Thursday, October 9, 2025

Julia Spencer-Fleming's At Midnight Comes the Cry

 



                                                                by Julia Spencer-Fleming    

I have a superpower as a writer. Since my last Clare Fergusson/Russ van Alstyne book came out in 2020, you can tell it’s not terrific speed. It’s not laser-like focus, either: I’m a late-in-life diagnosed ADHD person which explains why I tend to start one task, switch to another, and somehow wind up scrubbing my shower when I should be scheduling events.

No, my superpower is manifesting my plot elements. “Well, Julia,” I can hear you say (superhearing is another power of mine, except in my right ear, where I’m a tad deaf.) It’s not that hard to be timely as long as you pay attention to the news, right? Yes, but here’s the thing – I tend to come up with the plots for my novels years ahead of their publication.

I first learned one of the largest official offices of the American Nazi Party is in Syracuse, NY back in, I don’t know, 2016? I went to high school in a town right next to Syracuse, a town where my parents lived for 40-plus years. Trust me when I say Nazis are NOT what you think of when you think of Syracuse. Basketball, yes. Insane amounts of snow, yes. Fascism – not so much.

Then, a few years later, there was a lot of news here in Maine about a group of white supremacists who decided to relocate to the sparsely-populated northwestern reaches of the state and take over a local small-town government. I guess their idea was it’s easier to create a pale-people paradise in a spot that’s already well over 90% Caucasian. Much to their surprise, the locals did NOT agree with their sentiments (Mainers don’t take kindly to out-of-staters coming in and telling us how to live) and the group was basically run out of town.

These factoids sloshed around in the cocktail shaker that is my brain, and as I was finishing my last novel, HID FROM OUR EYES, I was already coming up with the basic outline of AT MIDNIGHT COMES THE CRY. I wanted to do a Christmas book – everyone loves a mystery set during the Christmas season, right? And what goes better with the holiday than a white supremacist militia group bent on spreading their message through violence? (There is also tree decorating, hot cocoa, and Santa.)

Did I have any idea domestic terrorism and political violence would be major news items the same fall my book was coming out? Absolutely not, and I wish to heck it wasn’t so! Did I think I was going to get invitations to speak on radio talk shows because of my timely fiction? Again, no! I would prefer the biggest issue of the moment to be Taylor Swift’s new album. (Is it really as bad as critics are saying?) But you know, when you’re given a superpower, you don’t really control how you use it. Maybe for my next novel I can manifest a relaxing summer at a beach house…

 


Julia Spencer Fleming |

At Midnight Comes the Cry

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