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Release Day Blitz for The Case of the Dead Domestic!

Title: The Case of the Dead Domestic

Series: Adele Gossling Mysteries: Book 6

Author: Tam May

Genres: Historical Cozy Mystery

Release Date: August 26, 2023

Everybody in town agrees: Arabella Parnell thinks far too highly of herself. She worked her way up to lady’s maid for one of Arrojo’s finest families, personal friends of the mayor. She attends parties given by the lady of the house as if she were the guest of honor. She writes letters to the daughter of her wealthy former employer as if they were comrades. She flirts with some of the most prominent men in the county.

So the Arrojo police are hardly surprised when they find her dead among the shrubbery in a wealthy bachelor’s conservatory.

And yet, amateur sleuth and suffragist Adele Gossling can’t help but wonder: Who was Arabella Parnell really? Was she just a servant with arrogant manners and too much self-assurance? Or was she the victim of the pride and passions of powerful men, one of whom did her in? With a hair comb, a brooch, and a candlestick to go on, can Adele solve this case?

Early reviews:

“It’s so much more than I expected from a cozy mystery.”

“The characters are well-rounded, interesting, and unique.”

You can get your copy of the book at a special promotional price at the following online retailers.

Excerpt

Missy Grace, the editor of the Arrojo Courier, hurried into her shop, her cotton hair flying as usual around her face. She pushed back her bangs with the edge of her pencil. “Adele, what can you tell me about that body found in Virgil Riddle’s conservatory?”

Adele stared at her. “What the devil are you talking about?”

“Don’t use such vulgar language, Adele,” Beatrice chided.

“It’s no worse than your ‘bum it,’ dear,” Missy barked.

Beatrice’s nose went up. “I stopped using ‘bum it’ last year.”

“My congratulations.” Missy turned her back to her. “I’m talking about the sheriff and your brother rushing out of the police station an hour ago, looking very official.”

“They told you there was a body in Virgil Riddle’s conservatory?” Adele asked.

“Certainly not,” Missy said. “You know how hush-hush they are when they’re being official.”

“Then how do you know about it?”

“I caught Assistant Deputy Curd having his morning bun at the bakery and wheedled it out of him.”

“It doesn’t surprise me,” Adele said dryly.

“Naturally, the boy was too dense to tell me anything of value,” Missy continued. “He could only say Mr. Riddle had found a girl’s body lying among the shrubbery in his conservatory, and she was most certainly dead.”

“Golly!” Beatrice sighed. “Another murder.”

“I wouldn’t necessarily take Assistant Deputy Curd’s word for it,” Adele said. “He’s not the brightest of men.”

“That’s why I’m coming to you,” said her friend. “You remember our bargain, Adele?” She looked meaningfully at her.

“I tell you what I know if you tell me what you know.” Adele nodded. “Only I honestly know nothing, Missy. This is the first I’m hearing of it.”

“Well then,” her friend took her arm, “it’s our duty as star reporter and lady detective to find out, isn’t it?”

“I’m not a lady detective, you know,” Adele remarked, but she took off the apron she always wore when dealing with some of the dirtier aspects of her work.

“You’re leaving me to mind the shop?” Beatrice’s green eyes, which had become more almond-shaped as the years passed, widened. “Golly!”

“I see you’ve replaced your ‘bum it’ with another inelegant colloquialism,” Missy remarked.

“A woman may speak as she needs to be heard,” Beatrice said with meaning.

“You know how to handle the cash register, as I showed you?” Adele asked.

“No one will come in anyway,” said the young woman. “It’s too early.”

“Nevertheless, we must always be ready to serve anyone.” Adele put on her gloves. “We’ll fetch Nin first.”

“Has she appointed herself lady detective too?” Missy eyed her.

“You might consider her the unofficial medium for the police,” Adele said as they emerged from her shop. “She’s helped them a great deal in the past, Missy.”

“I don’t object if she doesn’t,” she said.

