by Charles Finch

Historical fiction author Charles Finch knows firsthand the challenges of making sure his modern perspective doesn’t color the viewpoints of his historical characters. Finch shares with The History Reader how Charles Lenox, the sleuth in his mystery series and new book, The Hidden City, experiences working out in a gymnasium—an activity common in today’s world that was brand new in Victorian London.

 

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One unique thing about writing characters in historical fiction: they don’t know they’re from a long time ago. That sounds simple, but it can be hard to remember. The Victorians, the people I write about, didn’t know that huge crinolines would seem funny, a hundred fifty years later, or that gaslight and horse-drawn cabs would seem romantic and old-fashioned. The railroad and the telegram weren’t quaint old technologies to them but the newest thing in the world, equal parts thrilling and terrifying. It was all happening right that minute.

The balance between their perspective and ours can be hard to strike. I always try to err on the side of theirs.

In my newest Charles Lenox novel, for instance, The Hidden City, I wanted to show the book’s lead character, an upper-class amateur detective, participating in one of the fads that swept the city in the 1870s and 1880s. It was a newfangled innovation called the gymnasium.

We take exercise for granted, and of course, there has never been a generation of human beings born that didn’t know, whether intuitively or scientifically, that exercise changes the body for the better. But its formal history is fairly recent. In the 1820s and 1830s, British educators began to promote the idea of gymnastics for youth and members of the military to increase strength and flexibility. Then, in 1865 (fifteen years before the action of The Hidden City), a continental entrepreneur opened the “German Gymnasium” in King’s Cross, the first institution of its kind in Britain. It caught on immediately, and indeed, in 1866, it hosted the Wenlock Olympian Games, a precursor to the modern Olympics so significant that one of the two mascots of the 2012 Olympics in London was named “Wenlock.”

But the German Gymnasium isn’t where Lenox goes. I had a tonier destination in mind for him, and it was not much later that a Swedish system pioneered by Jonas Gustav Wilhelm Zander (“the Zander System”) caught on like wildfire among the upper class. It involved the first example of what we would now recognize as exercise machines—complex wooden objects, quaintly old-fashioned to our modern eyes but wonderfully novel to theirs, made of pulleys and weights, in a communal setting. The “gymnastiksal” had been born.

In all the books of the Lenox series, the main character is part of fashionable London, and it was important to me that his particular gym reflect his place in society. It has broad windows, a piste for fencing, a massage room, fancy up-to-date concoctions of cucumber water and lemon juice in the lounge, and, of course, an area for boxing, that most immensely popular sport across every class at the time, from the lowest gin mill on the East End to the halls of Eton and Harrow, all competing under rules designed by the Marquess of Queensberry.

The social element of the gymnastiksal is important in the book. It is here that Lenox meets an antagonist, a newspaper baron, and here as well that he has a swift encounter that eventually leads him to a solution of the book’s murder, the death of a crooked apothecary.

In other words, I wanted to present the gym not as a cute detail of Victorian life but as the same thing it is now, a place of exercise, gossip, and of course, annoyingly fit people. I wanted to see it both with the irony of we future-dwellers and the enthusiasm of its contemporaries. We can never fully recover what it would have felt like to be a Londoner in 1881, of course. But by studying the trends, the innovations of the time, we can glimpse the secrets, the pleasures, the mysteries of daily life in that hidden city.

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Charles Finch is a novelist and literary critic, author of the beloved Charles Lenox mysteries, following one of the earliest private detectives in Victorian London. The books have appeared multiple times on the USA Today bestseller list. He has written numerous essays, articles, and reviews for The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, Slate, New York, and The Guardian, and was honored with the 2017 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing by the National Book Critics Circle. He subsequently served on the NBCC’s board, and has also been a board member of the arts colony Ragdale and was one of three judges for the 2021 Pen-Faulkner Prize. He lives in Los Angeles with his family.

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Suspense author Sharon Short shares the rich history behind Middle Island, the real-life location that inspired her new novel, Trouble Island.

Years ago, I accompanied one of my daughters on her fifth-grade trip to Middle Bass Island, just off the shore of Ohio in Lake Erie. The class was visiting The Ohio State University’s Stone Laboratory, the oldest freshwater biological field station in the United States. I remember gazing across the sparkling water of the lake, and another chaperon commented that the dot of land on the horizon had once been home to a bootlegging gangster, who owned a luxurious mansion shrouded in secrecy. I was intrigued by this tidbit but before I could ponder it further, chaperoning duties required me to shift focus back to the kids.

But the notion of a Lake Erie island complete with a mysterious mansion as a staging spot for bootlegging stuck with me.

Time passed and eventually I turned my attention to researching the island to see if there was any merit to the anecdote my fellow chaperone had shared.

