Tuesday February 4, 2025

Beatrice Bests the Burglars, Background to story.

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 1616:

For the month of February, I will be offering, for free, the fifth short story in my Victorian San Francisco mystery series, Beatrice Bests the Burglars. Starting this coming Saturday, I will put up a new scene (there are seven of them) twice a week during the month.

But first, a brief check-in, and then some background on why I decided to write this particular story.

Check-in: Weather has definitely turned chillier, cloudy, with some potential rain by mid-week. Every day this week I have at least one, if not two phone calls scheduled. I think everyone is feeling the need to touch base in the midst of these uncertain times. I am trying to do continued plot development in between these calls.

Background for writing Beatrice Bests the Burglars:

My main series protagonist, Annie Dawson (previously Annie Fuller), owns a boardinghouse on O’Farrell Street in San Francisco, and I regularly include members of that boarding house in my stories, even if in only walk-on roles.

Between the boarders and the household staff, the house now holds fifteen people of various ages, and there is no way for me to give all these series characters important roles in every full-length mystery novel. This turned out to be particularly true in the sixth book in the series, Scholarly Pursuits, since most of the action in that mystery occurred across the bay in Berkeley on the campus of the University of California.

Fans of the series noticed this, and quite a few pointed in their reviews of Scholarly Pursuits how much they had missed hearing from many of their favorite characters. That prompted me to write four short stories set in the months between the end of the action in Scholarly Pursuits and the beginning of the events in Lethal Remedies, the seventh full-length mystery in the series.

Consequently, while Annie Dawson, her husband, and new daughter Abigail play very slight roles in these four stories, it is the minor secondary characters (and the historical setting of 1881 San Francisco) that get the spotlight.

As is obvious from the title, Beatrice Bests the Burglars, this short story features Beatrice O’Rourke, the O’Farrell Street boardinghouse cook, and for some time I had wanted to let this older woman to take center stage. So, I wrote a story where Beatrice was left alone in the house while everyone else is off at a July Fourth picnic.

This gave me a chance also to expand on what I have always seen as another “character” in the series…the boardinghouse itself, by letting Beatrice walk through the house while everyone is gone.

As she tours the empty rooms, Beatrice recalls how her own history and the history of the house have been intertwined for forty years. I confess this story also let me grumble a bit about getting older. Ironically, over thirty years ago, when I created Beatrice O’Rourke for my initial draft of the first book in the series, Maids of Misfortune, I was much nearer the age of Annie, with a young daughter, while Beatrice was based on an amalgamation of the older women who had been in my life. By the time Maids of Misfortune was finally published, Beatrice and I were pretty much the same age, with many of the same aches and pains.

As for the house, well, I am going to do a little Historical Tidbits post on Thursday on the history of boarding house living in San Francisco, with a photo of the inspiration for the O’Farrell Street house from my own past!

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