About the Author

Writing has been Tam May’s voice since the age of fourteen. She writes stories set in the past that feature sassy and sensitive women characters. Tam is the author of the Adele Gossling Mysteries which take place in the early 20th century and features suffragist and epistolary expert Adele Gossling whose talent for solving crimes doesn’t sit well with the town’s more conventional ideas about women’s place. She has also written historical fiction about women breaking loose from the social and psychological expectations of their era. Although Tam left her heart in San Francisco, she lives in the Midwest because it’s cheaper. When she’s not writing, she’s devouring everything classic (books, films, art, music) and concocting yummy plant-based dishes.

Social Media Links

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Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/Tam-May/e/B01N7BQZ9Y/

BookBub Author Page: https://www.bookbub.com/authors/tam-may

Goodreads Author Page: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/16111197.Tam_May

The History of Forensic Ballistics

I am not much for guns. I was actually taught how to shoot an M-16 and an Uzi gun during my army service in Israel but I was more interested in getting rid of all the bullets so I could get off the rifle range as fast as possible. I could care less if I hit the target or not.

However, guns are sometimes essential when writing mysteries. That said, there has never been a death from a gun in my Adele Gossling Mysteries. But Book 6 does include murder by gunshot, so that required me to include a ballistics expert in the story.

When I was doing revisions for the book, I became concerned I might be including something that in 1906 (when the book takes place) didn’t yet exist. When things come up in the plot that I didn’t anticipate in the first draft, I tend to write first and do research later (just to get the entire draft written). Ballistics is a fairly new field, right? So maybe in the early 20th century, there were no ballistics experts.

It turns out this was far from true. Forensic ballistics, or, firearm fingerprinting, existed as early as 1835 when in England, police were able to match the bullet in a victim’s body with a bullet mold made by a suspect. Thirty years later, police in England were also able to identify wadding (before cartridges were in use) of a newspaper found in a suspect’s home which helped to convict him.

In the early days, firearm fingerprinting was easier because guns and bullets tended to be handmade by the person who owned them or by a gunsmith whose unique style could be traced. But in the 19th century, men like Samuel Colt began manufacturing guns and bullets so it became harder to identify a bullet found in a victim with a specific firearm. So forensic ballistics had to become more sophisticated.

*Calvin Goddard was the man called in to help the police examine the firearms used in the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929. He invented* a compound microscope earlier in the decade that could do a side-by-side comparison of bullets. His aid helped answer some questions about this mass murder.

Photo Credit: Calvin Hooker Goddard, from an interview given to The Washington Star on 28 July 1931: Wvdp/Wikimedia Commons/PD US not renewed

And it did — with the use of the microscope. In the 1920s, the comparative microscope was invented which could place a bullet alongside one recovered from the victim and compare the grooves to identify it as matching or not matching. This comparative microscope was used to help convict those responsible for the infamous Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929.

Read about how a ballistic expert helps Adele and the police solve the murder of a lady’s maid in my upcoming book, The Case of the Dead Domestic. You can order it for a special preorder price at your favorite online bookstore here.

If you love fun, engaging mysteries set in the past, you’ll enjoy The Missing Ruby Necklace! It’s available exclusively to newsletter subscribers here. By signing up, you’ll also get news about upcoming releases, fun facts about women’s history, classic true-crime tidbits, and more!

The Dispensable Working Girl: Murder at Moose Lake

Working girls didn’t have it easy in the early 20th century. Employers exploited them shamelessly because they were cheaper labor than men, and they could get them to do the dirtiest work for less money (see my blog post here about the wage gap). They worked long hours in very dangerous conditions for employers who skirted safety laws to save money and had no regard for their workers’ safety. They were, in a sense, dispensable labor, more so even than men.

This was never more obvious than in the rise of crimes against working girls in the early 20th century. There were several cases of working girls who came to a bad end. I was browsing YouTube last year and came upon a miniseries made in 1988 about the murder of Mary Phagan in 1915. In my newsletter last year, I talked about a case in 1908 of a schoolteacher in Upstate New York who was murdered by her former student. There is also the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory tragedy which I wrote about here.

