An Interview with Susan Van Kirk by E. B. Davis

 

Retired teacher Grace Kimball is elated when former student Fiona Mackenzie returns to Endurance to make burial plans for her recently deceased mother, Sybil Mackenzie. But this will be no ordinary funeral because Fiona’s mother—a self-proclaimed witch—died in prison following a sensational Endurance murder trial ten years earlier. Detective TJ Sweeney doesn’t need witchcraft or visions to know Sybil Mackenzie’s presence—dead or alive—will rekindle anger in the residents of the small town.

When the judge from Sybil’s trial is poisoned, the evidence points toward Fiona, the witch’s child. Who else has a garden full of poisonous plants? Who else lost her mother to ten years in prison? Who knows the kind of dark magic the witch’s child can create? Her mother put a curse on all involved in her trial. Has Fiona returned to get revenge?

TJ finds other suspects ripe with motives to murder. Add vicious whispers and malicious rumors in the local coffee shops, pushy reporters looking for a story, and clashing opinions on social media. The town of Endurance is like a tinderbox just waiting for someone to light a match. Can Grace and TJ find the judge’s killer before that match is struck?

Amazon.com

 

The Witch’s Child is the fourth Endurance mystery written by Susan Van Kirk. I happily noticed that the first three books in the series are now on Kindle Unlimited. So—if you haven’t read them, do so now with your subscription. It’s been a while since the third book, which I’m sure is a story in itself.

 

The first three book titles were based on sayings by Benjamin Franklin in his Farmer’s Almanac. This fourth book is not based on sayings, but it addresses an old topic—witches, their practices, and differences from conventional norms. What is contemporary is the theme of discrimination against those different from us based on fear. Unfortunately, real harm was done by a witch in the past. The question is if harm will be done in revenge for the past.

 

Susan addresses the contemporary topic of social media where gossip occurs without basis in fact resulting in harming the innocent. Her ending also has unexpected surprises, which I will not spoil!                                                   E. B. Davis 

How many years between the third and fourth books? What happened?

 

That is a long story I could call “Persistence and the Pandemic.” Five Star Publishing had my Endurance series but stopped publishing mysteries after my second book, Marry in Haste. So I finished Death Takes No Bribes and thought I had a publisher to pick up the series. That, too, fell through. I decided to self-publish this third book. It took a while to round up a cover artist and formatter. By summer 2017 when I published Death Takes No Bribes, I decided I would stop the Endurance series after a trilogy and e-book novella. Done. Finished.

 

I wrote a non-Endurance mystery, A Death at Tippitt Pond, got a publisher, and saw it come out summer 2019. I began writing a new series with Death in a Pale Hue, but the pandemic hit, and I had a tough time writing my name. Finally, I finished Death in a Pale Hue, but the characters from Endurance were on my mind. People kept asking me when I was going to write another Endurance mystery, and would Grace Kimball and her romantic interest, Jeff Maitlin, get together?

 

Meanwhile, my agent found a publisher for Death in a Pale Hue plus two more books. Since I’d written the first book, I figured I could sneak another Endurance book in, and the pandemic had lessened so I was seeing people and my creativity was back. It was a four-year stretch between three and four, but now I find myself a hybrid author with two series. Life is sure strange, and the publishing world even stranger.

 

Did all witch lore and history begin in Scotland? I was totally unaware of this, and I’m a Scot by descent. I thought it was just a convenient way to discriminate against all women.

 

Me too. Scottish. Witchcraft exists in the cultures and religious practices of many countries and over centuries. The reason I settled on Scottish stories was because I traced my ancestors back to a clan in Scotland in the 1400s. I became fascinated by websites for a particular clan that talked of modern-day examples of the second sight [visions and dreams like clairvoyance] and documenting its passing from one generation to the next with anecdotal stories.

 

Then I traced the Scottish immigrants who came to the Cumberland Valley in the 1770s, so I thought I could create a character descended from those families. I noted that some universities in this country and abroad have actual courses on witchcraft. I ordered and read several books about Scottish witchcraft, pulling out helpful ideas. Wicca or modern witchcraft interested me, and I read books and articles on that. All the while I was thinking about how I could use each of these ideas in The Witch’s Child.

