Two-Day Sale of Victorian Mystery Books on Kindle
I don’t usually just post when I am doing a promotion, but I am experimenting this time with a pre-Holiday promotion of my two Victorian San Francisco Mystery novels so I thought I would let you all in on the experiment. Uneasy Spirits, the sequel in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery Series is FREE on KINDLE for two days, Tuesday-Wednesday, December 11-12, 2012. Here is the link for the U.S. Kindle Store, and the U.K. Store. A second part of the experiment is to offer the first book in the series, Maids of Misfortune, for 99 cents for the same two days that the sequel is on sale. While I know there are lots of people out there who already have Maids of Misfortune and are going to be glad to pick up the sequel for free, I wondered if those Read more…
Tools to use to Recreate the Past: Annie Fuller’s Boarding House
I am working on Bloody Lessons, the third book of my historical mystery series, which means I am wrestling once again with how adequately and accurately to portray the past, in this case 1880 San Francisco. This led me to the idea of describing some of the tools I used in creating the historical background for my protagonist’s home, which appeared first in Maids of Misfortune and will continue to play a role in all of my books, a boarding house in the 400 block of O’Farrell Street of San Francisco, between Jones and Taylor. First of all, as Susanne Alleyn points out in her clever and very readable book, Medieval Underpants and Other Blunders: A Writer’s (and Editor’s) Guide to Keeping Historical Fiction Free of Common Anachronisms, Errors, and Myth, an author of historical fiction needs to recognize that Read more…
Uneasy Spirits Excerpt: In Celebration of Halloween
Halloween is fast approaching, and I thought it might be fun to put up an excerpt from Uneasy Spirits, the second book in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series. This is a chapter near the end of the book where the main protagonist, Annie Fuller (a boarding house owner who supplements her income as a clairvoyant, Madam Sibyl), is taking a walk with two of her boarders (Barbara Hewitt and her son Jamie) and one of my favorite characters, their Boston Terrier, Dandy. Chapter Thirty-five Tuesday evening, October 28, 1879 “No Fun for the rats. A ratting match for $200 took place the other evening in a well-known sporting resort…The dogs were the imported bull-terriers ‘Crib’…and ‘Flow.’” —San Francisco Chronicle, 1879 “Jamie, hold tight to Dandy’s leash. I don’t want any rat-catching tonight,” said his mother, Barbara Hewitt, who then Read more…
Victorian San Francisco in 1880: Social Structure and Character Development
What follows is a brief summary of the social structure of San Francisco in 1880 (primarily from my dissertation, Like a Machine or an Animal) and how this has influenced some of the choices I have made in developing my characters in the Victorian San Francisco Mystery series. Brief Summary: “In 1880 San Francisco, with a population of 233,959 residents, was the ninth largest city in the United States. Located at the end of the peninsula that separates the Bay of San Francisco from the Pacific Ocean, this city of hills, sand dunes, fogs, and mild temperatures had been only a small village called Yerba Buena less than forty years earlier. This small village was one of the chief beneficiaries of the incredible influx of people into the region after the discovery of gold to the north in the winter Read more…
How realistic must we be when writing historical fiction? Victorian San Francisco Mistresses and Maids
I had planned to write about the social structure of Victorian San Francisco when two recent events got me to thinking about the tension historical fiction authors feels between accurately portraying the past and telling a good story. The first event was a mixed review I got for my most recent mystery, Uneasy Spirits. The reviewer suggested my treatment of the relationship between my protagonist Annie Fuller (who runs a boarding house in addition to being an amateur sleuth) and her staff was “unrealistic” because she treated her servants as friends and permitted them to have a Halloween party. The second event was an article in the New York Times Magazine entitled Nannies––Love, Money, and Other People’s Children, which reminded me how little the has changed between the Nineteenth and the Twenty-first century in terms of the problematic nature of Read more…
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