Photo Credit: Photo of Grace Brown, date unknown, author unknown: King Rk/Wikimedia Commons/PD US expired

But perhaps the most famous Progressive Era murder of a working girl was the tragedy of Grace Brown. This case became famous for two reasons. First, author Theodore Dreiser was so deeply touched by it that he wrote a fictional account in 1925 under the title An American Tragedy. Second, this story was turned into a film in 1951 that marked the first of three collaborations between lifelong pals Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor.

The story begins in 1905. Chester Gillette, a young man born to ultra-religious and poor people, took a job at his wealthy uncle’s skirt factory in New York. There he met an attractive girl named Grace Brown. Despite the strict factory rules that working men were not to socialize with their female coworkers, Gillette and Brown had a relationship that ended up with Brown becoming pregnant in 1906. This was still a time when the separate spheres were honored which meant a woman who had a child out of wedlock was shunned and disgraced. To avoid this, Brown wrote letters pleading with Gillette to marry her so she wouldn’t be a social outcast. He avoided responding to her for as long as he could.

Gilette finally agreed to take a trip to Moose Lake in the Adirondacks where Brown thought they would get married or at least engaged. But instead, he took her out on the lake and, knowing she couldn’t swim, made sure she drowned. The case became a sensation as Gillette was caught, tried, and convicted in 1908 and died by the electric chair.

The sixth book of my Adele Gossling Mysteries, The Case of the Dead Domestic, is also based on a case of a disposable working girl in the early 20th century. Rather than factory work, Hazel Drew was a domestic servant, and her death, unlike Mary Phagan’s and Grace Brown’s, remains unsolved. If you want to find out all about this unsolved classic true crime (and how it inspired one of the 1990s hit TV series), consider signing up for my newsletter here, as I’ll be doing a series of emails all about this case before the book comes out in August. Plus, you’ll get a free book as a gift just for signing up!

And you can preorder The Case of the Dead Domestic at a special price here.

The Vague Origins of Father’s Day

Today is Father’s Day in the United States. If Father’s Day sometimes seems like an afterthought, it sort of was, though not because fathers aren’t worthy of honor. I trace this back to the residue of the 19th century separate spheres where home and family brought up images of mothers more than fathers. So we can understand in this light why Mother’s Day gets a lot of attention.

Unlike Mother’s Day, which has definite origins, the history of Father’s Day is a little uncertain. There were, in fact, two local celebrations going on during the Progressive Era that is thought to be the official kick-off of Father’s Day, both celebrated for personal reasons. In 1910, Sonora Smart Dodd campaigned in her home state of Washington for an official Father’s Day celebration in June, mainly wanting to commemorate her own father. Dodd’s father had been a Civil War veteran and raised her and her five brothers and sisters alone on a farm when his wife died in childbirth. She succeeded, as Washington began celebrating a state-wide Father’s Day that year. The other celebration happened two years earlier, in West Virginia when a local Methodist church in Fairmont celebrated the day in honor of 361 fathers who had been killed in a local mining explosion.

But official lobbying and support were slow in coming. National political figures such as William Jennings Bryan and Calvin Coolidge supported a national Father’s Day, but it didn’t get much traction. Lobbying for a Father’s Day continued, and in 1972, Richard Nixon declared Father’s Day a national holiday on the third Sunday of June in the United States.

Why was Father’s Day almost an afterthought? As they say, follow the money. Mother’s Day was a commercially viable holiday from very early on. It was, in fact, its commercial appeal that helped get Woodrow Wilson to sign a proclamation declaring it a national holiday in the United States in 1914. But many felt fathers just didn’t have the same monetary appeal. As I discuss here, the role of the father in the 19th and early 20th centuries was more of a disciplinarian. The sentimentality given to mothers seemed to undermine the idea of the “manly man”, emphasizing the masculinity crisis of the Gilded Age.

*Talk about famous fathers! This photo is of none other than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, and his three kids. He doesn’t look much like a disciplinarian dad here, does he?*

Photo Credit: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his three children, 1900, Bain News Service, publisher, Library of Congress: Picryl/No known restrictions

Fathers are just as complex as mothers (something I discuss in my blog post about Mother’s Day) and Adele’s father is no exception. Although deceased when the series opens, Otis Gossling still profoundly influences his daughter and his son, Adele’s brother, Jackson, but in very different ways. As a highly-revered San Francisco criminal lawyer, it was his position that gave them their well-to-do standing. But Adele sees him very differently than her brother Jackson. Who is right and who is wrong? You’ll have to read the Adele Gosslng Mysteries to find out!

