Russian government, make clear. But Anisimova’s story did not end there. Her husband, also an artist with the Kirov albeit not a dancer, bent heaven and earth to secure her release—risking his own life and freedom by lodging complaints at all levels of the political hierarchy. Seven months after Anisimova arrived in Kazakhstan—where, in a bizarre twist, she survived by dancing for her captors—her husband’s petition hit the right desk on the right day, and she was summoned back to Leningrad for a review of her sentence. By the end of September 1939, the NKVD had overturned her conviction, releasing her to return to the Kirov, where she continued to dance and to choreograph into her fifties (she was twenty-nine at the time of her arrest).

Life was not smooth sailing even then. In June 1941, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. The Kirov was evacuated to Perm (Molotov, in those days), and Anisimova went with them. But thanks to poor timing and perhaps other factors, her husband and sister stayed behind, narrowly surviving the Siege of Leningrad and the famine that made the winter of 1941 hideous.

Meanwhile, in Perm, Anisimova began work on the ballet Gayané, her greatest triumph—performed to music by Aram Khachaturian and a libretto by her husband. Russian troupes still dance it, although it has never established a foothold in the West.

In the decades that followed her rehabilitation, the two years that Anisimova spent in detention were erased from her record. Ezrahi learned of them only through an archival file that landed on her desk by mistake. From there she pieced the story together.

This is, however, more than the story of one courageous and wrongly accused woman and her steadfast, loving husband. Through Ezrahi’s fluid and captivating prose, readers learn about Anisimova’s suffering but also about the realities of the Gulag; the cynicism of the mass arrests and repression; the Kazakh famine (like the better-known Ukrainian Holodomor, the result of poor state planning and malicious neglect); Soviet prejudice against anyone with ties, however weak, to the previous regime; and much more.

Although we regret and deplore the death and suffering of millions, it is the nature of the human brain to react most strongly to the plight of individuals. This is why reading fiction builds empathy: it draws us into someone else’s emotional experience. The best histories have the same kind of impact. Dancing for Stalin is that kind of book, and even if you’ve never tackled academic history before, give it a try. You’ll be glad you did.

Image: Modern performance of Gayané, © Karen Yan, Own Work, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Vicious Secrets

Most novels depend on secrets. Even where protagonists are completely honest with each other—which they most often aren’t, because their goals do not align, they have yet to establish a trusting relationship, or they lack crucial pieces of the puzzle—there will be other characters who withhold information for various reasons. And in the rare cases when all the players make their goals crystal-clear from the beginning, as can happen in an adventure story, only the author knows how the conflict will resolve itself—and then often not until after reaching the end of the first draft. We may guess that the hero or heroine will come out on top, but the question of how must remain unresolved for most of the story. Otherwise, a plot lacks tension, and readers have nothing to draw them in and keep them hooked until the end.

It’s the depth and kind of secrets that separate one type of novel from another. In Catherine Gentile’s Sunday’s Orphan , the subject of my latest interview on New Books in Historical Fiction, the secrets are deeply buried, profoundly shameful, and have to do with family and identity (the best kind, from a novelist’s perspective, because they offer the most complexity, nuance, and ambiguity). And although all the clues to those final, shattering revelations are present in the opening scenes, the journey is as emotionally fraught for the reader and the discoveries as shocking as they are for the imaginary people involved.

To say more than that would be to spoil the thrill of discovery. Read on to get a sense of the setup, then listen to the interview. But of course, the only way to discover the secrets is to dive right into the book.

The rest of this post comes from New Books in Historical Fiction.

Even for someone trained from birth to manage a farm, stepping into an inheritance at the age of twenty is not easy. Yet this is the situation facing Promise Mears Crawford when Sunday’s Orphan opens in 1930. Trouble comes at her from many directions. Her adoptive uncle, Taylor Crawford, constructed his farm according to the principles of racial equality, in defiance of the Jim Crow laws in effect all around him. Taylor had the standing to resist opposition from his neighbors, but Promise lacks both his stature and the resources she needs to fulfill the obligations he took on. Her financial constraints land her in conflict with the farm’s foreman, Fletch Hart, a long-time friend whose dreams of becoming a physician she cannot support due to lack of funds.

