GIVING THE PAST A VOICE by Triss Stein

LUCY BURDETTE: Today the Jungle Reds welcome another old friend, Triss Stein (and by that I mean seasoned, not old) who has a brand new Brooklyn mystery to tell us about. She tackles the difficult question of what kind of amateur sleuth is believable and what brings excitement to the page. I love the way she describes her process of solving a tricky question– I think you will too. Welcome Triss!

TRISS STEIN: I am thrilled to be a guest again of the authors at Jungle Red and to join the conversation with such avid readers.

Four books ago, I knew what I wanted. I wanted to write about Brooklyn’s varied and rapidly changing neighborhoods. I wanted a protagonist with a good reason to wander around asking legitimate – and sometimes unexpectedly dangerous – questions. And I wanted to include some of each neighborhood’s fascinating history.  So I had an idea: Erica Donato, a historian heroine writing a dissertation about how Brooklyn neighborhoods change. Her research would be a great excuse to send her out and about in her fascinating and exasperating hometown. She would be an unusual amateur sleuth but a plausible one.  Or at least as plausible as any amateur sleuth in a series.

There is a little, tiny flaw here I didn't see at first. Erica might like to spend a day in the library looking at old newspapers – and so do I- but it doesn’t make for an interesting novel.  How could I bring my Brooklyn voices to life?  I think that is part of the appeal for anyone who writes fiction about the past, or reads it.

I was part way through the first, Brooklyn Bones, when I realized that this is what was missing.  For that one, about a time when young people were coming to New York to join the hippie life, notes left by runaways, and a cop who saved them, seemed the answer. For the second, Brooklyn Graves, which is partly about  Tiffany’s all-women glass design studio, a discovered cache of turn-of-the-last-century letters became Erica’s responsibility to catalogue. This is based on a real discovery and I had great fun writing letters home from that long-ago imagined career woman. For Brooklyn Secrets, which is about the then and now very tough Brownsville neighborhood, “then” wasn’t impossibly long ago. Erica meets a couple of elderly ladies with differing memories about the not-so-good old days.

Do you see the pitfall?  I will run out of fresh ways to bring in those voices. Brooklyn Wars, the new book, is about the Brooklyn Navy Yard, which began when John Adams was president and was closed forever in 1967. It built famed ships the Maine, the Arizona and the Missouri, and operated around the clock during World War II. I had intended all along to write about wartime Brooklyn but soon realized was too late to make that generation present in a contemporary mystery. I ended up telling the more recent sad story of the Yard’s contentious closing, but I still wanted to give a nod to the glory years. I especially wanted to send a salute to the Brooklyn girls who put on coveralls and went to work welding ships. It’s a great story that took place just a couple of miles from where I am writing this.

My solution was a diary found among old papers in Erica’s mother-in-law’s attic.  I worried that it was too corny, too girlish, too overdone.  But, I thought, but, this is a sub-plot about a young woman. She is young enough in the beginning to write about Tyrone Power and fresh boys and parental rules, and, in the end, old enough to purposefully put away her childish things.  Her name is Philomena and she became very real to me.  In fact I gave her a story all her own, in her very own voice,  “Girls With Tools,” that was published in the Poisoned Pen anthology, Bound by Mystery. I hope you will enjoy meeting her.

And PS.  The next book will have some history that is in living memory and ongoing. Thank goodness, those players can speak for themselves.

So what do you think, readers? Does having the past come back to life – without ghosts!- make the story more compelling? And writers, have you ever had to solve this problem? Did it work?

About Brooklyn Wars: The once great, later abandoned, Brooklyn Navy Yard was in the throes of rebirth. All Erica set out to do was attend a community meeting about some proposed changes and so witness history in the making. She wasn’t expecting to witness the murder of a widely disliked city official. She wasn’t expecting to learn she has a link to the murdered man’s ex-wife or to be contacted by the one person who might miss him. And in the meantime, her adviser her wants her to skip the chapter altogether, her mother-in-law wants her to research an aunt who repaired ships at the wartime Yard and her daughter only wanted to talk about her sweet sixteen party. 

And here are some ways you can order the book:

https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781464207198

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/brooklyn-wars-triss-stein/1125827026?ean=9781464207198

https://www.amazon.com/Brooklyn-Wars-Erica-Donato-Mysteries/dp/1464207194/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1499867753&sr=1-2&keywords=brooklyn+wars