{"id":8951,"date":"2021-04-13T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-04-13T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=8951"},"modified":"2021-04-13T19:24:06","modified_gmt":"2021-04-13T23:24:06","slug":"history-mysteries-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=8951","title":{"rendered":"History Mysteries – Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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To be considered a \u201chistorical\u201d mystery, a story\u2019s events don’t have to have occurred in ancient Athens or Rome, as long as they happened at least 50 years ago. Lou Berney\u2019s award-winning November Road<\/a><\/em>, involving the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy, Play the Red Queen<\/a><\/em> set in the early days of the Vietnam War, and Kate Quinn\u2019s new Bletchley Park spy novel, The Rose Code<\/a><\/em> (World War II), certainly qualify.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In some ways, the difficulty of mastering the historical details\u2014especially for near-past milieus where readers actually remember fashions, transportation, and pop culture references and may be delighted to ding an author who gets it wrong\u2014is balanced by not having to deal with today\u2019s instant communications and surveillance tools.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s hard to maintain tension when your reader is thinking, \u201cWhy didn\u2019t he just pick up the phone?\u201d This explains why characters are always leaving their cell phones in the truck or losing signal or battery. \u201cWhy didn\u2019t he just Google it?\u201d Having to devise plot workarounds for these difficulties makes a writer occasionally long for simpler times, in technology terms, at least. The stories of 12th<\/sup> century Brother Cadfael suddenly gain appeal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Janet Rudolph\u2019s current highly entertaining issue of Mystery Readers Journal<\/em> (Spring 2021) takes on Historical Mysteries with author perspectives, articles, and reviews. Rhys Bowen\u2019s essay \u201cWhy I Write Historical Mystery\u201d made a number of thought-provoking points. She opts for glamour in her long-running Royal Spyness mysteries and the lure of romance in the popular standalone, The Tuscan Child<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

About World War II as a setting, Bowen says it was \u201cthe last time when we had a clear sense of good versus evil.\u201d (True, at least, for Eurocentric countries, less so in other parts of the world, I fear.) As Rose Code<\/em> author Quinn explained in a lively interview with the Princeton Public Library, the main reason she\u2019s not tempted to turn her mountains of research into some even-handed non-fiction account is that in fiction, \u201cyou get to pick a side.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The MRJ<\/em> essay by Renee Patrick (nom de plume<\/em> of married couple Rosemarie and Vince Keenan) discusses their series of Hollywood golden age mysteries in \u201cCrimes of Fashion.\u201d The protagonists, New Yorker Lillian Frost and legendary costume designer Edith Head, embody \u201ctenacity, hard work, and an uncanny ability to read people,\u201d which also make an ideal sleuth. It wounds like the duo\u2019s experiences prove once again that \u201cclothes make the man.\u201d Third in the series, Script for Scandal<\/a><\/em>, came out last December.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What are your favorite historicals? Mine include the Maisie Dobbs series (WWI), the early novels of Alan Furst (WWII) and the stories of Ben Pastor from inside the Third Reich and, and, and . . .<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Insights from more historical mystery writers in Part II tomorrow!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To be considered a \u201chistorical\u201d mystery, a story\u2019s events don’t have to have occurred in ancient Athens or Rome, as long as they happened at least 50 years ago. Lou Berney\u2019s award-winning November Road, involving the 1963 assassination of President … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"History Mysteries - Part 1 There's more history on the mystery bookshelf than you may think, and technology is to be credited\/blamed. Great authors are mining the past with considerable skill!","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[174,266,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8951","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-draft-blog","category-history","category-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2kn","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8951","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8951"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8951\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8953,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8951\/revisions\/8953"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}