Review of Beaumont Blues

by Robert Fate

This is the first of the Baby Shark books I’ve read. I had heard about the books and how good they were, but somehow missed picking up a copy. I finally lucked into Beaumont Blues in March at the Left Coast Crime and came away with a rocking good book that has made me a firm Robert Fate fan.

Kristen Van Dijk and her PI partner Otis Millet roar through the 50s in this wonderful book that starts out innocently enough with Kristen and Otis hired to find a missing socialite party girl. They’ve tangled with this girl before. But things go sideways when they find the girl being held by a psycho nephew of a local crime boss. Kristen gets the girl away from him, but not before two men are slaughtered and she has to knock the stoned kidnap victim out to get her to safety.

Things go downhill from there. The kidnapped victim, 17 year old Sherry Beasley, is heir to an oil fortune. She will inherit at 18 and if she isn’t there to hear the reading things will go badly. Nothing in the case is as it appears and no one is telling Kristen the truth. But Kristen is sharp and knows her way around low lifes. It’s not her fault that every move she makes seems to bring more of those low lifes out of the woodwork.

This is a wonderfully written book that I had a hard time putting down. Kristen is one of those characters I wish I could sit down and share a few brews with. Highly recommended if you like taut fiction that will leave you breathless, but satisfied.

Robert Fate's Web Site

The Myth of Childhood

Child workers from a glass factory, 1908

Some conventions we follow seem so innate and natural we assume they always existed. That's not always the case. A perfect example of this is the idea that childhood as we know it has always been the norm. The family dynamics of mother, father and children who needed to be tended to until they entered society as, hopefully, responsible adults was the way it’s always been. Certainly the so called 'family values' groups on the right would have us believe that God created the family as it stands today, therefore this is God's way and should be our way.

In actual fact, the concept of family as we know it came into being in the mid 19th Century and solidified in the late 19th century, though it wasn't until the 20th Century that child labor laws reflected this family value and protected children from exploitation. In 1916 a Federal law was passed prohibiting the transport of goods across state lines if minimum age laws were violated. The law was declared unconstitutional in 1918, voiding that protection. In 1924 Congress tried to pass a national child labor law, but the measure was blocked by opposition and the bill was dropped. In 1938 President Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which limited many forms of child labor. In 1973 Congress passed the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, creating the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect and other steps designed to increase children's rights and reduce child neglect and abuse.

Before the mid-1800s children were seen as being filled with original sin. The renown American theologian, Jonathon Edwards, believed children were "not too little to go to hell' and he advocated preaching terror when necessary, even to children, who in God's sight "are young vipers… if not Christ's."

Only through the works of people like Jean Jacques Rousseau, Johan Pestalozzi and Catherine Beecher this concept was rejected in favor of children being natural and innocent, free of original sin. With that change grew the idea that if children were going to become good adults they needed nurturing throughout their childhood. Children were blank slates, open to being molded with the proper raising. Women were assigned the role of primary caregiver and teacher. Men were to provide support. Starting in the mid 1800s women's magazines began to present articles aimed at instructing them on how children should be raised, including reading material and appropriate toys. Playgrounds began to be constructed for children to have a safe place to play. The definition of childhood was advanced from 5-6 years of age to include adolescence. This time was meant to be a time of innocence, play and learning.

But it took decades before the idea of childhood as an innocent, carefree age encompassed the idea that they should not be working long hours for low wages and they continued to be exploited as cheap labor well into the 20th Century.

What does all this mean? That family as is touted today as being the norm is no such thing. Family is as artificial as construct as marriage is. In the past people cared for their children as long as they were infants and unable to do anything themselves, but once they reached an age when they could work, be it hunting, tending crops or as the world grew more industrialized, working in mines or factories, often for 14 or more hours a day, often at little or no wages then they were expected to get out and be productive. Girls were married off as soon as they reached puberty. Certainly the idea of keeping children at home into their late teens or even early twenties was unheard of. They would only be mouths that needed feeding and if a boy or girl was big enough to work, then they should work. That was God's plan then. Reverend Edwards would certainly have agreed.

Writing Historic Romance

Guest blog by G.G. Royale

I love writing historic romance, and part of that comes from the fact that I never want to stop learning. Writing historical gives me an excuse to read more, to buy more books, to spend hours surfing WPA archives and backlogs of newspapers online. The most fun thing for me in writing historic fiction is when I get to use one of those wonderful nuggets of information I gleaned in a meaningful way in my story.