 

It is true that the designation “witch” has been used to discriminate against women and also people who are “different.” The mid- to late Medieval period through the 18^th century saw any dissent from religion in Europe as a threat to the social order. We know about the Inquisition, and our own Salem victims in the 1600s came from European settlers who were aware of the witchcraft trials in their home countries. People who were different became scapegoats and targets, so this was easy to replicate in the current town of Endurance. We know of many dark historical periods where this happened. History changes, feelings don’t.

 

From the start, when Fiona shows up in town, TJ doesn’t want her around. What does TJ have against Fiona?

 

TJ safe-guarded Fiona when she was a fifteen-year-old girl suffering through her mother’s trial. She felt sorry for her. But now Fiona is an adult, and TJ knows no good can come from Fiona bringing her mother’s body back to Endurance. That trial brought out such anger in the town, and the husband of the victims still lives in town, along with people who empathize with his loss. TJ knows this plan for a funeral service will end badly, and she will have to deal with the chaos.

 

Even Lettie, Grace’s former siter-in-law, is against Fiona burying her mother in a Christian cemetery and Fiona staying in Endurance. She’s such a forgiving soul. It seems unlike her. But then, doesn’t Lettie go from one extreme to the other, like she did with Del, her boyfriend?

 

I can’t decide who struggles more with Lettie’s opinionated side, Lettie or me? Most of the time her opinions are perfect vehicles for humor. She is angry with Fiona because of her mother’s actions. When Grace suggests Lettie should get to know Fiona better and she’d like her, Lettie says, “Of course. We’d have a lot in common. We could exchange recipes. Eye of newt, three-legged frog, an ostrich egg laid at the dark of the moon. I’m not sure I could get those ingredients at Tom Cogburn’s grocery store.”

 

But later Grace returns home to find Lettie and Fiona bonding in the kitchen over coffee. Lettie tells Grace, “She isn’t so bad once you get to know her. Sometimes people like her who seem so different actually aren’t. You just need to talk to them.” And this is a major theme of the novel. We tend to ostracize people who are different from us and sometimes attribute motives to them that aren’t correct, but if we talk to them we might discover we have more in common than we think.

 

TJ likes pie and men with great abs. Many women would agree with her. But, in TJ’s case, she doesn’t want to get married. Why? 

 

The answer to that goes back to my novella, The Locket: From the Casebook of TJ Sweeney. TJ is a
biracial woman, her Caucasian father walking out on her Black mother years earlier. Her bitterness toward marriage goes back to that relationship. She never wants to marry a man who, like her father, might break her heart and leave her with kids to bring up by herself. She never wants to love someone so much, like Grace loved her deceased husband Roger, that their death will devastate her. Marriage works for Grace, but it will never work for TJ, or so she believes.

Is the Midwest the center of the universe? (BTW—I’ve never thought Illinois was in the Midwest. I think of Kansas as being Midwest!)

 

Of course Illinois is the center of the universe. From my front porch, as far as I can see, is the rest of the universe. I tend to think of Kansas as a plains state. The Midwest is Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Ohio, Indiana. Some people add Minnesota, Michigan, and Wisconsin, but they’re too far north in my universe. I notice the news reporters disagree with me.

 

Although Endurance is a small town of 15,000 residents, it has a college. Does Endurance’s population include the college or with the college does that double the population?

 

No, the college is not included in the population. The town I live in has a college too, but the official (census) population of the town does not include the college. Endurance is a little bigger than my town and wealthier.

 

When the judge from the trial is poisoned and then a poisoning attempt is made on the prosecutor from the trial, it appears as though Fiona’s mother’s curse is being enacted. Does belladonna have to be processed to be effective or concealed in a beverage?

 

I had fun checking out the various poisons growing in Fiona’s backyard. (Fiona lived in Ohio for ten years with an aunt, but now she has decided to stay in her old home where she lived with her mother in Endurance.) TJ called her garden a perfect dispensary for murder. Agatha Christie used belladonna a few times. The juice of the belladonna berries is highly poisonous, but it also has a bitter taste, which you’d have to disguise. However, it isn’t very water soluble. Atropine is a poisonous compound found in belladonna that can be introduced into the bloodstream through injection, ingestion, or absorption through the skin. As an injection, atropine is normally converted to a salt to help its solubility in water and its easier absorption in the gastrointestinal tract. It would take an intelligent villain, and several of those appear to be in my story. One is a chemist, oh my!