And, oh my, did it turn out that yes, there certainly was.

Lake Erie contains an archipelago of numerous islands, some uninhabited tiny dots, and others popular tourist locations in warmer months, such as Middle Bass and Kelley’s Island, both part of Ohio.

The mysterious island I’d gazed upon from the shore of Middle Bass Island is known simply as Middle Island (the names are easy to confuse), its 46 acres the southernmost land mass in Canada.

Various people have owned parts of Middle Island over the years, the most notorious of whom was Toledo, Ohio, bootlegging gangster Joe Roscoe, identified as the “gambling king” of Toledo by none other than FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.  He owned part of the island and built a resort, with a lavish basement casino, on the grounds. The cover story was that Roscoe’s establishment was just for , and indeed that area of the lake was renowned for its good fishing opportunities.

But the location provided another opportunity: rum-running. (Though the alcohol in question was actually whisky, the rum-running term was applied anyway.) The island was ideally suited for this purpose. In Canada, Prohibition was on a province-by-province basis, ending in Ontario province last in 1927, while in the U.S., it was a nationwide mandate lasting until Dec. 1933. And the lake borders numerous U.S. ports.

What’s more, the resort gave Roscoe a lure to reel in politicians, police officers, judges, and other public officials. Once they’d enjoyed gambling, drinking, and sex with female sex workers, Roscoe essentially had them in his pocket.

His fellow gangsters (when at peace with him) also visited, including Al Capone and Alvin “Creepy” Karpis. (Allegedly, Karpis hired his doctor to remove his fingerprints; when the doctor made a veiled blackmail threat, Karpis took him fishing—and eventually the doctor washed up on an Ontario beach.)

With his superior speedboats and connections on the take, Roscoe eluded capture for years, until he hid Karpis in his Toledo apartment, and the apartment was raided by police.

But the island also has a fascinating history that precedes Roscoe. Evidence suggests that indigenous peoples once occupied the island between 500 BC-1500 AD. Escapees from slavery—and both sides of the Civil War—once used the island as a stopover as they fled to Canada. Abandoned on the northeast shore of the island is a lighthouse, built in the 1870s and functional until 1918, to guide shipping boats in the often treacherous waters of Lake Erie.

After Roscoe’s “fishing club” was shut down, a few other occupants of the island continued to live there. Eventually the mansion was abandoned, and in the late 1990s, vandals burned down what remained of the building. In 1999 the Nature Conservancy of Canada purchased the island and turned it over to Parks Canada. The island is part of Point Pelee National Park but is not open to visitors. It’s now a nature preserve, a home to double-breasted cormorants, great egrets, herons, Blue Ash trees, Lake Erie watersnakes, monarch butterflies, and many other species of plants and animals.

In my re-imagining of Middle Island to Trouble Island, I preserve the island’s history and nature, though I’ve amended the mansion and a few other details to fit my story.

Since I could not go to Middle Island itself, I went on a research trip to Middle Bass Island to read many resources in that island’s library, and hike the island’s nature trails. I often paused in my research to again gaze across the sparkling Lake Erie waters at Middle Island and imagine the fraught lives of gangsters on the island, while at the same time contemplating the island as fully returned to nature—a fitting and poignant finale to the island’s story.

SHARON SHORT is the author of fifteen published books. Her newest, Trouble Island, is historical suspense inspired by bootlegging and family history. Sharon is a contributing editor to Writer’s Digest, for which she writes the column, “Level Up Your Writing (Life)” and teaches for Writer’s Digest University. She is also a three-time recipient of the Individual Excellence Award in Literary Arts from Ohio Arts Council and has been a John E. Nance Writer in Residence at Thurber House (Columbus, Ohio). Sharon currently serves as President of the Midwest Chapter of Mystery Writers of America. As Jess Montgomery, she writes the historical Kinship Mysteries set in the 1920s and inspired by Ohio’s true first female sheriff. When not writing, Sharon enjoys spending time with family and friends, reading, swimming, and occasionally hiking.

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When I first learned about Hochland Home, the setting for The Sunflower House, it seemed like the stuff of dystopian science fiction. Few people knew about this state-run baby factory, created to perpetuate Hitler’s so-called Master Race. In retrospect, that isn’t surprising—Heinrich Himmler ordered all records destroyed during the last days of WWII. The majority were, but enough remained to piece together the truth. And the more I researched, the more horrified I became.

For Heinrich Himmler, facilities like Hochland Home were a solution to a troubling problem. Germany’s birth rate had been in decline for years, and he needed to ensure the Thousand-Year Reich. Lebensborn (literally: ‘fount of life’) was Himmler’s answer—a ruthless eugenics effort to increase the number of healthy ‘racially pure’ Aryans.