I have a master of fine arts in fiction from the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of New Orleans, so I have studied writing. A lot of writing. But I never sat down to learn how to write historic fiction specifically. If there is a “method” others use, I don’t know about it. In talking today about the way I do it, I will reference The Flapper and the Fellow, a mild BDSM novella set in 1925, available from Loose Id. This is by no means my only historic work -- I’ve written erotic romances set in the Middle Ages, samurai-era Japan, and plantation-era Louisiana to name a few -- but it is the one for which I did the most research.

When starting any story, the first thing I do is create my concept, my basic plot, and my main characters. I do this sort of devoid of time or setting. That can come later. Character should drive plot, so really the people matter most. I do tend to write to a lot of calls for submissions -- found either at Duotrope or the Erotica Readers and Writers Association page -- so most of the time I start with the theme or prompt. In the case of The Flapper, the theme was “trading places”; two characters had to house swap or something like that. I knew most people would play with the idea that the two people who swapped would be the two love interests, so I decided to go with the idea of who got left behind. From that, the story of Dot, the housekeeper, and Winnie, the professor taking Dot’s sister’s job, came about. My next thinking was “When would be a fun time for this to happen?” and of course the 1920s popped into my head: the hedonism of the Jazz Age tempered by Prohibition, suffrage… This time period offers a plethora of cultural conflict and richness from which to draw, particularly when set in New Orleans.

Once I’ve settled on my characters, plot, and setting, I start my research. My primary source for The Flapper was Mary Lou Widmer’s New Orleans in the Twenties. I like to use at least one book that can sit next to me while I’m writing because going back and forth between my word processing program and Web sites can sometimes feel frustrating. This book is full of great anecdotes and pictures, organized into chapters about the major elements of life and society at the time. It makes for very easy referencing. I prefer that sort of book to more thorough sociological, academic treatises, though those have more in-depth treatments. All I need is a few touch points that will ring true to readers, such as the names of newspapers, sports teams, restaurants…those sorts of things. I think most major cities have books like that.

In general, I try to write in such a way as to avoid anachronism by glossing over some details, leaving other things out completely, and totally playing up what I know was there. This works better in erotic romance because the romance is central, not some plot necessarily derived from the era in which it is set. Adding the erotic element makes it even better, since I can always distract the reader with sex! If I can’t find out for a fact whether or not an invention existed in the period of my story, I’ll leave it out completely. Following that, a few firm things I know fit into the time period added to the story give a sense of reality. For instance, Dot’s car starts by literally cranking over the engine. Every scene involving the car includes that at some point, even in the pouring rain. Fashion is also great to play with because the old fashion plates from magazines make for very clear description and up-to-the-moment accuracy.

I tend to focus on one or two elements of the era that I think are the most important in relation to the plot and throw in a heavier dose of detail there. In The Flapper, those elements were jazz and Prohibition. I referenced Louis Armstrong and what his career was doing in 1925, and I talked about the radio stations that were just sprouting up. These things were important to Dot’s character, since she wants to play trumpet in a band. I also researched plenty of articles on how easy it was to get a drink in New Orleans in the 1920s; it was really easy. Most of the famous granddame restaurants here had secret rooms, code to order special drinks, or waiters who openly carried flasks in their apron pockets to spike any drink for their grateful customers. The bayous and inlets south of the city made for great rum-running too, so the restaurants were never in short supply. Winnie’s father was an abusive drunk and his mother a teetotaler, so the availability of booze is somewhat shocking to him, though he slowly learns to appreciate the New Orleans cocktail spirit.

Once the story is finished, I read it through looking specifically for anachronisms, and I have a proofer do the same. As a reader, I can’t stand it when I know for a fact something shouldn’t be in a story, and I do try quite hard to avoid having my own readers feel the same way. This is completely separate from any other edits or proofing that I do. That’s about it. After a final polish, I sent the manuscript off with my fingers crossed that it will find a publisher.

Bio: G.G. Royale began writing erotica in the English student lounge at a small California university in the 1990s. After taking a few years to perfect her craft and earn her MFA in creative writing, she began submitting short stories. Her work appears on Web pages, in anthologies, and as eBooks. She lives in New Orleans, raises chickens, and edits for erotic romance publisher Loose Id.

More information can be found at her site, and at her blog.

Why Write History?

Guest Blog by Margaret Blake

Lots of people pose that question. It always comes up when I do a talk and ask for questions. My answer is much the same, although it varies a little depending on why they are asking the question. It can be asked in an arrogant way “Why write history?” and you imagine they are thinking, it’s a lot of old hat! Or they can ask because the questioner is perhaps wondering if there is a market out there for the book they have hidden in a drawer.

I write history because I love to delve into the past. Ah too easy that, it has to be more than that. My novels have an element of suspense as well as romance. Believe me it is just a tad easier to write suspense when you don’t have cell phones, or telephones, or fast cars and aeroplanes. When everyone can’t find out anything about anyone else practically instantaneously. No computer, no Facebook…importantly no DNA.