 

As a suspect, TJ continues to focus on Fiona. It surprised me because it seemed like a set-up. Why is TJ so intent on Fiona as the number one suspect?

 

TJ can’t figure out Fiona’s decision to stay in Endurance after her mother’s funeral. What motive could she have for doing that? She has a home to go back to in Ohio. TJ also sees the adult Fiona as an outsider and an odd duck. What we don’t understand often leads to interesting hypotheses. Fiona has easy access to belladonna in her yard and knows how to use all kinds of herbs and poisons, including belladonna. She also has reason to be bitter about her mother’s fate since her mother never made it out of prison alive, and Fiona lost any further years she might have had with her mother. In short, she has the motive, means and opportunity.

 

You brought in the observation via Grace that the social media seems to have already found Fiona guilty even though there are no fact supporting her guilt. Have you often observed this problem on social media?

 

Are you kidding? In this mass media and social network world we’re living in with misinformation and misunderstanding about facts versus opinions, this is an everyday occurrence. We draw conclusions about other peoples’ motives all the time because we ascribe opinions to them that they might not even have. Look at the current debate about breaking up social media monopolies because it’s too easy to use them to spread false information. (I must stop before this becomes a rant about the media.)

 

Are Grace’s friends Deb and Jill former teachers who are retired, too?

 

Deb O’Hara is the former secretary at the junior high who is retired but does volunteer work at the local genealogical association. Jill Cunningham is not retired but works as an accountant. Jill, Deb, TJ, and Grace are close friends even though TJ is much younger than the others.

 

Do authors often embellish the facts about how many books they’ve sold? How many print editions?

 

That’s a good question. I can’t speak for other authors. I do notice many writers using “best-selling” in front of their names, and I’m never sure what that means. I’m fortunate in that Five Star Publishing got my books into hundreds of libraries, and Harlequin Worldwide Mystery republished my first three mysteries and sold thousands of copies to their worldwide book clubs. Most writers don’t ever mention an exact figure, but I’m not sure how you verify copies sold by someone else.

 

What’s next for Grace and her posse?

 

That’s difficult to say without giving away secrets. I can only say we’ll see some momentous changes in the lives of all the main characters. Next, I’ll write the second book in the Art Center series with Level Best Books. Then I can go in one of two directions. I’m debating two more novellas about TJ Sweeney cases. I’d put them together in a book with my already written novella, The Locket, so we’d have three cases in one book. Or I might write another Endurance novel. Either way, the small town in the Midwest—center of the universe—will have another day.

And Now a Few Words for Small Towns

Recently I watched a Netflix series called “Virgin River,” a 10-part series based on books by writer Robyn Carr. I found myself drawn to it by its interesting characters, great dialogue, suspense, romance, and small-town setting. Virgin River is the story of a woman who leaves Los Angeles and moves to the remote town of Virgin River in northern California to restart her life. She is a nurse practitioner and takes a job with the local doctor, a curmudgeon played by Tim Matheson. She has a past, as do many of the other characters in the town, and the plot is filled with both danger and romance. It has been so popular that the second season is already filmed.

What caught my interest was the setting of Virgin River, California—the town, its culture and expectations, and the human relationships that gave it “a sense of place.” I understood and felt comfortable in that town with its characters—some with a huge sense of decency and selflessness, and others guided by money, fear, or their pasts. Of course, there was also the gossip of the residents that flew faster than the internet. It felt like a familiar place.

For Robert Frost, a sense of place was New England with its birches, snow, pastures, and streams. For William Faulkner, it was the South with its brooding knowledge of the past. John Steinbeck’s sense of place was the California arroyos and Hoovervilles of the Great Depression. For Nathanial Hawthorne, the Salem area with its witches and dark forest provided a setting that resonated with good and evil.

Sometimes I wonder if we have lost—in this amazingly interconnected and digital world—a sense of place. Some might call it a sense of “home.”