Early accounts claim that Lebensborn facilities like Hochland Home began as residences for unwed mothers. They were places where girls could have their babies in peace and privacy before relinquishing the infants to ‘good’ families who would indoctrinate them in Nazi ideology.

While that simple description was enough to make me queasy, I soon learned something even more disturbing was happening. Despite Germany’s conservative cultural norms, many young women were more than willing—dedicated, in fact, to producing children for their Führer. There were accounts of young women bearing multiple children in rapid succession with different fathers. Keep in mind that each girl needed a doctor’s recommendation to be considered—and then submitted to a brutal intake process to prove her Aryan heritage. As many as half of the applicants were turned away.
This intense level of enthusiasm can be traced, at least in part, to indoctrination in the BDM (Bund Deutscher Mädel) or League of German Girls, the only legal female youth organization in Nazi Germany. Youth group leaders taught young girls that there was, quite simply, a shortage of men. While each girl couldn’t be guaranteed a husband, she could still become a mother for her Führer through ‘biological marriages’ with appropriate, racially pure partners. It was every woman’s sacred duty to bear as many children as possible for the good of the state. Sex became sport with a sacred purpose.

I’ve always seen Hochland Home, and other homes like it, as a study in contradiction and hypocrisy. Expecting mothers received the best food and medical care available. They took character-training classes that molded them into the German feminine ideal. Yet these women were nothing more than brood mares valued for their wombs. Their thoughts and feelings were of little consequence; only obedience was necessary.

The fate of many of the children born in these homes was heartbreaking. In public, infants were celebrated at Naming Ceremonies officiated by SS officers. In private, many children suffered from neglect. They were treated like inventory and didn’t bond with their birth mothers. Without enough nursing staff to tend them, as many as forty percent failed to thrive or were developmentally delayed.

Some families refused to pay for funeral expenses after the children they adopted died. Others complained when they never received their promised children. We also know that some children who failed to thrive were sent away to other facilities—and according to one doctor’s report, kept alive on morphine. This wasn’t done to mitigate the children’s pain, however; it was only so the doctor could assure Himmler he’d done everything possible to extend their lives.

Eventually, on Himmler’s direct authority, the program approved “the systematic elimination of all the abnormal children, who according to the principles of selective eugenic reproduction, should never have been born.”

As many as 25,000 children were born in Lebensborn facilities like Hochland Home in Germany and other countries across Europe. Many of the children who survived were unaware of their origins. But for those who were, and particularly those labeled ‘children of shame’ by classmates and neighbors, a disproportionate number suffered from mental health issues.

The Lebensborn program took everything that was sacred about motherhood and despoiled it. This should also come as no surprise. Nazi ideology is rotten to the core and damages everything and everyone it touches. But it’s the thought of all of those children—born innocent into this world—that haunts me.

Adriana Allegri is a first-generation American whose parents lived in Europe before, during, and after World War II. She grew up on stories about how small acts of compassion saved lives. A former high school teacher and educational program administrator, Allegri also served as a writer/project manager for a leading data analytics company. Allegri spent fifteen years in the New York metro area but is happily relocated in Chandler, Arizona with her two ornery rescue cats. The Sunflower House is her first novel.

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by Ronald H. Balson

by Ronald H. Balson

A Place to Hide is my ninth novel and the seventh set during World War II.  As it frequently happens, research in support of one novel uncovers suggestions for a new and different novel. Thus, research on Denmark in preparation for Defending Britta Stein introduced me to factual scenarios unique to the Netherlands.  Although these two countries were neighbors and historically neutral, their experiences during World War II could not have been more dissimilar. Or more tragic. Whether we analyze Holland’s experience from a global perspective or from the individual’s point of view, the term “contrasts” keeps coming to mind. It was a time and place where pure heroism arose from the most unexpected and unlikely sources. 

When one thinks of Holland, one visualizes tulips, windmills, and bridges spanning busy canals. It was and is a lovely country, and a society adjusted to a pleasant way of life. In writing this book, I created characters designed to bring the reader into this grand setting. Through the characters’ eyes, we view the actual historical facts as they occurred. A Place to Hide introduces us to two fictional Americans: Theodore “Teddy” Hartigan and Julia Powers. In the story, they work as officials at the U.S. consulate in Amsterdam.  A dream job, yet it is 1937 and the world is about to change.

Though they were only separated by a border, just a line drawn on a map, Holland and Germany could not have been more different in the 1930s. Holland was a land of conviviality, mirroring the disposition of its Queen Wilhelmina. Germany was a stern and militaristic state, mirroring the demeanor of its Führer. They were neighbors with very little in common. In the Third Reich, an edict was issued, and it was followed without question. On Berlin’s boulevards, helmeted soldiers marched with their hands held high in Nazi salutes. 

