Monday, January 20, 2025

How I get my plots, Part One

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. Occasionally, I will also publish some of my shorter fiction in this newsletter to read for free.

Daily Diary, Day 1601:

First of all, for those of you who noticed when reading yesterday’s Small Moment of Delight, the photo was not of a rabbit, but a squirrel. My only excuse is that there was a small rabbit ornament on that lawn that I also photographed, but in my haste to get the post out before Rio came for his doggie play date with Leeza, I put up the wrong picture. Just wanted to make sure you all didn’t start to worry that I wasn’t just grumpy, but having a senior moment yesterday. (Smile.)

Today, as promised, before getting back to working on finding the plot for Etched in Blood, I am putting up the first of several posts about the process I use in finding the mysteries that are the core of the books .

When I first started writing my historical mystery series, I would have said that coming up with the mystery plot was my first task, and that then I would do any historical research necessary to come up with accurate details on such things as setting, fashion, and food in the book.

However, as time went on, I discovered that what really happens is that, beyond determining what female occupation I was going to feature in my next novel, I got 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 the background research on each book.

This was even true for the first book. I knew that the first book in the series, Maids of Misfortune, would explore domestic service, the job that young single women were most likely to have if they worked in San Francisco during the Victorian era. However, the inspiration for the actual plot came from an entry in a diary by a San Francisco servant working in San Francisco at the end of the 19^thcentury. In this diary, Harder wrote that one mistress wanted her to come back early on the mornings after her night out in order to start breakfast, but, 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 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 Chronicle as 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 in this book, 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 boarding house 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 the problems she might have faced at her first job in a one room school house helped me provide back story for Laura, 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…wink, wink, nod, nod) to help women pass the difficult teaching certificate exams. A woman’s scores on these exams determined at what grade level they could teach, which in turn affected the pay they might receive. This in turn would determine if they could make a living wage, a real concern for women, who my own research revealed often were the sole support of aged parents. In the year the Bloody Lessons was set a newly elected group of Republican politicians had just cut the salaries of elementary school teachers in half, causing a great deal of discussion in the papers about what the impact would be on these teachers, and provided the context for the reports on some women unfairly getting jobs they didn’t deserve.

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 his reputation. In addition, I could have Annie Fuller help him out by taking a temporary teaching job in order to investigate if the letters had any validity. 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, consequently being able to undercut competitors who hired male workers at a significantly higher wage rate. These young women signed apprenticeship contracts that were considered quite exploitative. These contracts stipulated that the young women rent rooms in boarding houses 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, but the report also mentioned that Bacon had been accused of “interfering” with some female employees (again a definite euphemism for some degree of sexual harassment or even assault), which meant an employee might be faced with untenable choices…leave, and lose wages, stay, and face unwelcome attention by Bacon.

What came from that 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.

With none of these books, did I have a mystery plot when I started my research, instead the plot came second—out of that research. 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).

Tomorrow, I will put up the fourth scene in Mr. Wong Rights a Wrong, but I will follow up on Wednesday with a post on where the research led me with my sixth novel, Scholarly Pursuits.

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