Uncategorized – Empowering women through fiction and history.

Lending a Helping Hand: The Early FBI

I’m a big classic movie fan. I prefer the earlier classics from between the 1920s and the 1950s rather than the later ones from the 1960s onward. But one film from the 1970s that has always fascinated me is the film Paper Moon. It’s a black comedy set during the Great Depression in the Midwest, where Americans were having the toughest time and would do anything to get by. The film follows a charming and handsome con man named Moze (played by Ryan O’Neal) who gets stuck with an eight-year-old orphan, Addie (played by his real-life daughter, Tatum O’Neal), who becomes a better con artist than he is. Clearly, this is not the kind of film that would go over well today, but in the 1970s, when standards were different and the concept of “political correctness” wasn’t as prevalent, this kind of film embedded a lot of social and political views that many Americans, especially younger ones, shared.

There’s a scene in the film where Moze and Addie succeed in beating a bootlegger at his own game when they find his stash of illegal whiskey, steal some of it, and sell it back to the man. They get caught by the local police but manage to escape. The escape scene is pretty standard 1970s action stuff (you can watch it here). Their goal is to get out of Kansas (their current location) and drive across the state line to Missouri, where the police can’t touch them.

Why was this so crucial? Because up until just after the Great Depression ended, state police had no authority to apprehend criminals who had not committed crimes in their state. So Kansas police couldn’t track Moze and Addie down if they crossed over to Missouri.

Criminals weren’t, however, completely free. In 1908, Theodor Roosevelt approved a new national law enforcement agency that could function in any state and help apprehend criminals who had crossed the state line. At that time, it was named the U.S. Bureau of Investigation, but in 1935, it was renamed to what we know now as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or the F.B.I.

Photo Credit: Newspaper story of the ambush (initiated by the U.S. Bureau of Investigation) that killed Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, 23 May 1934: Bradford Timeline/Flickr/CC BY NC 2.0

This agency helped crack some of the most notorious cases, including:

– The Lindbergh baby case (1932): The infamous case of the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh’s infant son prompted Hoover (head of the Bureau at the time) to send out agents to look for marked bills of the ransom money to try and track down the perpetrator.

– Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow (1934): Bureau agents in nine states collaborated to eventually track the killing couple down in Louisiana and create an ambush that led to their deaths.

– Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (1950s): This is sort of a forgotten case, but it was huge at the time (and if you’ve read poet Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar, you’ll know it). At the height of the Cold War scare, a spy ring was discovered to be transferring secrets from the atomic development center in New Mexico to the Russians. The FBI traced these messages to a scientist named Julius Rosenberg, and he and his wife, along with several others, were arrested in 1951. Both refused to confess and were executed in 1953.

Book 3 of my Grave Sisters Mysteries doesn’t involve Oliver Clarke, the Gyver district attorney, because the sisters focus on helping Daniel Frazer, the Moody County D.A., with his case. But Oliver has his own case, which is helping the Bureau capture criminals who kidnapped a child and left her for dead (yes, the case in the book is inspired by the Lindbergh baby kidnapping).

A Weekend Getaway Murder is available now for preorder, as it comes out this summer, so grab your copy 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!

International Women’s Day: Quotes that Inspire

Happy International Women’s Day!

This day has become pretty special to me in the last few years because I went back to work as an English language teacher for business professionals all over the world. I work with a lot of women from different countries. I hear about their struggles and their triumphs and their views about women’s place in their country and in the world, and I see what they are trying to do for their daughters.

So, if anything, this blog post is a tribute to their wisdom, strength, and insights.

If you want to get to know some wise, strong, and insightful American women living through tougher times than ours, don’t forget to check out my Adele Gossling Mysteries series and my new Grave Sisters Mysteries series!

School of Hard Knocks: What School Was Like in the Early 20th Century

I’m a teacher as well as a writer. I got into teaching pretty much by surprise. I was always very shy and introverted, the kid who slouched down in her seat in the back so the teacher wouldn’t call on her. When my parents suggested I do a teaching certificate when I was in college, mostly because they couldn’t see any practical profession for me as an English major, I shuddered. I didn’t end up getting that teaching certificate, as I had no interest in teaching children. But when I got into a master’s program and was offered a part-time instructorship teaching freshmen English composition courses as a way to pay part of my tuition, I grabbed it. Shockingly, I found I loved teaching adults (if you can consider college-aged students adults). In 2004, I transitioned from teaching college English classes to teaching ESL to business professionals. I still do that today, and I still love it.

Maybe that’s why teachers figure prominently in several of my books. But my teachers are victims not only of murder but of the rather unpolished and sometimes brutal school system in America in the early 20th century.

A typical schoolhouse in a small town or rural area in the early 20th century. Note the one-room structure and the mix of students (younger and older) posing in front of it.