Consider Holland to the west: Men rode bicycles to work and stopped in one of the many plazas for a Heineken on the way home. Frivolity abounded in the many cafes, not to mention in De Wallen, Amsterdam’s noted red-light district. The Netherlands was a tolerant society with diverse religions. One hundred and fifty thousand Jews and numerous synagogues gave Amsterdam the moniker “Jerusalem of the North.” This was in stark contrast to Nazi Germany’s ruthless persecution of those considered “Juden” and its intent to free Germany of all Jews. 

As the 1930s draw to a close, both Teddy and Julia are promoted at the consulate, manage to find love interests in the city, and are comfortable in the land of the windmills. But the close of the decade also saw Germany launch World War II with unprovoked attacks on neighboring countries. People in the Netherlands did not feel threatened because they were neutral in the last war and intended to remain neutral. They pointed to a peace treaty with Germany confirming that neutrality. Yet, in 1940, Germany ignored the treaty and, without any warning, ruthlessly attacked the Netherlands. They quickly overran the country and installed a wicked dictator to enforce Hitler’s murderous edicts.

During the occupation, the term “contrasts” clearly applied. Holland’s Jews were maltreated and terrorized, but, the non-Jewish majority deemed themselves powerless to interfere and collectively turned their heads. They concluded it was happening to someone else, and they shut their eyes. After all, they thought, it really didn’t affect them personally, and they had to protect their families.

In divine contrast, certain individuals rose above the crowd and deemed it unacceptable to stay silent. They chose to make a difference, no matter what the cost. Through Julia and Teddy, we are introduced to Henriëtte Pimentel, dean of the nursery school called the Creche. She shuttled hundreds of Jewish babies out the back door and into the neighboring college to be given to new parents, people who were willing to adopt one, or maybe two. We meet Walter Süskind, the manager of the Theater, where captive Jews were held until the train took them to the camp. Walter made sure that names were mysteriously erased from the passenger list. Alice Cohn forged hundreds of identity cards, skillfully omitting the black “J.” The Utrecht Rescue Squad found homes for those needing to hide. And on and on. In that way, tens of thousands were rescued, and their lives were saved. 

A Place to Hide examines how, despite the direst of circumstances, the goodness of man prevails.

Ronald H. Balson is an attorney, professor, and writer. His novel The Girl From Berlin won the National Jewish Book Award and was the Illinois Reading Council’s adult fiction selection for their Illinois Reads program. He is also the author of Defending Britta Stein, Eli’s Promise, Karolina’s Twins, The Trust, Saving Sophie, and the international bestseller Once We Were Brothers. He has appeared on many television and radio programs and has lectured nationally and internationally on his writing. He lives in Chicago.

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When we think about the World War II years, we tend to visualize a time when all Americans were united, pulling together and sacrificing as one to defeat fascism. From Casablanca to Saving Private Ryan, this heroic myth is strong and enduring. But that’s nostalgia talking. The truth is far trickier.

Even at a time of war bonds and patriotic rallies and rationing, not every American opposed Hitler. Many people thought he had some pretty good ideas. An alarming amount of Americans embraced the anti-Semitic, Nazi worldview, and those long-buried roots are still bearing bitter fruit today.

My new novel, The Rumor Game, is set in Boston in 1943. One character, Anne Lemiere, is an antifascist activist and journalist whose weekly column disproves harmful war rumors, much of it German propaganda. The other protagonist, FBI agent Devon Mulvey, is tasked with ensuring that saboteurs don’t interfere with local war industries or ports. Researching this time period brought me many surprises, including how many Americans wanted to undermine the war effort.

For years as Europe burned, many Americans had been strong isolationists. Radio personalities like Father Charles Coughlin (the conservative media voice of his time), famous figures like Charles Lindbergh, several US Senators and Congressmen, and future president John F. Kennedy’s father (then the ambassador to London) opposed any effort to involve the country in Europe’s troubles. Many Americans openly supported Hitler, like members of the German American Bund, which held huge rallies in Madison Square Garden and elsewhere. German agents in the U.S. provided funding and talking points to many pro-Nazi groups, finding agreeable soil in which they planted their fascist seeds.

Then Pearl Harbor happened. Within days, we were officially at war with both Japan and Germany, and it became illegal to support the Nazis. Father Coughlin’s newspaper was banned from the mail (people could still distribute it by hand, though). German agents were either arrested or forced out of the country, but all those Americans who had agreed with them didn’t suddenly disappear. They just got a little quieter.

Less quiet than you’d think.