And you can start right here with Book 1, The Carnation Murder, which is free on all bookstore platforms. Book 6 is coming out later this summer, so check that out here.

If you love fun, engaging mysteries set in the past, you’ll enjoy my novella The Missing Ruby Necklace! It’s available exclusively to my newsletter subscribers and you can get it here. By signing up, you’ll also get news about upcoming releases, fun facts about women’s history, classic true-crime tidbits, and more!

Why My Waxwood Series is Also a Mystery

One of the beautiful things about being an author is touching the lives of readers with your stories. I cherish readers who respond to my emails with enthusiasm for the next book (one lovely reader already emailed me asking if I still need Advanced Review Copy reviewers for Book 6 of my Adele Gossling Mysteries when the book won’t be out until August and I haven’t even put out a call for ARC readers!) I also love it when readers discover elements in my stories that never occurred to me when I was writing them.

This is exactly what happened with the Waxwood Series. When I wrote the books, I was thinking of a series arc involving historical coming-of-age, specifically one woman’s journey into the past and her maturing into adulthood in one of the most turbulent and chaotic times in American history.

But one reviewer surprised me by calling the Waxwood Series “a mystery saga of the Gilded Age.” At the time I wrote the series, I wasn’t writing mystery fiction or even contemplating publishing a mystery series. I had written Book 1 of the Adele Gossling Mysteries as more of an experiment during National Novel Writing Month back in 2013 but put it aside to concentrate on historical fiction. So the idea that the Waxwood Series was also a mystery saga came as a complete surprise to me.

But now some years have passed since the last book of that series was published. I can now look back and see the gold nugget my reader discovered is absolutely true.

Now, it’s not a mystery in the traditional sense. It has no detective, no amateur sleuth, no whodunit, and no red herrings. The mystery is largely personal and psychological. In Book 1, Vivian is confronted by a woman who knew her grandmother, Penelope Alderdice, in her youth and the woman she knew was not the woman Vivian grew up with. As a debutante coming into adulthood, Vivian considers it vital to know the truth about her family’s past. So her search takes her through several “clues” (such as Penelope’s summer in Waxwood, the name Grace, and letters Penelope wrote home about that summer) which tell her more about who Penelope was and what she sacrificed to become a shipping tycoon’s wife and Nob Hill socialite in the mid-19th century. The clues also point toward some astonishing truths about Vivian’s family that she never knew. Like a detective, she confronts her mother about these truths (the evidence) and gets some answers — but not all of them.

Book 3 continues Vivian’s sleuthing when a man who was acquainted with Penelope through stories from his aunt drops clues about Penelope that lead Vivian to realize there are still some skeletons in the closet she needs to air out. In spite of her promise to her mother to focus on winning the heart of a wealthy Canadian who can bring them back into the good graces of Nob Hill society, Vivian can’t resist pursuing these clues to unravel the mystery behind her family’s past. Her search takes her to a deserted artist’s colony in the hills and the bowels of San Francisco’s poorest neighborhood to find out about her roots. The results are life-changing for her.

Book 2 focuses on Jake, Vivian’s brother, whose journey is more about his coming-of-age as a man in the Gilded Age. Book 4 presents an even greater mystery for Vivian — the man responsible for her family’s fall from grace comes back into her life unable to speak or communicate. In spite of her loathing for him, she gets involved with unraveling the clues behind his silence and faces the last of her family demons.

Not all mysteries are about finding an external killer. There are crimes of the past that sometimes need to be put to rest before people can move on with their lives, just as finding justice for the murder victim and his or her family allows those involved to move on.

I would love for you to start reading the Waxwood Series right now and you can do that for free with Book 1, The Specter. Vivian’s story continues in Book 3, which is now on sale so you can find out about that here.

*The Waxwood Series is a stand-alone series. That means you do not have to have read all the books in order to enjoy or understand each book.