Sunday March 16, 2025: A Small Moment of Delight

Doing research!

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 1656:

This past week, I made a good deal of progress in sketching out the plot for the new short story that will feature both Annie, my main protagonist, and Mr. Wong, who Annie first met while working undercover as a maid to investigate her first crime in Maids of Misfortune. In the process, I was reminded several times how much delight I get in uncovering new and often surprising information as I do the research for the stories in this historical mystery series.

I have already written and published a long post about how I use research to come up with my plots, and the process of developing this story was no exception. While much of my general historical understanding of the late 19^th century and the lives of women living and working in the cities of the Far West is grounded in the work I did over thirty years ago for my doctoral dissertation, both the plots and little historical details I discover often come from either new research into primary sources that are now available onlines (newspapers, state and federal documents) or secondary sources (academic articles and books) that have come out since I was actively keeping up with my areas of historical expertise.

And in doing the research for this story, both primary and secondary sources have proved very helpful. The first moment of delight came from a couple of lines in the April 12^th, 1883 edition of the San Francisco Examiner. The newspapers of that period often list very short items, sort of news of interest, and I had come to this particular listing from using the key word “Chinese.” The item I found was a single sentence stating that the Chinese Consul for the San Francisco port said that “if the Chinese children are refused entree to the public schools of this State, the Chinese will refuse to pay the poll tax, which helps to support the public schools.”

While if found this piece of information very interesting, especially in the context of what is going on in America today, it wasn’t relevant to the plot I was developing. However, it was the next few lines that caught my eye and my imagination. This item reported that the Commissioners of Insanity determined that despite a certain behavior on a local woman’s part, she couldn’t be committed to the Insane Asylum.

Needless to say, this sent me right down a rabbit hole of research into other primary sources that has been very rewarding and has had a good deal to do with how my story is developing.

In fact, coming back yesterday to do a little more research on this topic, I stumbled upon a couple academic pieces that were also relevant. One was a book entitled Racial Frontiers that was published in 2002 that I have ordered a used copy that will come in about a week. The second was a UC Berkeley dissertation published in 2015, entitled “The Perils of Home: Race, Gender, and Labor on the Pacific Frontier.”

This was available as a PDF I could download, and I my plan once I publish this post, is to open it up and start reading the dissertation, and I have no doubt it will provide me many moments of delight throughout the day.

As usual, do let me know about any particular moments of delight have you encountered recently.

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