Some of the villains in my novel belong to a group called the Christian Legion. That’s a fictional organization, but it’s based on several pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic groups that still existed in the United States even after we entered World War II. One in particular, the Christian Front, had been founded in the 1930s by politically active clerics and laypeople who were outraged by the Russian Revolution and by leftist Republicans’ violence against the Catholic Church in the Spanish Civil War. In their eyes, Church-hating Communists and Socialists were the real enemy—and they conflated leftists in their minds with Jews. America’s Christian Front supported Spain’s future dictator Francisco Franco during that war, and it echoed Hitler’s opposition to Communists and his persecution of Jews during the lead-up to Pearl Harbor—and even after.

I was born and raised an hour from Boston, and I lived in the city for a few years after college; Boston has a big piece of my heart, so it brings me no joy to report that it was home to much anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi activity during World War II. Much of the city’s large Irish population was predisposed to viewing our English allies with suspicion or even hatred, and its Catholic population was susceptible to the Front’s focus on leftist (and Jewish) enemies of the Church. Both of these biases were exploited by Axis propaganda.

The Christian Front was particularly active in Boston, distributing anti-Semitic hate sheets and hosting several rallies that turned violent. During the war years, in neighborhoods like Dorchester, attacks on Jews became commonplace. Gangs of Irish teens and young men would attack anyone from Jewish kids to old men. In some neighborhoods, it was as if Europe’s war was being fought right here in the streets.

Most city newspapers ignored the story, hesitant to criticize their majority-Irish readers. City police also looked the other way—and sometimes even participated in the violence. It all contributed to a hostile atmosphere so very different from the unified, patriotic visions we have of that time.

And it sounds alarmingly similar to our own time, as right-wing trolls and militias around the world breathe new life into old hatreds. Today we’re faced with deep societal divisions, rampant disinformation that exploits old biases, rising anti-Semitism, and a lack of faith in democracy. Surveys suggest a terrifyingly high percentage of Americans agree that political violence is sometimes acceptable.

I hope The Rumor Game sweeps readers away to a different time and place. But I also hope it helps them contextualize how we got to where we are today, how we once overcame a similar evil, and what it takes to imagine a better future.

Thomas Mullen is the internationally bestselling author of eight novels, including Darktown, an NPR Best Book, which was shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Southern Book Prize, the Indies Choice Book Award, and was nominated for or won prizes in France, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. The follow-up, Lightning Men, was named one of the Top Ten Crime Novels of 2017 by The New York Times and was shortlisted for a CWA Dagger Award. His debut, The Last Town on Earth, was named Best Debut Novel of 2006 by USA Today and was awarded the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for excellence in historical fiction.

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Long before Sotheby’s or Christie’s opened their New York offices, New Yorkers could view art and objects up for auction at the American Art Galleries, run by the American Art Association. Founded in 1883, the gallery was located at 6 East 23rd Street and was the first auction house in the United States. If the Association’s press is to be believed, it managed the “highly important collections of Art and Literary Property” of the Gilded Age. In 1938, the firm was taken over by Parke-Bernet Galleries, which was then purchased in 1964…by Sotheby’s.

The Princeton Club

In its early years, the hallowed watering hole for Princeton graduates followed the money. In 1900, the Princeton Club opened its doors on 34th and Park in an old home of the Vanderbilts. In 1908, the club moved, taking over the home of murdered Gilded Age architect Stanford White at Gramercy Park North and Lexington Avenue. White’s studio, with Flemish oak and a vast fireplace, was converted into a grill room, but the structure was kept largely intact, so much so that when the property was sold again in 1918, it still had twenty bedrooms. Tragically, Stamford White’s home no longer exists. In 1925, it was demolished and the Gramercy Park Hotel was built in its place. The Princeton Club moved again, but as of 2022, closed its doors due to COVID and lack of financial support.

Natural History Museum

In 1861, Dr. Alfred Bickmore envisioned a museum for natural history and felt New York should be its home. But it wasn’t until Barnum’s American Museum burned down in 1868 that efforts began in earnest. The founding collection of insects, fossils, mammals, and reptiles was originally housed in the Central Park Arsenal, which still stands at 64th Street off Fifth Avenue, while the museum we know today was constructed at 81st and Central Park West. Theodore Roosevelt’s father, Theodore Sr., was one of the museum’s founders; the president and Edith Wharton were long-term friends; he was four years older and born just three blocks from her birthplace.

Calvary Episcopal Church

Located near Gramercy Park since 1846, Calvary Church was the place of worship for many of New York’s finest families, including the George Frederick Joneses and their daughter, Edith. Wharton uses the church as a setting in The Age of Innocence, and Dr. Ashmore, a character in the novel, was modeled after the Rev. Washburn, on whom Edith had an intense crush. The funeral service for David Graham Phillips was held there in 1911. Located at Park Avenue South on the corner of 21st Street, the brownstone church was not widely admired for its aesthetics, but it looks gorgeous in an 1893 painting by Childe Hassam.