The city square in my town

 The mysteries I write are heavily guided by a sense of place. Three different fictional towns—Endurance, Sweet Iron, and soon Apple Grove, are small Illinois towns that have the culture where I grew up and currently live. The stories that resonate remind me of how comforting it is to be surrounded by the familiar. A farmer dies in a farming accident and his neighbors organize to help bring in the crops. Recognized names and places, local politics, and even obituaries of familiar family names form a subconscious framework for my life. The thoughts that appear in my stories are products of seventy-three years in the same area among familiar people, names, and events. It is not the East or West coasts; it is the heartland.

My children grew up in the small town where I still live. They have memories of their neighborhood

A block from my house, this tree-covered street

with back door neighbors, pick-up games of baseball in the yard, walking to and from school, and weekend evenings at the local roller rink. When one of them drove his hot wheels off the neighbor’s porch thinking he was one of the Dukes of Hazzard, all the doors opened, and everyone rushed to see what the noise was after he hit the sidewalk. Another one rode her tricycle down the middle of our busy street to go shopping downtown at age four. A local cab driver brought her back unharmed—fortunately to the next-door neighbor’s house since I would have died of embarrassment at her escape. (It seems I have a lot to live down.) Small towns.

An overview of the town
square, which is really a circle

My newest book, a story set in the small town of Apple Grove is almost done, and it, too, has a small-town atmosphere. A young woman returns to her town after years away in a large city and discovers some of these joys that she had missed. Like her, I spent several winters away in an urban area, shared the freeways with thousands of cars, stood in lines with total strangers, and lived in a neighborhood with people I never saw or met.

Despite the joys of living in the heartland, secrets, the past, and murder still turn up in my mysteries.

A sense of place. Small towns. There is something to be said for that.

Oral Reading Tips for Nervous Nellies by Susan Van Kirk

Author public readings are a staple of book promotion. In a week I’m going to Left Coast Crime in San Diego, and one of the activities I’m doing is a five-minute reading from my latest mystery, A Death at Tippitt Pond.

I’m fortunate. This kind of promotion doesn’t worry me. For the past fifteen years, I’ve judged at the Illinois regional speech tournament since I used to coach speech contestants in high school. Adding to that, I have forty-four years of speech and communications teaching on the high school and college levels. For me, a public reading is a breeze, but I’m aware that it may not be so for other writers. Believe me, I am sympathetic. If you are planning to do a public reading in the future, I have seven tips that will help you prepare and make you less nervous.

1. Find out how much time you have for the reading. If you get to decide the length yourself, remember people’s attention spans. In my case, I have only five minutes. Yikes! That’s the length of a television commercial break. This means I’ll leave a minute for an introduction and four minutes for the reading.

How much can I read in four minutes? I read aloud from my book and timed it on my phone. Four minutes is about two and a third pages, double-spaced. Not much. By the way, don’t try to time by reading it in your head—it’s goes faster than reading aloud. So now you know the length of your reading.

2. Choose an area of your book for your reading. Pick something that will interest your audience. In my own opinion, dialogue is more compelling than description. You want your listeners to want to read your book, so the more dramatic, the better. Pick something that will make your audience think, “I want to know what happens next.” If your reading demonstrates the tone or atmosphere of your book, great! I chose a meeting between a lawyer and my protagonist which contains a huge reveal. High drama!

3. Edit your reading. You don’t have to read it exactly as it’s written. If there is description that isn’t necessary for your audience to enjoy the story, you can cut that. Cut speaker tags, and anything else that isn’t important to the effect of the reading. If your reading is a bit long, editing will also help on your time.

4. Design an introduction. Read your piece and put yourself in the place of your audience. What do they need to know to understand your reading? What happened just before the reading? Who are the speakers? When did this happen? Once you decide what to include, read it aloud and edit for smoothness and time.

5. Re-read your introduction and piece aloud and time it. If it is still too long or is very close to your time limit, consider editing more. You don’t want to be rushed. Re-read it several times, timing it to make sure you are in good shape. If you find a phrase that is a stumbling block, consider changing it for smoothness. This is YOUR book, so you can edit.

6. When you are sure you have the right length, it is time to consider how you will read the words. If you’ve ever read to a child or grandchild, you know they aren’t too interested in a monotone recitation. (That point came home to me when I listened to my son do a great Eeyore for his daughter.) Print out your final copy, double-spaced. I like to make the font larger. Print on one side only. Find places where you want to pause, emphasize, or change your voice. Mark those to remind yourself. I like to use colored pens.

