What We're Writing: Rhys Researches

RHYS BOWEN:  For once I am actually not writing. Earlier this month I sent off my latest stand-alone, ISLAND OF LOST BOYS, to my editor, did the copy edits on my next Georgie called PERIL IN PARIS, and the page proofs on ALL THAT IS HIDDEN, the next Molly book, written with daughter Clare.

Clare should have been here now, staying with me in California while we work on the next Molly book, but alas she is stuck at home with Covid. After being so careful all this time her husband had to take a group of students to El Salvador where they promptly all got Covid. He waited until he tested negative to fly home but then still gave it to Clare.

So we are both working remotely but we’re still in the hunter/gatherer stage: this is the part of the writing process that I love—searching the internet, finding out new and exciting things that can be part of our story and deciding how to weave them in. The new book is set in the Catskills—in the fledgling bungalow colonies. At that time the exodus of Jews from the city to escape the summer heat and disease was still new. There were as yet no resorts. Enterprising Jewish  farmers offered rooms or built primitive outbuildings at reasonable rents and quickly saw the possibilities.  Anyone who could escaped from the packed conditions of city life, where typhoid and other diseases ran rampant during the steamy summer.

And so we decided that Molly’s neighbors Sid and Gus would have to visit Sid’s grandparents who live in the Catskills. That was the starting point: and then we discovered the artist’s colony to which they would obviously be drawn. A theater director Clare knows is putting on summer stock in a theater in the Catskills, AND the theater was in existence in those days. Perhaps Sid wants to be in the show.

When I was in New York for the Edgars I met up with an old friend who is well-connected in the New York Jewish community. We’ve had fun adventures over the years, once being locked in Gramercy Park and having to be rescued. She’s offered to help with research and vet what we write. “Well of course I know Grossinger’s grandson if that helps,” she said. She will also be invaluable in getting the tone right—Sid’s family coming from Germany two generations ago , educated, worldly and well-established yet other characters new immigrants and much more conservative in their religion and habits.

Clare’s research has turned up other gems. A newly formed state park near where we want to set the story. Also near was a bluestone mine—an early form of cement vital for New York street building. An environmental theme, we ask ourselves?

And so the pieces of the story come together from the research. We already knew what the main thread of plot would be (not going to tell you). But this is how environment will enrich and twist the plot. Such fun.  I start out knowing where I want to set a book, who might be murdered and why. Then I do my detailed research. Usually it involves going to the place, walking the streets my heroine will walk and noticing what I see. Sometimes I spot something that will come into the story, maybe change it.  But just soaking in details makes it a richer story: for THE VENICE SKETCHBOOK the basket being lowered from an upstairs window into a boat below and being raised again with the morning newspaper. Little gems you can’t make up. 

For my upcoming WHERE THE SKY BEGINS I visited the old air bases in Lincolnshire, climbed inside a Lancaster Bomber, looked at flight suits, parachutes, read letters home from pilots.

I’m not going to be able to visit the Catskills before we write this which is annoying. I have driven through the area before so I know what it looks like and thank you to Google Earth—I shall be visiting in often, I suspect. Also I have Clare to do the lion’s share of research now. We know about the bungalows and the kochalayn (the bungalows that had their own kitchen!) But would they have played mahjong in those days? Would there have been entertainers? Maybe a family’s entertainment is so good that others come to watch and a tent is set up and…

A challenge will be how we bring Molly, good Irish girl, into this Jewish setting.

So we get ready to start writing. And dear Reds and readers—if any of you have bungalow memories or heard your grandparents talking about their time in the Borscht Belt, please do share.