Appleton Offices

In 1825, D. Appleton and Company began life as a bookstore on the Bowery near Exchange Place. The business would move several times, evolving into a highly successful publishing house and home to writers such as Stephen Crane, Henry James, and Edith Wharton, as well as Charles Darwin, Lewis Carroll, and Kipling. Its handsome 1868 headquarters can be found on 90-94 Grand Street. But in 1900, the company went broke and was obliged to move again. In September of 1902, they built new offices on 39th and Fifth Avenue, a few short blocks from Grand Central.

Met Opera House

Anyone watching The Gilded Age is familiar with the origins of New York’s hallowed opera center. And any Wharton fan knows that The Age of Innocence opens at the Academy of Music, in order to perfectly orient the reader to the novel’s setting and sensibility. Located on Broadway between 39th and 40th Street, the original Metropolitan opened on October 22, 1883. The New York Tribune reported “The appearance of the auditorium will be light and sunny. The proscenium is nearly square and will have the effect of a gigantic picture frame.” The curtains were deep red and gold, the chairs mahogany and black rattan. While the Italian Renaissance style light brick exterior might have been simple, the interior boasted the “Golden Horseshoe,” spaces taken by the original stockholders—the Vanderbilts, Morgans, and Rockefellers who had been shut out of the old Academy. The opera house lasted longer than the New York homes of many of its founders. By 1966, Lincoln Center beckoned. Luminaries such as Marian Anderson and Leonard Bernstein joined in fundraising efforts to renovate the old building. But in January of 1967, the Old Met succumbed to the wrecking ball.

Palm Garden of the Belmont Hotel

When it opened in 1906 on the corner of Park Avenue and 42nd Street, the Belmont was not widely admired. The Architectural Record called it a “monster hotel,” likening to a large department store. Palms seem to have been a popular motif for tea rooms. The Waldorf had its Palm Garden, the Plaza its Palm Court. The Belmont’s Palm Garden displayed the architects’ preference for vast over cozy, with high frescoed ceilings, marble columns, crystal chandeliers, and of course, the palms that towered over diners. Millionaire August Belmont, who inspired several Wharton characters, made sure the hotel had an entry for his private subway car. The hotel was demolished in 1934. 

Mariah Fredericks was born, raised, and still lives in New York City. She graduated from Vassar College with a degree in history. She is the author of the Jane Prescott mystery series, which has twice been nominated for the Mary Higgins Clark Award, as well as several YA novels. She can be reached through her website.

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by Julia Kelly

Whenever someone visiting London asks where they should go, I always recommend a trip to the Churchill War Rooms (CWR). Now a part of the Imperial War Museum, the CWR, which was known as the Cabinet War Rooms when it was in use, was a secret underground bunker for Prime Minister Winston Churchill, his ministers, and military strategists during World War II.

The CWR has been lovingly brought back to life, and museum-goers can now wander by Churchill’s bedroom, the map room, and the cabinet room where some of the great men of the war worked. It even houses a retrospective on the life of Churchill. However, it is the tiny, unassuming Room 60A that inspired me to set my debut historical mystery A Traitor in Whitehall in the CWR because of the nearly anonymous but incredibly important women who worked there.

Between the summer of 1940 and 1941, Room 60A served as the CWR’s Typing Pool. Given that this was a time before modern conveniences such as copy machines, typists, like my amateur sleuth Evelyne Redfern, were a vital part of a well-run office.

In A Traitor in Whitehall, Evelyne is recruited to join the Typing Pool. All seems to be going well until, on her second shift, she stumbles across the body of a fellow typist. Unimpressed with the investigators brought in to handle the case, she takes it upon herself to catch a killer hiding in plain sight among her colleagues.

The demand for administrative support from typists like Evelyne was high throughout the war, but there were limitations on who would be chosen for such a role. The women of the typing pool were often young and universally unmarried because the civil service had operated a Marriage Ban since before the war. Not only were both male and female staff working for the government required to receive their employer’s permission before marrying, women who wished to marry were forced to resign from their jobs unless they received a special waiver. (Married women were not hired in the first place.)

The Imperial War Museum has a letter in its collection that was sent to a typist in July 1943, and it gives some insight into the practicalities of the job. The writer tells the recipient that, pending background checks, she has been offered the job of Temporary Shorthand Typist Grade II for the “war period,” with one week’s notice required for firing or resignation. She was offered 47 shillings plus 13 shillings, 6 pence a week in war bonus, which is just over £3 (roughly £215 today). This typist was also offered sick leave and annual leave (or vacation time). 