Journeys were horrendous in the medieval times. You went on horseback or you walked. Roads were notoriously dangerous too. Robbers abounded. You could go in the summer when there were more people but again this limits you.

Something important happens in London, it takes ages for the news to be brought to say Yorkshire in the North. News would be brought by visitors, or importantly, by the packmen who travelled the roads delivering goods and who picked up lots of gossip on the way.

All this enables me to really spin out the story. In my novel The Substitute Bride, my heroine changes places with her sister. She will marry Lord Hinchcliffe and she does get away with it for a very long time. But when he does find out, then it is more devastating for she is by then madly in love with him and it is no more a marriage of convenience. Imagine what a photograph could do to that plot!

In Dangerous Enchantment my heroine has a secret, the revelation of which could end with her death. Alfled in A Saxon Tapestry pretends she is boy – again no photographs to show the lie of the disguise. It’s great.

I do write contemporary romantic suspense, as well as contemporary romance, and I enjoy these. Research is easy to do and in A Fatal Flaw my heroines quarry knows almost immediately that she is making enquiries about him. That puts her in danger. So you can have fun with modern technology as well.

However, I do enjoy going back in time. Why do I write history? Simple really, because I like to!

Whiskey Creek Press
Margaret's home Page

The History of the Model-T

A video of the history of the Model-T and how it revolutionized transportation and production with the first full scale assembly line. Those things were better than Hummers for getting around!

Black Widow Louise Peete

Lofie Louise Preslar, born in Bienville, Louisiana, a very personable woman who people loved. She was also one of America's leading "black widows". She was the Southern Belle daughter of a wealthy newspaper publisher. She attended the best private schools in New Orleans, where she became notorious for her sexual escapades which got her expelled. Following that illustrious beginning she embarked on a life of pleasure and murder.

She married traveling salesman Henry Bosley in 1903, and traveled with him. In the summer of 1906, Henry caught his wife in bed with a local Texas oilman and grief-stricken, killed himself two days later. Louise sold Henry's belongings and moved to Shreveport, where she worked as a prostitute until she could afford a trip to Boston. There she continued as a prostitute. She became popular as a girl who would make house calls. But on the side she lifted the jewelry of the wives of her wealthy clients. Eventually her larceny was discovered and she fled to Waco, Texas. There she met Joe Appel, another wealthy oilman, a flamboyant character who wore diamond studded rings, belt buckle and even the buttons on his clothes.

One week after they met, Joe was found dead with a bullet in his head. His diamonds were missing. Called before a special grand jury, Louise admitted shooting Appel down - in "self-defense." The oil man tried to rape her, she claimed, and she was forced to defend herself. The missing jewels forgotten, members of the jury applauded her. They also set her free.

By 1913, running out of luck and money, Louise married local hotel clerk Harry Faurote. Her flagrant adultery soon drove Faurote to hang himself. Moving to Denver in 1915, Louise then married Richard Peete, a door-to-door salesman. She bore him a daughter in 1916, but Peete's meager income wasn't up to her standards, and she took off alone, for Los Angeles, in 1920.

Shopping for a house to rent, Louise met mining executive Jacob Denton. Instead of leasing her the house, she persuaded Jacob to retain the property, and Louise would come in as a live-in companion. After several weeks Denton refused to marry her. In response, Louise ordered Denton's caretaker to dump a ton of earth in the basement saying she planned to "raise mushrooms" - Denton's favorite delicacy - as a treat for her lover.

Denton disappeared on May 30, 1920. There never were any mushrooms. Louise had numerous explanations for curious callers. First, she told all comers that Jacob had quarreled with "a Spanish-looking woman," who became enraged and chopped his arm off with a sword. Although he managed to survive, she said, poor Jacob was embarrassed by his handicap, and had gone into seclusion. Pressed by Denton's lawyer, she revised the story to include an amputated leg; the missing businessman would return once he was comfortable with his artificial limbs.

Most incredibly, these tales kept everyone at bay for several months, while "Mrs. Denton" threw a string of lavish parties in her absent lover's home. It was September by the time Denton's lawyer grew suspicious enough to call the police to search the house. An hour's spade work turned up Denton's body in the basement, with a bullet in his head.

Detectives started hunting for Louise, and traced her back to Denver, where she had resumed a life of wedded bliss with Richard Peete. Convicted of a murder charge in January 1921, Louise was sentenced to a term of life imprisonment. In the beginning, Richard corresponded regularly. In 1924, when several of his letters went unanswered, Peete committed suicide.