But the potential loss of Fletch’s friendship pales in comparison to the threat posed by the arrival of Daffron Mears, a self-appointed Jim Crow enforcer whose propensity for vigilante violence is well known throughout the county. Daffron wants a job—in fact, he wants Promise’s farm, which he regards as stolen from him by Taylor—and he is not above manipulating Jim Crow laws to get his way. He implies that he will report Promise to the authorities if she turns him down while giving work to Fletch, a Black man.

To protect her friend, Promise agrees to Daffron’s demand, if only for a week. But Daffron’s return to the farm that he left twenty years before sets off a series of crises that cast doubt on everything Promise thought she knew about herself and her origins.

Catherine Gentile admits in our interview that this was a difficult novel to write. For the same reasons, it is a difficult novel to read. But its unflinching portrayal and beautifully written exploration of a topic too often buried beneath platitudes about the need for change and its particular relevance to the questions of racial injustice that have been front and center the last two years make it an important book.

Winter 2021-22 Bookshelf

As the old year gives way to the new and the days slowly, slowly lengthen, it’s time to check in on some of the books destined to occupy my evenings for the next few months.

Christine Ezrahi, Dancing for Stalin
(Elliott and Thompson, 2021)
Although it’s true that I mostly read historical fiction these days—with my podcast channel, it’s hard to find time for anything else, and I enjoy visiting the past without having to worry about its dirt, quack medicines, and misogyny—I do occasionally tackle nonfiction. This study of a Soviet ballerina and choreographer sentenced to the Gulag in 1938 but eventually freed and returned to her former position thanks to her husband’s tireless efforts on her behalf, is a major draw for me. In addition to the human interest angle, I have loved ballet for as long as I can remember, read and enjoyed the author’s Swans of the Kremlin, and spent several years researching the life and times of Agrippina Vaganova, who revolutionized Soviet dance education between 1917 and her death in 1951. I look forward to learning more.

 

 Andrea Penrose, A Question of Numbers
(Andrea Penrose, 2019)
In addition to her Wrexford & Sloane mysteries, featured in last month’s interview with the author for New Books in Historical Fiction, Andrea Penrose self-publishes a second series set in Regency England, this one featuring Lady Arianna Hadley and the Earl of Saybrook and originally put out by Signet/NAL. This series focuses more on the political intrigues associated with the Napoleonic Wars. Lady Arianna, the daughter of a disgraced earl who absconded to Jamaica to escape his creditors, has an unusual past for a society lady and a talent for flirtation and deception, as well as an instinctive grasp of mathematics. On several occasions she also doubles as a chef—in male clothing, of course.

Lord Saybrook, a veteran of the Peninsular War, doesn’t quite fit society’s expectations either because of his Spanish blood. The two share a love of chocolate, then just expanding from a drink to the confection we know today, and by this point in the series their marriage of convenience has blossomed into a love match and a true partnership. In this fifth book, Napoleon has just escaped from Elba and seized the French throne once more. Arianna and Saybrook have no desire to become involved in stopping the emperor’s latest schemes, but Lord Grentham, the head of Britain’s secret spy network, has other ideas …

The puzzles are genuinely puzzling, the couple’s adventures guaranteed to keep you at the edge of your seats, but the true appeal of this series for me is the delightful and well-rounded characters—not only Arianna and Saybrook but their friends, family, and even enemies.

 

Deanna Raybourn, An Impossible Imposter
(Berkley, February 15, 2022)
Another historical mystery series, already advanced to book 7—this novel has been on my radar since last year, when I conducted a written interview with the author on this blog. Veronica Speedwell is an independent-minded young woman with a mysterious past, living in Victorian England, and she works as a lepidopterist, in part as an excuse to travel to foreign lands. Her partner, known as Stoker, the third son of a noble family, works as a taxidermist.

It would be unfair to go much more deeply into their respective backgrounds and how they reached their current position sorting through the massive collections of Lord Rosemorran. Suffice it to say that Veronica and Stoker have a knack of stumbling over murder victims and at times are charged by their lofty relatives with discovering the perpetrators of such crimes. In this case the summons comes from Sir Hugo Montgomerie, head of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, and involves one of his family members who may—or may not—be the heir to Hathaway Hall, declared dead during the eruption of Krakatoa some years before the story opens in 1889.

