Life Then and Now by Peg Cochran

LUCY BURDETTE: Today I'm delighted to welcome a good friend from the Mystery Lovers Kitchen blog, Peg Cochran. Besides being a wonderful cook, she writes multiple series, including a historical mystery series taking place in the 1930s. I'll let her tell you about the new book--welcome Peg!

PEG COCHRAN: I want to thank Lucy and the Jungle Reds for having me.  I’ve long admired the blog so this is a great honor!

My historical series, Murder, She Reported, is set in the late 1930s in New York City.  Both my parents grew up in New York City and became teenagers during those years.  I’ve been fascinated with the 1930s and 1940s since I heard their stories of eating at the Automat or Chock Full O’Nuts, listening to Tommy Dorsey and Glen Miller and dancing the jitterbug.   I’ve also always been a huge fan of old movies and at one time I was positive that I’d grow up to live in a Manhattan high-rise with a view of the city and a martini glass in my hand! (I did eventually live in Manhattan with a view of Queens but sans the martinis—I hated the taste.)  One of the things I love about the time period is how different it is from today…and yet how similar in many ways.  

Much of the action in Murder, She Encountered, the third book in the series, takes place at the 1939 New York World’s Fair—billed as the “World of Tomorrow.”   

Carrier debuted air conditioning at the fair and became a very popular attraction during the sweltering summer heat.  Dupont previewed nylon stockings that were less expensive and more durable than silk hosiery and the Westinghouse exhibit included Elektro—a seven-foot tall robot with a 700 word vocabulary.  We now take air conditioning, nylon pantyhose and robots—used for everything from manufacturing to surgery—for granted.

A lot of what I learned during my research helped to shape my characters and create an exciting story.  Take one upper-class woman who graduated from Wellesley College and who wants to do something with her life and put her in a time period when she is expected to live at home until she lands a suitable husband and moves into her own home to raise a family, host dinner parties and lunch with her girlfriends—and watch the explosions occur and the sparks fly!   

From the beginning, Elizabeth “Biz” Adams has other plans.  She’d studied photography and much to her mother’s dismay, lands a job at the Daily Trumpet, a tabloid newspaper where she starts as a gal Friday and eventually becomes a crime photographer and a woman working in a man’s world.

Women like Biz fought the good fight for the rest of us who now have opportunities unheard of in her time although we are still battling certain issues like equal pay or the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment or validation of the #MeToo movement.

In Biz’s day there were distinct divisions between the classes—upper class women marry within their social class—an appropriate young man in banking, law or medicine who knows how to play tennis and bridge and knows who and how much to tip at restaurants like the Stork Club.  

Biz again bucks expectations by falling for Sal Marino, a NYC detective who she met while photographing a murder.  Not only is he not from her social class, he’s Italian, his parents are immigrants and they live on the lower Eastside instead of the upper Eastside of Manhattan—all strikes against him in the eyes of Biz’s parents and friends.

America tended toward isolationism at the time—a committee called America First was formed toward the end of the 1930s.  In May of 1939, more than 900 Jews fled Hitler’s Europe aboard the S. S. St. Louis seeking asylum in the United States but were not permitted entry into the country.  Biz is appalled that these poor souls were turned away while the prevailing view was that the United States ought to curtail immigration.  Today we are still striving to regulate immigration and provide a fair and equitable process for those seeking sanctuary within our borders.

All of this, as you can imagine, created a lot of (delicious) conflict between Biz and her parents and friends.  But like Katherine Hepburn, a leading lady of the time who insisted on wearing trousers when most women didn’t, Biz is determined to live life on her own terms and not be bound by the restrictions of the era. 

In Murder, She Encountered, her romance with Marino is heating up and she is saving money for her own apartment—all bound to send her friends and family into a tizzy!

Red readers: If you had lived in the 1930s, would you have conformed to expectations or would you have rebelled like Biz?

Mystery writing lets Peg indulge her curiosity under the guise of “work” (aka research). As a kid, she read the entire set of children’s encyclopedias her parents gave her and has been known to read the dictionary. She put pen to paper at age seven when she wrote plays and forced her cousins to perform them at Christmas dinner. She switched to mysteries when she discovered the perfect hiding place for a body down the street from her house.

When she’s not writing, she spends her time reading, cooking, spoiling her granddaughter and checking her books’ stats on Amazon. A former Jersey girl, Peg now resides in Michigan with her husband. She is the author of the Murder, She Reported series, the Cranberry Cove series, the Farmer’s Daughter series, the Gourmet De-Lite series, the Lucille series and the Sweet Nothing Lingerie series (written as Meg London.) Find her on Facebook and her website.

**And the winners of Tuesday's books are Daisy Dilly (Vicki) for Sherry Harris's SELL LOW, SWEET HARRIET, and MARILYN (ewatvess) for Barbara Ross's SEALED OFF.