San Quentin's warden, Clinton Duffy, once described Louise Peete as projecting "an air of innocent sweetness which masked a heart of ice." Apparently she liked to boast about the lovers she drove to suicide, especially cherishing Richard's suicide, proof that even prison walls couldn't contain her fatal charm.

In 1933, Louise was transferred from San Quentin to the prison at Tehachapi, and six years later on her tenth attempt to win parole, she was released.

Her release was due to the intercession of a social worker, Margaret Logan, and her husband Arthur. Paroled to the care of a Mrs. Latham, in Los Angeles, Louise was allowed to take the name "Anna Lee," after her favorite movie star.

She found employment at a servicemen's canteen in World War II; in 1942, an elderly female co-worker vanished inexplicably, her home discovered in a state of disarray. Detectives called on "Anna Lee," the missing woman's closest friend, and they were told the woman had died of injuries sustained in a fall. The police bought the story, never bothering to check out "Anna's" background or obtain a death certificate.

The kindly Mrs. Latham died in 1943, and Louise's parole went to the Logans. She married elderly bank manager Lee Judson in May 1944, and on May 30, Margaret Logan vanished without a trace, Louise telling Margaret's aged husband that his wife was in the hospital, unable to receive visitors. By late June, Louise persuaded the authorities that Arthur Logan was insane and he was committed to a state hospital, where he died six months later. With typical lack of feeling, Louise donated his body to a medical school for dissection.

Louise moved into the Logan home with Judson, but in short order, her husband discovered a bullet hole in one wall, a suspicious mound of earth in the garden, and an insurance policy naming Louise as Margaret Logan's sole beneficiary. He never told anyone.

By December 1944, Louise's parole officer had grown suspicious of the regular reports, submitted over Margaret Logan's shaky signature, that contained such glowing praise for their charge. Police invaded the Logan home shortly before Christmas, prompting Lee Judson to voice his suspicions at last. Margaret Logan's body was unearthed in the garden, whereupon Louise offered another of her patented fables. In this story, decrepit Arthur Logan had gone suddenly insane, beating his wife to death in a maniacal rage. Terrified of attracting suspicion due to her background, Louise had buried the corpse and stalled for a month before having Arthur committed to an asylum.

Louise was charged with Margaret Logan's murder, her husband booked as an accessory. Acquitted on January 12, 1945, Judson took his own life the next day, leaping from the thirteenth floor of a Los Angeles office building. Louise, it was observed, seemed pleased with his reaction to their separation.

Convicted of first-degree murder by a jury that included eleven women, Louise was this time sentenced to die. Her appeals failed, and she was executed in San Quentin's gas chamber on April 11, 1947.

Evil Diva

Time Monday, Jun. 11, 1945

Serendipity and creativity

Serendipity is defined as good luck in finding unexpected and fortunate discoveries. In writing, for me, this means stumbling across things unexpectedly that help push a story forward. I recently finished my first historical novel, COLOR OF SHADOWS AND SMOKE and have begun research on a second historical, this one called A PLACE OF SILENCE, set in the early 30s, still during Prohibition. While researching the Depression in my local library I came across a book titled THE ORPHAN TRAINS: PLACING OUT IN AMERICA. Since it was in the section dealing with the Depression I was intrigued and pulled it out, along with a massive pile of other books to look at. Between 1850 and 1930 200,000 children and several thousand adults where set out west, purportedly to find homes for the urban poor. The west was in desperate need of more bodies to help on the farms and industries and agencies like The Children's Aid society saw this as a way to find places for these children.

The moment I read that, I knew the main character in A PLACE OF SILENCE would be just such a child. He would be a boy from a desperately poor family barely able to survive in some eastern city, perhaps Philadelphia or New York. So he was ripped out of his home and shipped west with a trainful of other children, some true orphans, other like him, from families simply too poor to manage. I immediately had to wonder what such a life would be like. Would you imagine your parents had abandoned you? Might you see it as a great adventure? At that time there were no laws controlling the use of children in labor. They were often working in mines or factories, toiling away for 12-14 hours a day for pitiful salaries and no assistance if they were injured, something like the trafficking in children that occurs today. But back then there were few people interested in the plight of children such as that.

But I would never have known about this if I hadn't started browsing the racks, just checking out intriguing titles and taking a closer look when I found one that interested me. I do much the same thing online. I will do Google searches on one subject then find links within the pages I'm researching that take me off in a whole other direction. Often fascinating ones, and sometimes they too can trigger that feeling of Eureka when I stumble onto some fascinating facet that can turn a whole plot on its ear.

I highly recommend it during your next trip to the library. Just find a section, perhaps in a section devoted to your city's history, or a period linked to whatever novel you are working on. Just scan the titles, see what jumps out at you and take a look.

You never know, you just find the magic key to making your novel one degree better.