The whole series is delightfully tongue-in-cheek and engaging, and I look forward to talking with the author for New Books in Historical Fiction in about three weeks.

Irina Shapiro, Murder at Ardith Hall
(Merlin, 2021)
These novels came to me via an Amazon recommendation, and I purchased the first book more or less as a test. I was soon hooked, though, and tore through the next four without stopping for breath. The series features Jason Redmond, a US Civil War veteran and surgeon who has unexpectedly inherited an earldom from his grandfather, and Daniel Haze, a local constable in an English village who abandoned a promising career as a London policeman after the accidental death of his young son.

As the series progresses, Redmond slowly grows accustomed to his unwanted status as an aristocrat, and he and Haze develop a satisfying partnership that leads to the solving of several difficult crimes. Here in book 6 the victim is a guest at a séance, and the suspects include Daniel’s wife. These fast-paced mysteries have twisty, clever plots and a host of interesting secondary characters. I look forward to finishing the series in time to interview the author in April 2022.  

 

Bryn Turnbull, The Last Grand Duchess
(MIRA, February 8, 2022)
The final years of the Romanov family are not on my list of favorite subjects for fiction, not least because it is such a depressing and ultimately tragic tale. But that said, the prospect of a book set in Russia by a writer whose earlier novel, The Woman before Wallis, I enjoyed was enough to draw me in. As in The Woman before Wallis, the author approaches her subject—in that case, the combined scandals of the future King Edward VIII’s love life and the Vanderbilt custody battle—from an oblique angle, permitting a new perspective on familiar territory.

Here the subject is Grand Duchess Olga, the eldest daughter of Nicholas II, who acts as a window onto the dramatic family and societal events that led to the collapse of the dynasty amid war and revolution. The book title must have been a marketing decision, since there were many other grand duchesses—not only Olga’s sisters but her aunts, and those who escaped into emigration continue to pass the rank down even today. Still, that’s a quibble in reference to what looks like a rich and sympathetic portrait of a young woman who came to a brutal end through no fault of her own.

Last but not least, I have been reading and re-reading my own latest novel, due for release by Five Directions Press in late January. Song of the Sinner picks up a month after the end of Song of the Sisters and follows the developing if star-crossed romance between the widowed Solomonida Sheremeteva and Anfim Fadeyev, a government official and merchant, over the course of the next two years. Despite her exalted rank, Solomonida faces the same dilemma that affects many women today, especially in these troubled times: can she meet the needs of her children at the same time as she cares for herself? Read on for a short description.

Song of the Sinner

After surviving marriage to a brute, Solomonida Sheremeteva has sworn never to take another husband. As a boyar’s widow, she at last has the right to choose her own destiny, and she intends to devote her attention to securing a happier future for her daughter. Never mind that she has feelings for a handsome official. His inferior rank means that any association with him can only damage her own child’s prospects.

Anfim Fadeyev could not agree more. He knows as well as Solomonida that a priest’s son should not aspire to the hand of a noblewoman, whatever his achievements in the government and in trade. He needs a mother for his children, not a highborn lover. So when passion overwhelms him and Solomonida one winter’s night, they both face a dilemma: how to respond when the demands of the heart contradict those of the head?

Gender-Bending Shakespeare

One of the best developments of the last few years has been the willingness to acknowledge that human identity and sexuality are more complex and layered phenomena than the bifurcated he/she many of us grew up with. I still remember learning in school that unidentified persons must be referred to as “he.” These days, even he/she raises eyebrows.

But although society’s willingness to talk about diversity has increased, the diversity itself has existed for millennia, probably since the dawn of time. Jinny Webber’s latest novel—Bedtrick, the subject of this month’s New Books in Historical Fiction interview—explores the fluid understanding of gender in Shakespeare’s plays, which was in part a response to the strict limitations placed on women in Elizabethan England. Webber tackles this question through her fictional interpretation of the life of Alexander Cooke, an actual actor in Shakespeare’s company about whose real life little is known. Read on to find out more.

