Did She Fall or Was She Pushed? By Jeannette de Beauvior

I’ve always liked bleak stories, and the lyrics to Linda and Richard Thompson’s Did She Jump or Was She Pushed have been playing in the back of my mind lately. Provincetown—where I live, and where my current mystery series takes place—is gearing up for the 400^th anniversary of the arrival of the Mayflower and the signing of the Compact in our harbor, and I’m contemplating a very real mystery that accompanies the story.

Of course, I’m always poking around history for stories. Nearly every mystery I write has some sort of historical component, because I’m fascinated with the idea of secrets. We all keep them: individuals, communities, groups, countries. And once in a while, the fear of having them revealed can lead to murder.

History and place are tightly connected. I suppose I could make up a place and make up a history to go with it, but why go to all that effort? The truth is, many if not most places have secrets, have something dark in their pasts, have events and situations that could very well make for a modern-day mystery. Once in a while I stop myself and acknowledge, You can’t make this stuff up. If I tried, it wouldn’t be nearly as good.

Take the first book in my series about Martine LeDuc, PR director for Montréal, in which four women have been murdered. Martine discovers they were all looking into the city’s past, when orphans were transferred to a psychiatric hospital and made the subjects of medical experimentation in collusion with the CIA’s MK-Ultra program. All the murdered women have a connection to these historic situations, and were killed to keep someone else’s role from becoming public. Martine finds herself standing between the killer and his getting away with it all, and—as any mystery reader knows—that’s not a good place to be.

You can’t make this stuff up. MK-Ultra even has a Wikipedia page, for heaven’s sake, but no-one seems to know about it.

And then there’s Sydney Riley, the protagonist in my current series. She’s the wedding planner for an inn here in Provincetown, but she has a nasty habit of finding whatever dead bodies happen to show up in this tourist destination. The most recent book in the series, A Fatal Folly, draws on the sinking of the very real pirate ship Whydah off Cape Cod—and who wouldn’t kill for pirate treasure?

Which brings us to 2020 and the question: did she fall or was she pushed? Most kids learn about the Mayflower in school, but what they don’t learn about is the absolute danger and misery of the crossing. It took 66 days from September to November—the worst weather imaginable, with storms and high seas; everyone was seasick; going up on deck was a dangerous respite from the crowded conditions below (the Mayflower had taken on the passengers from the leaking Speedwell and so was significantly overcrowded). All in all, a beastly time was had by all.

We know about the Mayflower voyage and the first few weeks in the New World from the diary of one William Bradford, who later became the first governor of Massachusetts and who came across with his wife, Dorothy May, who apparently was able to survive the wintry Atlantic crossing perfectly well. The ship anchored in Provincetown Harbor, the men went off to explore the area, and Dorothy slipped off the deck and drowned.

Really? She survived the storms, the sleet, the waves, and once the ship was at anchor in one of the world’s most protected harbors, she slipped and drowned? Is anyone here thinking? And then sometime in the 1800s a novelist got hold of the story and posited suicide as the real cause of her death. Again, really?

Unfortunately, there’s no way to know what actually happened. I’ve tried, and primary-source documents are few—and mostly biased. I probably won’t write about it, because when I incorporate history into my novels I want it to be as accurate as possible, but honestly… did she fall or was she pushed?

And to me, this is the place where being a mystery novelist and being a human being come together. Not many people outside of Montréal knew of the Duplessis Orphans, or of WW2’s Operation Fish; I told their story. Not many people outside of Provincetown knew of the Whydah, or the Portuguese fishermen and their losses, or of the AIDS deaths here; I tell their stories. History is as alive as we keep it, and there are so many voices that deserve to be heard. And if we can weave it all into a captivating mystery… so much the better!

Award-winning author Jeannette de Beauvoir writes mystery and historical fiction (or a combination thereof!) that’s been translated into 12 languages. A Booksense Book-of-the-Year finalist, she’s a member of the Authors Guild, the Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, and the National Writers Union.

All her novels are firmly rooted in a sense of place, and her delight is to find characters true to the spaces in which they live. She herself lives and writes in a cottage in Provincetown, on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and loves the collection of people who assemble at a place like land’s end.

The Sydney Riley Provincetown mystery series is in its fifth installment on with the release of A Fatal Folly in November. The next book in the series, The Matinée Murders, will be coming out in June 2020.

She also teaches writing courses both online and onsite.

Find out more—and read her blog—at her website. You can also find her on Facebook, Instagram, Patreon, Amazon, and Goodreads.

When History and Mystery Combine by Jeannette de Beauvoir

For a long time, I wrote historical fiction. I did it mostly because much of my academic background is in history, but partly, it has to be said, because of an inherent laziness—after all, with history, the plot’s already written! And I continue to feel that there are wonderful deep mysterious stories out there, just waiting to be mined for entertaining and interesting fiction.

I think also that having grown up in France, my sense of the presence of deep roots forever tugging at our feet is more pronounced than it is for most Americans. The castle in my hometown was completed in the 13^th century, and I used to go there to write incredibly bad angst-ridden poetry, connecting in my adolescent imagination with the people I imagined walking the courtyard and ramparts centuries before me.

So it’s not surprising that when I turned to the mystery genre, I’d look to history for inspiration. I’ve always been intrigued by how the past never really lets go: whether a secret has been buried in a family, a city, an organization, or a continent, it’s probable that it will always return—usually at the most inopportune time—to haunt us.

And that intersection of past and present offers a rich opportunity for exploration of a whole number of themes…of which murder and mayhem are obvious frontrunners.

My first solo mystery, Murder Most Academic (writing as Alicia Stone for Mainly Murder Press), stayed pretty much in the present; but I was delighted to find an opportunity to explore what might happen if parts of a city’s not-too-distant past were to return to upset the workings of the modern world, which I do in Asylum, out this month from St. Martin’s/Minotaur.

So what secret was coming back to haunt modern-day Montréal?

Beginning in the 1940s, under Québec Premier Maurice Duplessis and continuing into the 1960s, a scheme was developed to obtain additional federal funding for thousands of children, most of whom were “orphaned” through forced separation from their unwed mothers. The federal government offered more monetary support for asylums than it did for orphanages, so children were shipped from orphanages to insane asylums, where they were, to put it mildly, treated very badly.

Eventually the surviving “Duplessis orphans” received some compensation from the government, though it was very much a case of too little, too late. But what, I wondered, if there were even more to the story than that? And so I dug a little deeper and found that, at the same time, other disturbing events were happening. Project MK-Ultra, a CIA mind-control research program attempting to produce a perfect truth drug, was headquartered at the Allan Institute in Montréal. The connections that could be made are obvious, and I made several of them as I developed the idea of some of these events coming back to haunt people in the present—and driving them to kill.

Martine will be back next year with another bit of the past that’s interfering in the present, and I’m delighted about having found some ready-made exciting stories to incorporate into my work.

The intersection of history and mystery is a perfect place to write. It’s my hope that it will be a perfect place for readers, as well, as they discover new characters, interesting storylines, and—of course!—a painless history lesson.

Jeannette de Beauvoir is an award-winning novelist, poet, and playwright, whose work has appeared in 15 countries and has been translated into 12 languages. She grew up in Angers, France, and now makes her home on Cape Cod. Read more about her at www.jeannetteauthor.com.