An Interview With Kathleen Kalb

by Grace Topping

 

During stressful times, nothing is better than escaping into another world—especially one we can experience only through a good book. Kathleen Kalb, in her Ella Shane Mystery series, takes readers to New York City and other cities during the Gilded Age and shows us what’s behind the curtain of a touring opera company. 

 

 

A Fatal First Night

An Ella Shane Mystery

Back Cover Copy

 

New York City, Fall 1899. Ahead-of-her-time coloratura mezzo Ella Shane has always known opening night to be a mess of missed cues and jittery nerves, especially when unveiling a new opera. Her production of The Princes in the Tower, based on the mysterious disappearance of Edward IV’s two sons during the Wars of the Roses in England, concludes its first performance to thunderous applause. It’s not until players take their bows that the worst kind of disaster strikes . . .  
 
Flawless basso Albert Reuter is found lurched over a bloody body in his dressing room, seemingly taking inspiration from his role as the murderous Richard III. With a disturbing homicide case stealing the spotlight, Ella can’t be so certain Albert is the one who belongs behind bars . . .
 
Now, Ella must think on her feet while sorting out a wild series of puzzling mishaps and interlocking mysteries. Yet even when sided with her aristocratic beau, does this scrappy diva have the chops to upstage the true criminal, or will this be the last time she headlines a Broadway marquee?

                                                                                                            www.amazon.com

 

Welcome, Kathleen, to Writers Who Kill.

 

Thank you so much! I’m honored to be here.

 

Ella Shane is a complex character. She has a foot in two different faiths, runs an opera company when that was unusual for a woman in that time, and plays male “trouser roles” in various productions. Is Ella based on someone you know or read about?

 

I like to describe Ella as part Beverly Sills, part Anne of Green Gables, part Errol Flynn, and all her own woman. She’s definitely inspired by Sills, who was a brilliant performer and opera company manager, and had a wonderful, unpretentious style. The orphan-made-good backstory is a classic 19^th century theme, but Ella takes it in a different direction. She also draws a bit from my own and my husband’s ancestors. Though mine were Western Pennsylvania Scotch-Irish and his New York City Jewish immigrants, they were the same kind of tough, determined, and loving ladies.

 

In Fatal Finale, the first book in your series, we join Ella when she is starring in opera productions and managing her own opera company. You give us a taste of her backstory, which sounds fascinating. Have you thought of doing a prequel so we can learn more about how Ella got to where she is?

 

That’s a great idea, and one I hadn’t really considered. Ella just “appeared” to me in her current form as I was walking to work through New York’s Washington Square, which became her neighborhood. It might be a lot of fun to go back and spend time with her and her cousin Tommy Hurley when they were working their way up from the tenements.

 

I’m impressed with Ella’s free spirit. She stated that who she dreamed of was no one’s business but hers and that she has no interest in marriage—when most women needed to marry for security. How did she develop such an independent spirit?

 

From her earliest childhood, living in the tenements with her sick, widowed, mother, Ella has had to take care of herself, and often pull more than her weight. As one of the “undeserving poor,” young Ellen O’Shaughnessy, as she was born, always had to prove herself worthy. As an adult, she’s very satisfied with the life she and her cousin Tommy have built and sees no need to change it—especially since she knows what marriage means for a woman in 1899. 

 

Although Ella isn’t interested in marriage, she finds it hard to suppress the attraction she feels for Gilbert Saint Aubyn. What is it about him that makes Ella question her desire to stay single and independent?

 

Part of it is simply that Gil is there at the right time. Ella’s in her mid-thirties, and she’s starting to realize that she may not want to miss out on motherhood, which means marriage in 1899. But he may also be the right man: he’s not troubled or threatened by Ella’s unusual profession or life, he enjoys being in the background while she shines, and he’s happy to join the crew’s adventures. Much of Gil’s character arc in the series is about giving him the chance to become, and prove himself, worthy of Ella. (Which is a lot of fun, because it’s generally assumed that a Duke is such a catch, he doesn’t have to prove anything.)

 

Your series is set during the Gilded Age in New York City when women are starting to fight for their rights. When Ella’s friend is refused admission to the press box when reporting on a baseball game, the “injustice of it did not sit well” with Ella, especially since her friend wrote far better than the male reporters. Is Ella typical of women during that age?

Many women did believe in fighting for their own and other women’s rights. Many others did not, and considered anyone who didn’t want to be an Angel in the House unnatural. For Ella and her friends, though, it’s as much about supporting each other as the abstract concept of women’s rights. Hetty is being dismissed and mistreated, and Ella, ever the loyal tenement kid, is angry at the unfairness to her friend.

 

In your series, you focus not only on Ella’s career and a murder investigation, but you also raise social issues of the day. For example, the danger women faced using toiletries and medicinals that contained toxic substances. Do you come up with subjects you want to feature and then research them, or do subjects you unearth while doing research inspire you?