Once employed by the CWR, a typist would receive work sent to her supervisor from departments across many branches of the military. The women, who worked in shifts of six, sat on swivel chairs at wooden desks with a low light with a green shade hanging over their desks. On their Imperial typewriters (later “noiseless” Remington models imported from America to appease Churchill’s distaste for excessive sounds), the typists would insert a top paper and two carbon pages so that all their work was produced in triplicate. 

In this manner, the typists of the CWR produced an incredible number of documents for the Joint Planning Staff. These might include memos, reports, or handwritten meeting notes. 

Although the typists handled incredibly sensitive information, former CWR typist Joy Hunter recalls, “You [had] no idea where it’s come from and probably [hadn’t] got much idea what the content is either because you just have to type it, get it right, and get it checked.” 

In some ways, life in the CWR resembled that of life above ground. There was a post box for staff members’ personal letters that was emptied four times a day, and those working there could also receive personal letters. From 1942, the typists could have used the canteen that was set up for staff meals or, if there was not an air raid on, they could choose to go out to a local cafe for a bite to eat. There were even film screenings for recreation.

A typists’ shift typically lasted three days at a time, and those on shift would sleep in the CWR’s dormitory called the Dock on hard wooden bunk beds. However, even when they went home, their work was not far from their thoughts because they couldn’t tell anyone where they worked or what they did, not even close family, because of the incredibly secretive nature of their job. 

Writing a mystery set in the CWR and featuring the Typing Pool proved to be both a challenge and a blessing. Much like an isolated country house in a Golden Age detective novel, the CWR was a closed environment that was carefully guarded because of its incredible importance. However, having the scope of the museum’s physical catalog, Secrets of Churchill’s War Rooms by Jonathan Asbury, as well as its online collection and extensive record of oral histories was a boon when it came to adding rich historical detail and bringing to life the experience of the CWR’s typists—even a fictional one on the hunt for a murderer.

Julia Kelly is the international bestselling author of historical novels about the extraordinary stories of the past, including The Lost English Girl and Light Over London. Her books have been translated into 14 languages. In addition to writing, she’s been an Emmy-nominated producer, journalist, marketing professional, and (for one summer) a tea waitress. Julia called Los Angeles, Iowa, and New York City home before settling in London.

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by Nev March

The Spanish Diplomat’s Secret, the third book in my Captain Jim and Lady Diana series, is set aboard an 1894 steamship, the Royal Mail Ship (RMS) Etruria.  Why the Etruria? As I researched the ship—and her sister ship the Umbria—I learned about their incredible real-life adventures and was immediately hooked.

RMS Umbria and her sister ship RMS Etruria were built in a Glasgow shipyard and had their maiden voyages in 1884. They were the last two Cunard Line ocean liners fitted with auxiliary sails, which unfurled to take advantage of transatlantic winds.

This also meant they kept a contingent of sailors to climb the rigging and trim sails. The ships had three masts, but their single screw (think propeller) was driven by steam from coal-fed boilers. Down in the stokehole, thirty-six brawny stokers fed furnaces three hundred and twenty tons of coal daily—a prodigious amount for each journey.

As ship technology advanced, the newer, double-screw steamers eventually outpaced the Cunard pair. Ships got faster, commercial air transport took flight and these achievements faded from our collective memory. However, reading about the adventures of these two ships and the precarious nature of early commercial travel continued to shock me.

During an outbound journey in December 1892, the Umbria was due at New York on Christmas day. She did not arrive. Three days later there was still no sign of her, and speculation grew that she’d sunk with all aboard. However, on the 29th, the steamship Galileo docked, bringing good news. She had passed the Umbria showing three red lights, which meant she was disabled but being repaired. 

When at last, the ship limped into New York on 31st December, her delay was explained. In the middle of a high gale, the main propeller shaft had broken, leaving the ship helpless and drifting. Stranded on a wild ocean, the passengers must have been terrified. Incredibly, the Chief Engineer and his crew managed repairs amid heavy seas and saved the ship. 

The flaws of single-shaft technology became even more apparent in 1902 when sister ship Etruria also lost her propeller and tried to reach the Azores by sail alone. Eventually, she was rescued by the SS William Cliff of the Leyland Line.

Among other remarkable stories surrounding these sister ships was a failed bomb plot. After the Boer War, when the ships returned to transatlantic runs, the Umbria was preparing to sail, when the New York Police Department received an anonymous letter claiming that a bomb was aboard When the ship was searched, a bomb containing a hundred pounds of dynamite and a crude timed fuse was found. It was discovered to be a mafia plot to down competing British shipping lines. 