As usual, the rest of this post comes from the New Books Network.

As Jinny Webber explains in this interview, a “bedtrick” is a literary device through which a character is deceived into spending the night with someone unexpected, trapping that character into an unwanted commitment. William Shakespeare used the device in All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure. So it is a fitting title for this novel about the gender-bending that was so much a part of Shakespeare’s comedies—most notably, Twelfth Night. There were practical reasons for having female characters appear as men throughout much of a play, but Webber takes this historical reality and twists it into the essence of her plot.

Her main character, Alexander Cooke, is a gifted actor with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the company where Shakespeare serves as playwright. Sander, as Alexander is known to family and friends, specializes in female roles, which in Elizabethan times could be played only by males—usually pre-pubescent boys. Only a select group of confidants knows that Sander was born Kate Collins, a village girl who fled her home to avoid an unwanted marriage and found her place among the traveling actors of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men.

When Sander’s brother—Johnny, another member of the acting company—gets his lover pregnant and refuses to marry her, Sander steps in to protect the mother-to-be, Frances, and her unborn child. Although it is illegal for two women to marry in sixteenth-century London, Sander persuades a priest to perform the ceremony. Frances’s position as Elizabeth I’s Silkwoman is secured, but the story of Sander and Frances is just beginning. Like all married couples, they must find a way to live together, even as England itself suffers from unrest and uncertainty caused by the aging queen’s reluctance to name her successor. Filled with quotations from Shakespeare and an insider’s view of his plays, this is a charming story of love triumphing in the midst of intolerance.

 

Image: C. Walker Hodges’ conjectural reconstruction of the Globe Theatre (1599–1613), Folger Shakespeare Library, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The Recommendation Algorithm

One of the down sides of an Amazon account is the slew of “you may like” messages that deluge my e-mail account at the rate of half a dozen or more per day. It beats me why anyone, even a computer programmer, might decide that because I just spent $50 on a salad bowl combo that wasn’t even shipped to my house, I must be in perennial need of salad bowls. But this is the world we live in, and most of the time I just click delete and move on.

There are other reasons why I don’t put a lot of stock in Amazon recommendations. Most important is that I often search books for work, so I have no desire to read them for myself. I also buy books—and other items—for family members, who have quite different tastes from mine. Those purchases, understandably, mess up the algorithms and result in a lot of suggestions in which I have no interest.

That said, the Amazon recommendations have had their uses. The best example is the time I searched for a particular book on the French Revolution (again for work), which generated a “you may like” for Baroness Orczy’s classic, The Scarlet Pimpernel. My grandfather gave me an illustrated copy of that book for my fourteenth birthday, and I loved it, but the copy itself had vanished long ago. I bought the book, re-read it from the perspective of a long-married adult, and seven years later that chance find led to my first published novel—The Not Exactly Scarlet Pimpernel, which simultaneously paid homage to and gently critiqued Orczy’s original.

Recently, for whatever reason, the Amazon recommendations have been on a roll. First, when I was looking into Sherry Thomas’s Lady Sherlock series for a New Books Network interview, the computers directed me to Andrea Penrose, whose Wrexford & Sloane (and Lady Arianna Hadley) books I love every bit as much as Lady Sherlock. My interviews with Sherry Thomas and with Andrea Penrose can be found at New Books in Historical Fiction (just click on the authors’ names in this sentence).

Then the recommendations threw up Irina Shapiro’s forthcoming Murder on the Sea Witch, book 7 of her Redmond & Haze mysteries. Again, I read the first one, enjoyed it thoroughly, and am working my way through the others, in preparation for talking with the author sometime next spring.

Most recently, the recommendations directed me to Pam Lecky, the author of three mysteries (so far) featuring Lucy Lawrence. I’ve yet to dive into those, so I don’t necessarily have plans to do more than enjoy them, but the opening of the first one looks good. I look forward to reading them as soon as I’m caught up on Lady Arianna and Redmond & Haze.

So the story has, at least temporarily, a happy ending. Three out of three is pretty good results, although if we go beyond the last few weeks, the rate is more like three out of three thousand.

Now, if I can just convince the algorithms that, honestly, one salad bowl is enough …