7. Practice. A lot. The best advice I can give you if you are a nervous reader is to know that reading cold. Concentrate on the introduction because that is where you are most likely to be nervous. Know it well. Also, practice looking up occasionally at your pretend audience. Once you get into the reading, your nerves should calm down because you’ve really prepared, and you’ve got this.

Being prepared is most of the battle, so I hope these steps will help you be less nervous and more effective as you’re selling your books. If you’ve done readings for audiences, are there any suggestions you might add?

The Education of a Teacher (Including Dirty Books and Pointed Looks) by Susan Van Kirk

An early teaching picture

In March I’ll be leaving my small town in downstate Illinois to go to the Left Coast Crime conference in San Diego. I’m currently a hybrid author with five books and a novella to my name since 2010. This is not what I had planned for my retirement years, and “planned” is the key word. A planner all my life, I morphed into my current situation through a series of unplanned incidents that led me to this mystery-writing retirement gig.

Life often throws surprises at people who are planners. That would be me. My writing is guided by outlines, and my deadlines are accompanied by check-off lists. Me—the planner. Teaching English full time and raising three kids involved in everything—that really turned me into a planner. Survival mode.

Then I turned fifty.

You know how people sometimes talk about watershed moments in history? Well, that was the watershed moment in my life. Fifty was a liberating age. I did something very unplanned. My last child left home for college, and I decided to try something I’d wanted to do for the last 29 years of living with other people—I spent three summers going to graduate school at the University of Illinois. I know that doesn’t sound like such a big deal, but for me it was the first time I’d been on my own in almost three decades. Just a little scary.

That degree allowed me to teach at the college level, and I left my high school teaching job after thirty-four years. I will always love and feel passionate about the teaching I did at both institutions. After ten years at the local college, another deadline was looming: retirement. Unlike many people who aren’t sure what they’ll do in retirement, I knew. That came about because of a series of unplanned events. Did I mention I am a planner?

First, came Cliffs Notes. After I received my master’s degree, I decided to take it for a ride and see if any book companies would hire me to be a consultant. One answered: a little company begun in Nebraska that wrote Cliffs Notes. I hesitated since I’d spent my career telling my students not to use these; but when the Cliffs Notes folks told me what they would pay me, I was astounded. After all, I was used to a schoolteacher’s salary. This would help me pay for my children’s college fees. I’d be able to use my literary knowledge and research books that I loved. But more importantly, this freelance job taught me to use computer software to collaborate with multiple editors. This would turn out to be a valuable learning experience.  

Second, came a college conversation. One of my students told me I should write a story I had told in an education class about why I found teaching such a passionate job. The story involved my high school teaching, a friend who had died in Viet Nam, and a class reunion. I wasn’t a writer. One day I decided to take his advice and put the story down on paper. After I sent it in to Teacher magazine, I received an email in two days saying they wanted to publish my story. I was dumbfounded.

That’s when the magical, unplanned, craziness began. I heard from people all over the country about how this story had affected their lives. Many were teachers, of course. Others were former students—I’d taught about 4,000 by then—who had heard me read the story on the magazine’s website. It was a humbling experience, but a very exciting one also. I was hooked.

And third, I decided to write a creative nonfiction book about my three decades of teaching. This book would contain fifteen stories about students who had gone through my high school classes. Some of those stories are hard to believe, but all are true. They bring laughter, tears, and surprise, but they describe what really happens in a classroom when you teach teenagers, and many of these stories have a universal quality. One involved a book challenge to a Kurt Vonnegut book, and the letter I received from Vonnegut is framed and hanging in my living room. The title of the book is The Education of a Teacher (Including Dirty Books and Pointed Looks). At the time I didn’t know anything about the publishing business, so I self-published it. Over ten years it’s sold thousands of copies.

And that is why I decided to write mysteries when I retired. I’ve spent ten years now learning about the business of publishing, and I am writing the books I love to read: mysteries. My hidden passion for reading, combined with a learned skill—writing—has led me to the perfect retirement job. And a big bonus: my grandchildren give me words to use in each of my mysteries, and some day they’ll even be old enough to read them.

A Writer's Take on "Little Women" by Susan Van Kirk

[Spoiler Alert: If you’ve never read Little Women and are planning to see the recent movie, you may want to stop reading HERE.]