Photo Credit: A one-room schoolhouse with the teacher and students, north of Kearny, Nebraska, 1910, Solomon D. Butcher (photographer), Library of Congress: LOC’s Public Domain Archive/Public Domain

Compared to schools today, the American school system, especially in small towns and rural areas (where many of my books take place) was pretty harsh. Parents complain today of crowded classrooms, but in the early 20th century, school was a one-room affair that packed in kids from the first to the eighth grade. The younger kids learned the basics while the older ones did more self-study. Older children were expected to help younger ones with their lessons. As you might expect, the separate spheres dictated some differences in what boys and girls were taught. Although both were taught the basics (reading, writing, and math), girls were taught subjects considered more appropriate for their future station in life (like sewing and mending) while boys were allowed to tackle subjects like science and biology.

Perhaps one of the most surprising things about American schools at the turn of the 20th century is that corporal punishment was legal and widely used in many schools. It wasn’t unheard of for a child to get a sharp rap on the knuckles or on the palm of his or her hand with the teacher’s ruler if they misbehaved. For example, the murder of a schoolteacher in 1915 by one of her former students was partly provoked by her and the school principal’s liberal use of this kind of punishment (you can read more about that case here).

Teachers didn’t have it easy in the early 20th century. Surprisingly, most teachers were men up until that time. Things changed during the Progressive Era when more women went to work. Teaching was one of the few respectable professions for a young woman (some as young as seventeen), and school districts could get away with paying women much less than they paid the men.

But, as those who have read the first book of my Grave Sisters Mysteries know, the teaching profession bound these young ladies to rigid and restrictive rules. They had to dress a certain way and were forbidden to do certain things, like take in some of the outside leisure activities that were becoming popular at the time (think: vaudeville, moving pictures, and even drug store soda fountains). They were forbidden to go out with men and couldn’t even be seen with any man who wasn’t family. They were expected to save most of their paltry earnings for retirement so they wouldn’t be a burden on the community in their old age. That left them with barely enough to support themselves.

Another one of my books that features the death of a teacher is A Wordless Death. That book is on sale now for a great price, and you can find out more about it here.

The (Not so) Roaring Presidents of the Roaring Twenties

President’s Day is on February 16 in America. In spite of how people feel about the current president, presidents have had a major influence on the nation throughout the years, and each president, in many ways, reflects the era in which he serves.

Some decades have had more presidents than others. The 1840s and the 1880s tie for the most presidents in America, as people saw five during each of those decades (that’s a lot of presidents!) But the 1920s, when my Grave Sisters Mysteries is set, saw its share of presidents too. The decade had no less than three presidents who occupied the Oval Office at one time or another.

In many ways, these three presidents (Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover) represented the ethos of the 1920s. Since the Republicans dominated politics at the time, the men favored business and incorporated things like low taxes for large corporations, high important tarrifs, and a hands-off approach to business regulations that sharply contrasted the pre-war anti-trust politics. Not surprisingly, they embraced a free market, which was partly responsible for the economic boom of the Roaring Twenties. They also shied away from the global market, focusing more on domestic issues (though not focusing on them enough, as we’ll see with the Hoover administration).

Photo Credit: Warren Harding and a group of men outside the White House, Washington D.C., 1923, Harris & Ewing Collection, Library of Congress: Public Domain Media/Public Domain

However, each of the presidents faced very different challenges. Harding, who took office in the first third of the decade, was dealing with a nation devastated by the effects of World War I. His campaign promise was a “return to normalcy”. Consequently, his approach to politics was so laid back that many people thought him lazy and incompetent. It may be that this laid-back attitude was the reason why his administration was riddled with scandal. Of special note was the Teapot Dome Scandal, where the Secretary of the Interior accepted bribes from private oil companies to whom he had leased reserves in Teapot Dome, Wyoming, and in California. In addition, the head of the Veterans Bureau (established in 1921 and which is featured in Book 2 of the Grave Sisters Mysteries) ran off with nearly $250 million, though he did return and was tried and convicted after Harding’s death in 1923.

Photo Credit: Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover walking outside the White House, 1928, Harris & Ewing Collection, Library of Congress: Picryl/No known restrictions

Succeeding Harding was Coolidge. If Harding was thought incompetent, Coolidge was thought ineffectual. In fact, he really didn’t do much for the country other than clean up the mess left behind by the Harding administration. He was known for his silence, and his involvement in politics was quite minimal by today’s (and even 1920s’) standards. Nevertheless, this uber laid-back attitude was popular with voters, and he lasted until 1929. In fact, one of the reasons why he wasn’t re-elected was because he chose not to run with no reason other than “I choose not to run.” How’s that for a man of few words?

