Romance in the Air and Murder in the Shadows by Susan Van Kirk

Lately, I’ve been plundering my past writing. It’s not that I’ve run out of ideas for future books. In fact, I already have an idea in mind for my seventh Endurance mystery. Recently, I rewrote parts of my memoir about teaching and reconnecting with students I’d taught in my past life. That project led me down another path I’m starting on now. Here’s a description of a 1940s dance venue called the Roof Garden that I used in my novella, The Locket: From the Casebook of TJ Sweeney:

“That was the beauty of the Roof Garden. If you looked over the edge, you could see people dancing in the street and on the sidewalks. The music simply floated down there from the top of the building, and a whole ‘nother dance was going on below. From above, you could gaze down on the couples and the glowing streetlights. You see, back then, even if you couldn’t afford the dance, you could still have a little of the starlight.”

 

Back in 2016, I published an 82-page novella about my gorgeous, smart, biracial detective, TJ Sweeney. Normally, the Endurance Mysteries featured Grace Kimball, retired teacher, but for that brief moment, I decided to let her former student and detective friend, TJ, have the spotlight. And, even better, it allowed me to go back in history—one of my favorite trips.

 The story featured a murder victim buried in a construction site in the present day that gave TJ a puzzle to solve. Why was she killed? Who was she? Because the bones dated back to the 1930s or 1940s, TJ would need to unscramble a tough puzzle indeed—before DNA, before databases, before other useful law enforcement tools.

 

When I wrote this novella, I also meant this story to be a tribute to my parent’s generation. In Galesburg, Illinois, where I grew up, the Weinberg Arcade still stands, a brick-and-mortar office building downtown. During the 1930s and 1940s, however, the roof of that building became a glittering dance venue featuring the Big Bands, who toured throughout the Midwest. Tiny Hill, Lawrence Welk, Tommy Dorsey, and Paul Whiteman were just a few of the band leaders whose bands played at the Roof Garden. It was an oasis in a stormy time. My parents went there as often as possible and particularly when my dad was home from World War II.

 

Besides finding wonderful anecdotal Roof Garden history at the local library, I tracked down a woman who danced at the Roof Garden as a teenager. She told me, “On the dance nights, especially Saturday nights, you had to buy a ticket to get in, and it cost twenty or twenty-five cents. It was a different time, you know. There was a coat check guy who was Black, and an occasional musician was Black, but otherwise the crowd was all white people. Smooching or other displays of affection were frowned upon, and they had security guys there. But never, in all those years, was there a fight or brawl.”

 “And soldiers? Were there soldiers?” I asked.

 

“Oh, yes. You see, the Mayo army hospital was on the north edge of town. [One of sixty-three army hospitals built expressly for war casualties, I later learned. It opened in 1943, and because Galesburg was a major railroad hub, a special spur was created to offload the injured.] The patients who were ambulatory could take a bus downtown and walk a couple blocks to the Roof Garden. Since Knox College [in Galesburg] had an ROTC program, many of their air cadets would come to dance during the 1940s.”

The nostalgic atmosphere of the story is juxtaposed with a terrible murder. The way TJ Sweeney goes

after the identities of the victim and the killer displays her cleverness in dealing with a world far removed from our modern-day technology. Lots of twists and turns highlight her search. Two of my favorite images from the novella came from my imagination and from my source. I pictured soldiers milling around in their uniforms, many smoking, and waiting for the bus to pick them up to go back to the army hospital. The second image was of the people down on the pavement four floors below, who could clearly hear the band music and were dancing on the sidewalks and in the streets among the hazy glow from the street lamps.

 My source ended our conversation with a wistful comment. “Eventually the war ended, and everything changed.”

 

Yes, a decade later, Elvis Presley would show up and my parent’s generation would be appalled. Now I see why.

 

I’ve decided to write two more novellas about TJ Sweeney, slap the three together, and make a full-sized book, From the Casebook of TJ Sweeney. I’ll keep this first novella about the murder during WWII, but I’ll add two more.

 

TJ went off to college to follow in the footsteps of her mentor, Grace Kimball. She was going to become an English major and teach on the college level. But something happened during her college experience that set her on a new path to eventually become a police detective. What shattering event changed her life?

 

The third mystery novella will concern people TJ knew back in high school. Although the plot is about a murder in the present day, there are powerful forces at work, taking TJ back to the personalities and events she remembers from Endurance High School. Grace Kimball might remember her former students with the grace to give them a pass sometimes, but TJ knew who they were when they weren’t in Grace’s literature class. And her memories were often totally different from those of her mentor.

 

Stay tuned. From WWII to the present day, my readers will hear more about Detective TJ Sweeney, and that’s what they’ve been asking me to write.

 

Do your readers ever give you directions when it comes to what they want to read?

Susan Van Kirk is is the author of six Endurance Mysteries beginning with Three May Keep a Secret. Her standalone mystery, A Death at Tippitt Pond, was followed by the Art Center Mysteries: Death in a Pale Hue, Death in a Bygone Hue, and Death in a Ghostly Hue from Level Best Books. Member of MWA and past president of the Guppy Chapter of SinC. Her website: susanvankirk.com