I was charmed to learn that in his youth, Britain’s future Prime Minister Winston Churchill had sailed on the Etruria. 20-year-old Churchill traveled to Cuba in 1895 to witness the Cuban war of independence against Spain, (his idea of a vacation!) taking the Etruria to New York as well on his return to Liverpool. 

Early steamships played a crucial role in the growth of commercial cruising, which so many of us enjoy today. The juggernauts of their time, today these ships seem quite small. However, monthly transatlantic runs between Liverpool and New York by ships like these gave birth to the golden age of sea travel, connecting our continents and opening up our world to trade and travel. I hope you enjoy the opulence, charm, and dangerous excitement of these early steamers in The Spanish Diplomat’s Secret.

Nev March is the first Indian born writer to win the Minotaur Books/Mystery Writers of America First Crime Novel Award for her Edgar-finalist debut, Murder in Old Bombay. After a long career in business analysis, she returned to her passion, writing fiction. Nev sits on the NY chapter board of Mystery Writers of America and is a member of Crime Writers of Color. A Parsi Zoroastrian, she lives with her family in New Jersey and teaches occasionally at the Rutgers University Osher Institute.

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by Allison Montclair

Allison Montclair’s beloved Sparks & Bainbridge Mystery series is a fun read for all mystery lovers, however, the events are very much rooted in history. Montclair heavily researches the post-WWII era while writing this series. Below is an essay from Allison Montclair discussing the research and thought processes that go into these books.

In a tense moment in The Right Sort of Man, the first in my Sparks and Bainbridge Mysteries, the following takes place:

“[She] opened the door to see a short, perky brunette standing there, a notebook and pencil in her hands.

‘How do you do?’ chirped the woman. ‘My name is Eloise Teasley. I am conducting a survey for Mass-Observation about rationing and the response of the Ordinary British Housewife. Are you an Ordinary British Housewife by any chance, and if so, would you mind answering some questions?’”

Faithful readers will know, of course, that Miss Teasley is none other than the intrepid Iris Sparks, improvising her way through her first investigation under the guise of a Mass-Observation researcher.

But what was Mass-Observation?

In 1937, two teams based in London and Bolton were formed by an anthropologist, a poet, and a filmmaker to interview ordinary people about their reactions to national and world events in order to counterbalance what was perceived as the sugar-coated pronouncements of the established press. Their first publication, “May the Twelfth: Mass-Observation Day-Surveys 1937” by over two hundred observers, collected anecdotes, overheard comments, and interviews of people and their reactions to the coronation of King George V. Mass-Observation would go on to make similar surveys and investigations covering a variety of topics.

The timing was fortuitous for anyone researching life in wartime and thereafter, such as myself. While regular histories are essential to getting at an understanding of events and their causes and effects, M-O gives you individuals. I write mysteries in historical settings. The history is around everything, but the characters, the people, are what drive the story and engage the reader. In M-O, you hear voices, speech patterns, patterns that don’t parrot the popular perception of the period. [I like alliteration when I can get away with it.] All of it can give authenticity to a historical fiction author.

My characters lived through the Blitz, and I was able to flesh them out with experiences drawn from Tom Harrisson’s “Living through the Blitz,” an M-O publication. My detectives were a pair of women, Iris Sparks and Gwen Bainbridge, and some of their sensibilities were inspired by a pair of oral histories by Anne de Courcy, The Last Season and Debs at War, both of which drew on the M-O books and archives.

My fourth book, The Unkept Woman, originally was intended to be about something very different than what I started thinking about, but I kept coming across references to the “Britain Can Make It” exposition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in the fall of 1946. It turned out that M-O covered the exhibition quite extensively. The problem: The archives were in England, I was in New York, and there was a pandemic going on.

The pandemic proved to be a help, oddly enough. When I contacted the archives, they realized that I could not come there and beg entry. They provided me with a free pass—FOR ONE MONTH ONLY!—to access the digital archives.

That proved to be a very intensive month, but oh, the treasures buried within! In the M-O reports from “Britain Can Make It,” we find the comments of children after seeing the toys and school furniture, as well as the complaints of the adults over the unavailability of the new designs, the lengths of the queues, and the occasional oddness of the presentations. Much of it digitized from handwritten notes! All grist for the mill, and things one might not find in regular histories of the event.

You also find out tiny details that can become instant writing prompts. A mention of buskers entertaining the people waiting in the long queues gave me an entire paragraph that I never would have considered, not to mention a happy afternoon listening to songs buskers would sing back in that time [because why write when you can waste time listening to music in the name of research?]

I have only scratched the surface of what was there, sad to say, but I know about it now. More than a dozen books and many more reports are there for me to rummage through. It isn’t the only resource I draw upon, of course. But it gives life to my writing in ways that others don’t.

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