Thursday, May 2, 2024
Part Two of Origins of the short story, Madam Sibyl’s First Client
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.
In addition, now and again I will provide some of my fiction to read, for free, on this newsletter. Everything is available to anyone who subscribes, but I am always pleased when someone shows their appreciation for the newsletter by upgrading to paid.
Daily Diary, Day 1339:
Brief Check-in: Yesterday was pretty much a repeat of Tuesday, making sure I applied the Voltaren at regular intervals and going for 4, 15 minute walks. I think there were more times during the day when I wasn’t particularly aware of the pain in my knee, unlike the week before when pain in that knee had become pretty constant. I also finished working on this post and had my two scheduled phone calls.
On the remodel front, all the main material for remodeling, the master bath was delivered and filled up a good portion of our laundry room. One of the things I like about this company is they didn’t schedule to start the project until they had everything ordered and in their warehouse.
This morning I am putting my post up early since this is when the demolition starts, which is being done by a separate company that specializes in removing asbestos, which they found in both the drywall and the flooring. A person from the remodeling company itself arrived at 7:30 to make sure everything was prepped for the Asbestos removal company. This part of the process is supposed to take at least three days, with a fourth for checking the air quality.
Origin of Madam Sibyl’s First Client: Part Two
Back-tracking a bit more, my decision to make my protagonist, Annie Fuller (Dawson) a widow who supplemented her income by becoming a pretend clairvoyant didn’t come over night, but really germinated over about ten years. By 1982, when I was finishing up writing my dissertation, I had started to think seriously about turning the material I had learned about women who worked in the west at the end of the 19th century into a mystery series. There were several factors that played a role in this.
First, as I went on the job market, in a discipline where women were still a very tiny minority of hires and when women’s studies was just beginning to be taken seriously, I was very aware that even if my dissertation eventually got published, there was a good chance it would end up being read by a few fellow professors and future graduate students.
The idea that only academics would learn about these women for whom I had developed such admiration and affection seemed such a shame, and I became convinced that this meant that using the material to write historical fiction might be the best way to ensure a broader audience.
But I didn’t want to write just any kind of historical fiction, because by this time I was intrigued by the idea of combining my love of history with my long-time enjoyment of mysteries. In the early 1980s, while contemporary mysteries with female protagonists had started taking off, historical mysteries weren’t yet a sub-genre that existed. However, there was one historical mystery series that I had found, the Brother Cadfael series by Ellis Peters. The first book was published in 1977. By 1882 I had read the first three books in this series and loved them. Her books became my model, a series with an amateur sleuth (a monk), set in the past (medieval era), that was firmly based in historical research, which were finding a broad audience.
To me, this convinced me that a series in late 19th century San Francisco, where each mystery could permit me to examine a different kind of female occupation of the era, was a possibility. That is the point when I started to consider how to go about giving my amateur female protagonist reasons to get involved in solving mysteries
The first occupation I settled on was to make her a widow who owned a boarding house, which was a key occupation for widowed or married women of this time, particularly in San Francisco. See this post about why boarding houses were so important in the city. Having her run a boarding house would create an immediate cast of characters who would provide information she needed to know or could bring cases to her to solve. This is, in fact, what happens in the second book in the series, Uneasy Spirits, when it is one of the boarders, who comes to Annie and asks for help.
But this occupation alone seemed too limiting, and that is when I came up with the idea of having Annie deciding to supplement her income from the boarding house by being a pretend clairvoyant. This came from my memory of those San Francisco Chronicle ads which had so intrigued me.
By the time I wrote the first draft of Maids of Misfortune, it was 1988. I had finished my dissertation, gotten my first teaching job in Lubbock Texas, had a child, moved back to San Diego with my husband who got a job at UCSD, and I had just finished a two-year teaching job at UCSD as a visiting lecturer. Temporarily without a full-time job (which I got the next year) I finally felt I had the time to take the ideas I had been mulling over for years and start that series. There was now a more substantial literature on women in this period. And a number of the articles and books, particularly on women in religion and reform, had touched on how the rise of Spiritualism provided a justification for women to do things that before would have been seen as unfeminine. If a woman was simply channeling the communication from spirits—often male spirits--it was all right for them to speak in public, or offer advice, especially medical and business advice as fortune tellers, clairvoyants and mediums.
If you look carefully at the first ad in the clipping below, from December 1878 you will sees examples of this.
Miss Leland The Greatest Fortune Teller. Gives correct information on stocks, love and wishing charms, and lucky tokens given, and unhappiness in families remedied. Fee $1.
All persons in difficulty. Mental or business will find solace and valuable information by consulting Mrs. Grey the great seer and Test Medium.
Looking at these ads in the San Francisco Chronicle, it didn’t take much imagination on my part to think of a whole variety of mysteries that would come to Annie if she started pretending to be a clairvoyant who was giving advice about investments, love affairs, and unhappy families.
However, none of this explains why, in 2014, after publishing three novels and three other short stories in the Victorian San Francisco mystery series, I felt the need to write a prequel story to Maids of Misfortune. But that is for Part Three:
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WOW! How old ARE you?? You finished your dissertation and were reading Brother Cadfael books in 1882! (Haha, just giggling over your typo.)
On the serious side, do you think that the Volteran works well? I've recently begun using a CBD cream for bad tendonitis in my shoulder, and it seems to work well and begins almost immediately. It's not supposed to have any psychoactive components. My chiropractor recommended it.
I, too, loved Cadfael!