Over the holiday I saw the new Greta Gerwig version of “Little Women” based on the novel by Louisa May Alcott. Truth be told, I plan to see it again this week because it has mesmerized me with its plotting and viewpoint. The first time I saw it was a delight, but the second time will be a study of how she did it. As both a writer and a viewer, I am intrigued by Director/Writer Gerwig’s choice—to tell the story in a non-linear plot, and to breathe a more modern voice into the lives of the March girls. This movie is unlike any version of the classic you’ve seen or read.

If you haven’t read the novel, here’s a very brief summary. Four sisters in the March family—Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, grow from adolescence to adulthood beginning at the time of the Civil War. Their Concord, Massachusetts house also contains their beloved mother and a housekeeper, but their father is off to the war. This is a financially strapped household, but that doesn’t keep Marmee, their mother, from teaching them about generosity and kindness. They grow to adulthood navigating the social constraints women faced in the mid-1800s.

Alcott’s novel opens with the famous line, “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents” and proceeds in a linear fashion from the mid-1800s to their adult lives. But Gerwig turns this plot decision upside down, beginning the film seven years later when an adult Jo March is speaking with a New York publisher about her writing. She lives in a boarding house in the city and has met Professor Bhaer whom she will eventually marry. She doesn’t know that yet, but we do.

After this appointment, Gerwig crisscrosses back and forth with their younger lives in Concord. Back and forth. Back and forth. The New York Times review said it was as if Gerwig had carefully cut the book apart and put it back together in a different order. Like a book being stitched together—and yes, you see that too in the film—the viewers must pay close attention to the plot and which time period they’re observing. As a writer, this technique intrigued me.

Fiction writers deal all the time with what are called “backstory dumps.” How much of the past does the reader need to know in order to understand the plot and characters? Too much will bore the reader; too little may confuse her. Gerwig uses her back and forth plot to weave together the adult lives of the March girls with their pasts. She has a reason to do this as we’ll see.

Besides meeting Jo March in New York, we also meet a grown-up Amy studying art in Paris. She runs across Laurie, who was the March’s neighbor in Concord. We know she will marry him, but first we must go back in time and watch his earlier love, Jo March, dump him.

Meg March will end up with Laurie’s former tutor and, according to Aunt March, be doomed to a life of poverty. How did that happen when we saw her—in the past—go to a debutante ball and long for the life of beautiful clothing and handsome suitors? The back and forth scenes explain what happened.

Always there is the specter of the death of Beth March, the quiet, musical daughter, and that hangs over the scenes of the past like a dark cloud. We also see Jo’s desperate attempt to save her, and how Beth's death affects the family into the future. Time and memory is a complicated thing, isn’t it?

All these relationships play out in a world of gender, class, and time. This is beautifully displayed in the second literary technique I admired in Gerwig’s choices. As the publisher tells Jo, he can’t produce her book unless her heroine dies or marries—both of which seem to be weighed equally for women. Throughout the non-linear retelling, the question of a woman’s freedom, independence, and frustration with social constraints appears in many of the scenes. By using a nonlinear plot, Gerwig makes these points so clearly, and they resonate with the many decisions women must make for their lives today. This gives the movie a modern feel.

We already know the fate of each March girl, but by sewing the plot together with past and future intermingled, we see the “why.” We can sit back and consider how each of them responded to her place in a time when marriage was deemed an “economic necessity” for women, and a woman becoming an author was seemingly impossible.

Gerwig has used her decisions about plot and voice to delight us with the “becoming” of the four March sisters. Even the end of her movie is not an ending Alcott could have used—nor did she—but I believe she would have loved it.

Have you seen this movie, and, if so, what did you think?

Fire Hydrants and Street Signs by Susan Van Kirk

Each time I begin a new mystery about a small, Midwest town, I notice once again the quirks and benefits of my own town. Some of these episodes I use in my books just as they happened, and others I embellish. I have lived in a one million+ city so I’m not immune to the charms or drawbacks of large places. All the same, I love living in my small Midwest town, and, frankly, it provides great fodder for the settings of both my Endurance and Sweet Iron mysteries.

