Historical Tidbits: Why My Research Comes First
Daily Diary, Saturday, December 9, 2023, Day 1194:
Welcome, I’m Mary Louisa Locke, the author of the USA Today best-selling Victorian San Francisco Mystery series and the Caelestis Science Fiction series. In this daily newsletter, I reflect on my life as an indie author trying to age gracefully, including my struggles to maintain a balanced life, what I listen to, read, and watch for entertainment, and occasional bits of information I’ve gleaned from doing the research for my novels.
Tomorrow, in my Ta Da! List post about what I want to celebrate for the week, I will be talking about having chosen the female occupation that will be the focus of my next full-length novel in the Victorian San Francisco Mystery series. This reminded me of a piece I wrote in preparation for a talk I gave in 2018 about “Putting the History in Mystery,” which I thought would be a nice bit of background for tomorrow’s announcement.
Writing Historical Mysteries: What comes first, research or plot?
If you had asked me when I first started writing my historical mystery series, I would have said that the mystery plot would come first, with the historical research coming next to provide accurate details on such things as settings, fashion, and food.
Instead, what really happens is that I’ve been getting the key elements of my mystery plots (the nature of the crime, who did it and why, motives for the other suspects, and how the crime was committed) from the real historical events I discovered while doing my background research on each book.
The idea behind the series has always been to feature different kinds of occupations held by women working in the cities of the far west at the end of the nineteenth century (the subject of my doctoral dissertation). For example, the first book in the series, Maids of Misfortune, explores domestic service, the job that young single women were most likely to have if they worked in San Francisco during the Victorian era. The inspiration for that plot came from an entry in a diary by a San Francisco servant, Anna Harder, who wrote how frustrated she was by the fact that one mistress wanted her to come back early on the mornings after her night out in order to start breakfast. However, week after week the mistress failed to get up and open the back door, leaving the poor woman sitting, shivering, on the back steps. From this entry, I got the plot for a classic “locked door” mystery, having my series protagonist, the widowed boardinghouse owner Annie Fuller, go undercover as a servant to discover how the master of the household was killed…and by whom.
My second book, Uneasy Spirits, looked into the world of nineteenth century spiritualists, an occupation dominated by women in this period. I had already chosen to have my amateur sleuth, Annie, supplement her income as a boardinghouse keeper by being a pretend clairvoyant because I’d been intrigued by how many women advertised in the San Francisco Chronicleas having this sort of occupation…making good money at this job if their fees were any indication. Yet, it was the more in-depth research I did for this book, reading monographs on spiritualism and biographies of nineteenth century spiritualists, that gave me the idea for the crimes Annie would investigate, as well as providing the models for two of the suspects and one of my most intriguing characters, Evie May, a little girl who seemed to have unusual psychic powers.
When I started the research for Bloody Lessons, my third book, all I knew was I was going to feature women in the teaching profession in San Francisco. At first, most of my research went into providing background for a new character I was introducing. Laura Dawson is the little sister of Nate Dawson, who is Annie’s love interest and co-amateur sleuth, and at the opening of this book, Laura has moved into Annie’s boardinghouse and is working in a local grammar school. Learning about the San Jose Normal school where Laura would have gotten her teaching degree and getting details on problems she might have faced at her first job in a one room school house was all great fun, but the breakthrough in developing a main mystery plot came when I began read about teachers and the public school system in the San Francisco Chronicle. That is where I hit pay dirt.
I found a series of 1879-1880 articles about San Francisco School Board members who were accused of taking bribes (or other favors) to help women pass the difficult teaching certificate exams. The scores a woman got on these exams determined at what grade level they could teach, which in turn affected the pay they might receive. This in turn could determine if they could make a living wage, a real concern that year because a newly elected group of Republican politicians had just cut the salaries of elementary school teachers in half.
These articles also mentioned that these accusations came through anonymous letters—and viola–I had my crime (poison pen letters) and a reason for Annie’s beau, Nate Dawson, to get involved. Since he was a local lawyer, I could have a school board member hire him to defend their reputation. In addition, I could have Annie Fuller help him out by taking a temporary teaching job in order to investigate if the letters were coming from within the public school system. Once again, the research inspired the mystery plot, giving me motivations and possible suspects for this crime.
The research I did for my fourth book, Deadly Proof, was even more instrumental in providing the eventual plot elements for the mystery. Again, I started doing basic research on the topic–women who worked in the printing industry in San Francisco. I had to learn all about the profession of typesetting, running a printing press, and which companies in San Francisco were willing to hire women. In doing this research, I found a state labor report that mentioned a printing press owner, Mr. Bacon, who had come under scrutiny because of accusations of unfair labor practices. Unlike most printers in the city, Mr. Bacon hired mostly young women, forcing them to sign apprenticeship contracts that were considered quite exploitative. These contracts stipulated that the women rent rooms in boardinghouses Bacon owned and gave him the right to hold back a proportion of their wages until they completed their apprenticeships. The contract also said that if a woman left his employ before the apprenticeship was completed, he could keep all their back wages. Bacon, by paying these young women less (and recapturing their wages as rent) was able to undercut competitors who hired male workers at a significantly higher wage rate. The report said that Bacon had been accused of “interfering” with some female employees (shades of #metoo) and I couldn’t help but wonder if this meant he could essentially force them to quit before the contract was up, which would permit him to keep those back wages. Clearly, a pretty despicable man, since it was unusual for such state reports to go after individuals in this fashion. I was also intrigued when I looked for information for this real individual in the local papers and found that he had died under suspicious circumstances.
Viola! What came from my research was a plot where the murder victim would be a wealthy, womanizing printer, Joshua Rashers, who would have lots of potential murder suspects with perfectly good motives for wanting him dead. I even discovered my murder weapon from a catalog of typesetting tools.
For none of these books, did I have a mystery plot when I started my research, instead the plot came second, followed of course by lots more research to fill in the historical details.
It occurs to me that in discovering my plots in this fashion, I am following in the footsteps of those clever detectives you read about in contemporary mysteries who let the evidence (in this case the historical facts) guide them rather than come at a crime with predetermined theories (or predetermined plots).
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Fascinating! I doubt that all other writers do such marvelous research! It sure pays off in your books.
What interesting research you did for your books! Women's occupations must have given you a good insight into social change and how the lot of women improved over time. Though some things never change, as you pointed out.