 

It’s a little bit of both. The dangerous patent medicine storyline in A Fatal Finale grew from the needs of the plot. In A Fatal First Night, the racial prejudice plotline began with my desire to find a realistic way to have a more diverse cast, which forced me to think and research how people in the time might behave.

 

A Fatal Finale was well received by Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, the Library Journal, and a number of other reviewers. Reviewer Aunt Agatha listed it as her Favorite Debut for 2020. When you were writing the first book in your series, did you ever feel that you were producing something special?

 

Those reviews blew me away, honestly. Finale was a big change for me. I’d written and queried two earlier contemporary mysteries (200+ rejections, no publication), and I decided to try this completely different idea I’d been kicking around for months. It wasn’t really until I started querying, and getting much better responses than I’d had with the earlier ones, that I started to think it might actually happen. 

 

Ella is a likeable character, stating that “…there’s not enough kindness in the world. Where I can, I try to add to it.” What accounts for this aspect of her personality? 

 

Her awful childhood. She grew up very poor in the tenements of the Lower East Side and saw firsthand the ugly underbelly of the Gilded Age. In a time without social services, the needy were entirely at the mercy of the kindness of others. Ella’s seen enough cruelty for a lifetime, and she’ll fight it any way she can.

 

What inspired you to write a historical mystery, which is entirely different from another book you wrote about a female assassin, On the Side of the Angels?

I’m all about the characters. As a reader, I want to spend time with people I love, and once I had Ella, Tommy and the cast, I just wanted to hang out in Washington Square with them. Same with my killer librarian. She’s a nice suburban mom with a second life, actually a lot like me. Except that her second life is a little more complicated. Angels is actually pretty cozy in content and sensibility, if you don’t mind the fact that the main character kills creepy men and (apparently) gets away with it.  

 

Readers learn a bit about different operas through your books. Have you studied music or performed opera yourself? What inspired you to center your series around a touring opera company?

 

In the late 19^th century, opera was a much more popular art form than it is now, so opera stars were much more like our Broadway or even TV stars. I did a lot of summer theatre in college, and I love music and backstage life. I do use my voice in my work as a radio anchor, so I know how it feels, but I’m not a trained singer. That wasn’t my gift. 

 

Opera performance is a far cry from your day job—working as the weekend morning anchor at 1010 WINS New York. Tell us about that?

 

I’m a radio lifer. Started as a teenage DJ in my hometown of Brookville, Pennsylvania, doing overnight shifts on school vacations and news at the college station at Pitt University. Still, I was sure I was going to be a lawyer or a history professor until the summer after graduation, working as a writer at KDKA in Pittsburgh. I was standing behind Mr. Big Important Anchor as he read my words on the air and thought “THAT’s what I want to do!” Took me 20 years, but it’s exactly what I’m doing now, and in New York, yet.

 

During the pandemic, did you have to travel into a studio, or could you broadcast from home? 

 

We were very lucky to be able to work from home, and I spent more than a year in a corner of my husband’s home office, and later in the downstairs schoolroom/studio. I’m back in the NYC studio now and so glad to be with my colleagues again.

 

I understand you grew up in Pennsylvania not far from a star, Punxsutawney Phil, and Altoona, my hometown. What was it about growing up in Pennsylvania that turns so many young women to writing about murder?

 

Wow! Punxsy was the big town, and Altoona was a real city. I grew up watching the TV station from Altoona—it was one of the few we got in Brookville. I think one Groundhog Day at Gobbler’s Knob would inspire most folks to think about homicide. But it probably takes a good English teacher to make you actually write about it!

 

What’s next for Ella Shane, her cousin Tommy, and the other wonderful characters from your Ella Shane Series?

 

It is going to be a very, very interesting February 1900 in Ella’s world. In A Fatal Overture, due March 29, 2022 from Kensington, the Duke’s mother and aunts show up on Ella’s doorstep demanding she marry him…only to return to their hotel and find a body in the bathtub. That turns out to be the least of their problems with danger and threats in the air, the wedding of two beloved supporting characters, and Ella and Gil wrangling over their future. And then something really terrible happens. (No spoilers here!)

 

I understand that you will be coming out with a new series, The Vermont Radio Mysteries. Can you tell us about that series?

 

Thanks. Written under my new, DJ-perfect pen name Nikki Knight, Live, Local, and Dead (Crooked Lane, February 8, 2022) is a contemporary cozy set at a small radio station in Vermont. New York DJ Jaye Jordan buys WSV after, as she puts it, her husband survived cancer but their marriage didn’t. Unfortunately, the satellite talk-show host she replaced with love songs turns up dead in a snowman on her doorstep. Then there’s the governor, Jaye’s old crush, who’s interested and dealing with a series of mishaps of his own. And did I mention Neptune the giant surly gray cat and Charlemagne the flatulent moose? 

 

Thank you, Kathleen. I look forward to reading more books in your Ella Shane series and Live, Local, and Dead.

 

 

To learn more about Kathleen Kalb, follow her at https://kathleenmarplekalb.com.