Just recently, I was daydreaming at the stoplight on my way to the bank. Several cars were behind me, and I don’t know how long I sat there oblivious to the light. Eventually, I looked up, saw the green light, and drove into the intersection. Ordinary, you say. So what? You think. If I were in a metropolitan area, I’d have at least six people honk their horns to move me along. Several would literally lay on their horns. But here in my little town, not a horn, not a road rage incident, and not a single person yelling out the window or making an obscene gesture. This is a great snippet of information for the book I’m working on where people from a more cosmopolitan area visit my little town. Its lack of speed will drive them crazy. Tee hee.

At the time I was daydreaming, I was on my way to the bank because I needed to get ten crisp one-dollar bills to put in my grandchildren’s Halloween cards. [Thank God they are still young enough to

Photo by Jen Theodore at Unsplash.com

get excited about a dollar bill; in the future this will bankrupt me.] I pulled up to the teller window and recognized all three tellers. When I told them what I needed, I saw a mad scramble to get me just the right bills—no teenage wadded-up bills, no bills with holes, rips, or tears. I watched as they searched every nook and cranny. As they collected the bills, I noticed the doggie treats and lollipops on the counter to give to customers with little passengers. Small towns. Gotta love them. These tellers know I write mysteries and understand that I have grandchildren, including two sets of twins. They are so helpful. Mission accomplished.

In Three May Keep a Secret, I used a situation in my town and exaggerated it a bit. An intersection in our town, just off the Square, was a through street with stop signs on the east/west streets. People driving north and south went straight through. East/west had to stop. It has been this way for decades. The town fathers—what were they thinking?—decided to change the intersection to a four-way stop. They put stop signs in the middle of the north/south street between lanes so people would notice them.

As Jill in my book said, “Drivers knocked over and splintered three sets of signs. Obviously, the four-way stop wasn’t working. So then they voted to put a sign in the middle of the intersection saying, “Stop if pedestrians are in the walkway.” This resulted in people slowing down to read the sign and getting rear-ended. [This part is a true story.]

As Jill continued, “Great day for Bert’s Collision Shop. And one of the casualties was Mayor Blandford’s wife, Polly. She was arrested for causing a public disturbance because she got out of her car and marched back to Genevieve Blackburn, who was talking on her cell phone when she rear-ended Polly’s car. McGuire [the policeman] had to pull the two away from each other, and Polly took a swing at him too.” [Well, so I exaggerated a bit.]

Right now I’m looking out my front window at the fire hydrant in my yard. For years I asked the fire department to paint it because it was an eyesore. They were “too busy.” I decided to buy the red paint and do it myself. I think there must be a story in this little incident. I’m working on it…

The Intersection of History and Fiction by Susan Van Kirk

My most recent book, A Death at Tippitt Pond, begins a series of mysteries using more history than I added previously in my Endurance mysteries. For several weeks now, I’ve been researching how people lived in small prairie towns in the Midwest during the 1850s. My protagonist, Beth Russell, lives in the present day. She is a historical researcher and genealogist, but because she is now researching her family history in Book #2, I must go back to the past.

My plan for the second book in the series is to investigate the life of her 4^th great-grandfather, William Webster (nickname Webb) Tippitt. He built the Queen Anne Tudor Beth now lives in, and he was the owner/editor of the Sweet Iron Sentinel. What few people knew back then was that he was also building a tunnel to hide runaway slaves during the harrowing period after the Fugitive Slave Law was enacted.

On the wall of Old Main, Knox College

To give you a brief glimpse of the intersection of history and fiction, I’ll explain a couple of ideas I have in mind. They may, or may not, end up in the final book. The Lincoln-Douglas debate occurred in my hometown of Galesburg, Illinois, only twelve miles from where I’m typing. October 9, 1858 is the date, and the site—Old Main at Knox College—is the only building left standing from the group of debates that would decide the senator from Illinois. Lincoln lost, but he gained so much interest that he would run and win the Presidency two years later.

I am considering whether Webb Tippitt will take his teenage daughter, Abigail, to the debate. Since the 1850s plot will concern the conflict among abolitionists, anti-slavery believers, and Southern sympathizers in the small town, it might be a good spot for Webb to explain some of those political leanings to his daughter. Don’t get me wrong: this novel will have a mystery in the 1850s, and it will parallel a mystery in the 21^st century with Beth Russell. However, I will thread history through it as a context for the mystery. I must simply be careful to concentrate on the mysteries and keep the history in the background.