You would think, with two Republican presidencies marred with scandal, incompetence, and inefficiency, the Democrats would win the election at the end of the 1920s, but such was not the case. This was mainly because the Democratic candidate, Alfred E. Smith, had several strikes against him that made him unpopular with many voters. He was Irish and Catholic, for one. It seems incredible now that Americans would be so prejudiced as to consider these aspects a drawback, but it would take another 30-odd years until they voted an Irish Catholic into the White House (that would be John F. Kennedy, of course). Smith was also anti-Prohibition and had big-city manners, which didn’t go over well with the small-town voters of the time. So Hoover got the presidency. However, the Republican laid-back politics and free market favor proved to be exactly what the country did not need at the time. Less than eight months after he was inaugurated, the stock market crashed, and the years Hoover served were the most difficult of the Great Depression. He was defeated when he ran again in 1933 for a president who could take the country by the hand and create interventions that would pull America out of the biggest economic disaster in history (that president, by the way, was Franklin D. Roosevelt

My Grave Sisters Mysteries begins at the start of Harding’s administration, and you can expect the series to run well into Hoover’s and beyond. You can get the first book of the Grave Sisters Mysteries, The Case of the Washed-Up Corpse, here.

Forensic Pathology in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries

Mourning practices were an art form in the 19th and early 20th centuries. When I did research on mourning for my Gilded Age family saga, the Waxwood Series, back in 2022, I found no shortage of information. People during these eras had a fascination with death that is almost the antithesis of how we approach death in the 21st century.

However, when I started doing research on the more technical and scientific aspects of dealing with the dead for my Grave Sisters Mysteries series, the information was surprisingly lacking or difficult to find. As Deborah Blum emphasized in this TED-ED video, in our CSI-friendly era, crime investigation relies heavily on picking apart the corpse (both physically and emotionally). But 19th and early 20th century crime investigation focused much more on clues, witnesses, and suspects, and less on the victim’s body.

In the 19th and early 20th century, you couldn’t even say American forensic pathology was in its infancy. More like it was in the womb. The role of medical examiner was pretty ad hoc and didn’t officially exist in many places until the 1930s. In addition, many medical examiners were not trained specifically in pathology, consisting mostly of local doctors who were good at treating the living but had little experience with examining the dead. Both my Adele Gossling Mysteries and Grave Sisters Mysteries feature this type of medical examiner, though both doctors have enough experience to know what they’re doing. In contrast, in the latter series, Helena Wright (the middle Grave sister), is the mortician of the family funeral home, and her training provides her with more in-depth knowledge of pathology (something the medical examiner resents!)

Medical examiners and pathologists were, like policemen and mayors, government-appointed, and as such, subject to the kind of corruption that ran rampant in the 19th and early 20th centuries (until the Progressive movement called for reforms). They could be bribed to cover up evidence for various reasons. Maybe the victim was a well-respected citizen, and the pathology brought up something that pointed toward a less-than-stellar life the influential family didn’t want made public (like certain diseases). Or maybe the examination of the victim showed foul play that would require important people to be involved in the case, who didn’t want to be involved. The examination might even implicate someone important to the town in a dastardly crime, so evidence needed to be covered up or distorted. I’m reading a true crime book right now about the death of a woman in the early 20th century, where the writers surmise this is exactly what happened.

Photo credit: Leather doctor’s bag and its contents dated between 1890 and 1930, Wellcome Collection Gallery: Fae/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 4.0

Thankfully, things started to change in the 1920s. Law enforcement began to take forensic experts and medical examiners more seriously and saw them as a vital part of the investigation rather than just part of their standard procedure. One example that changed the way the New York police thought about forensic pathology happened in 1923. A housewife living in one of the tenement buildings in the city was found dead in her apartment. At first, the case seemed cut and dried – accidental death by poisoning from a gas oven (not an uncommon thing in the early 20th century, as gas was the main source of power in tenements). However, because of reforms going on in the city at the time, the coroner was also a trained medical man and was able to determine that death had not occurred due to carbon monoxide poisoning (interestingly, based on the color of the dead woman’s skin) and in fact had been strangled (as there were marks on her neck). Later, it was discovered her husband had indeed strangled her (for the insurance money) and had tried to stage the murder to look like an accident, which the authorities almost bought.

Pathology plays a role not only in my Grave Sisters Mysteries (as I discussed above), but in Book 3 of my Adele Gossling Mysteries. A doctor is asked to write out a new death certificate because what looked like an accident proves to be anything but. It was possible to retract the death certificate if further examination suggested otherwise. This is what starts off the investigation into Thea Marsh’s death in the book.

Death At Will has been chosen by Barnes & Noble as a favorite reading year pick! To celebrate, I’ve discounted the book to $2.99. You can grab it here. And did you know Book 1 of the series, The Carnation Murder, is free? If you haven’t yet gotten into this series, you can start now by getting your copy of the first book for free here.

And if you want to see some more fascinating early 20th century pathology at work (without the gore!), check out my Grave Sisters Mysteries! Book 2 of the series was just released last November and is on Barnes & Noble’s Top Indie Favorites list for this month. The book is still at a nice discount of $3.99, so you can get The Missing Witness now.