A second thought about my research concerns a character I already have in mind—a Presbyterian minister. Many of the prairie towns in the northern end of Illinois were begun by Northerners from the East Coast who desired to create Christian towns with religious colleges that would educate new ministers. Both Knox College and Monmouth College were established by such people. I was curious about how to create this minister, and what he might think. So, I accidently discovered that Hewes Library, on the Monmouth campus, contains all the minutes from the Presbyterian Church’s Assembly, a meeting once each year of all the synod representatives from the entire country.

I can hear you now. “Seriously, she thinks that sounds exciting?” I simply wanted to check out the minutes from 1860-1865 and see what happened in my character’s church during the pre-war and war years. The divide between North and South is evident since the representatives all debated whether secession was a moral, religious, or political issue in 1860. The Northern synods believed secession to be disloyal to the federal government and against the laws of the Bible, but the Southerners felt it was strictly a political issue. After 1860, the Southern synods were all absent, and this schism ripped the church apart. During the war years while the South was absent, the minutes became more strident with discussions of the immorality of slavery. I plan to have my fictional Presbyterian minister either go to a national assembly or receive information from that meeting.

These are only two issues I’ve been thinking about as I research. This should give you some idea of the multitude of research topics authors go through when they include other periods of time in their books. My present-day plot will involve a mystery as will the plot in the 1850s. Beth will discover a lifetime of information about her fourth great-grandfather. I’m hoping to continue this pattern in the third book as I check out the life of Abigail’s daughter, Emma, in the late 1800s.

The Agony of Book Titles by Susan Van Kirk

It is easier for me to write an entire mystery than to come up with an amazing title. Seriously, I find it agony to create titles. I think about a title for weeks while I’m doing other things, and often my subconscious will nail it while I’m asleep. That must mean I’m trying too hard during my conscious hours, right?

My newest book, A Death at Tippitt Pond, is a prime example. When I sent the pre-publication manuscript to a book contest that sent me three judges’ comments, I received two positive comments on the title and one negative. I still decided to use it (Sorry, third judge.) But look at this photo of the paper where I determined the title, and you’ll see how many possibilities I thought about before I circled one.

I’ve decided to go by some guidelines for writing my book titles. Here they are.

First, the title must support the book’s genre. If it’s a cozy, I don’t want the same kind of title as a thriller or a historical fiction novel. Second, it should reflect the tone of my book. Third, it might hint at my theme. Fourth, it should have a word or phrase I can repeat while writing a series. Fifth, it might have a recurring character’s name. Sixth, it could be a phrase I use at a crucial time in the plot. Seventh, it could contain random words connected to the book that I’ve moved around in various patterns (again, see photo). Eighth, if all else fails, I’ll sleep on it and let my subconscious sort it out.

I decided on A Death at Tippitt Pond because it is a combination of cozy-bordering-on-traditional mystery. So it isn’t as “cozy” as a cozy with animals or recipes. The Tippitt family who owns this pond is going to be a force throughout the series. Adding that to the title will help down the road. I also liked the title because I could repeat it in advertising. The plot of this book proves that “a death at Tippitt Pond changed everything.” Big time. In a way, that points to a theme of the book: decisions made by people throughout history change outcomes dramatically. My main character is a historical researcher. I also have room to grow. Combining the word “death” or “Tippitt” with other phrases will yield titles for books that will help brand the series.

I’ve learned a lot. I originally titled my first Endurance mystery, “A Silent Place to Die.” Seriously? Now I am embarrassed. It was a cozy. Does that sound cozy? I had a terrible time coming up with a more relevant title. Then I remembered that my protagonist, Grace Kimball, was a retired English teacher. She would have taught pieces of Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac. Bingo! I began using phrases from that book for the whole series. “Three May Keep a Secret (if two of them are dead), “Marry in Haste (repent at leisure), and “Death Takes No Bribes.” The e-book novella about my Endurance detective does not follow Ben Franklin’s proverbs, but then the protagonist isn’t Grace Kimball either.

I would like to think I’ve become better at framing titles. How about you? Do you have any advice to add about creating titles?