A Time To Celebrate—And Reflect! By Katherine Hall Page

JENN McKINLAY: What a treat to have our friend Katherine Hall Page visit us today to talk about her latest Faith Fairchild mystery! Take it away, Katherine!

     Today is Syttende Mai, Norwegian for the Seventeenth of May or Constitution Day and celebrated not only all over Norway, but by Norwegian migrant communities across the world (think lutefisk and lingonberries in Minnesota, waffler in Cardiff, and a huge parade in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn). The day celebrates the signing of Norway’s Constitution in 1814, but earlier celebrations were a protest at being ceded to Sweden (story for another time and source of jokes belittling that country made by my grandfather when I was growing up). My mother was Norwegian, and we always had something special for dinner. It joined the 4th of July as our national holidays. Today I’ve been thinking of the 17th of May as a slightly different kind of celebration, one of survival. The brutal Nazi occupation of Norway with three concentration camps and other horrors forbid the celebration, and also wearing colors of the Norwegian flag (red, white, and blue) on clothing. Norway was liberated on May 8, 1945, and the flag continues to be a strong symbol of freedom, as is Constitution Day with its children’s parades, more diverse these days with the country’s increasing ethnic diversity. 

     The Body in the Web is about a crime, but the book is set against the backdrop of the pandemic, survival. I kept a daily journal, jotting a few sentences about things happening in our lives and outside the Pod (three—our son under the same roof happily) ‚ what we ate and how I “foraged” for essentials. Once it was safe to be with people and I started the book, everyone had stories to tell—some tragic, but also many about their ways of coping, ingenious, even humorous. Similar to one of the subplots in the book, I learned about a postponed very elaborate wedding, and plan for a honeymoon baby prompting thorny discussions since no one could pick a new date, for either. Biological clock ticking, baby first? I detailed other issues. Unlike paper goods, there were many shortages, that could not have been predicted— thread since we were all stitching up masks, cream cheese! and the search for yeast alternatives. 

     Faith Fairchild and family form a Pod with son Ben home from college, daughter Amy a senior in high school and husband Tom, all dealing with their lives remotely. Faith’s catering business is suspended. When a close friend’s death is deemed a suicide, Faith must solve what she knows is a murder remotely as well. She can’t go knock on doors, face suspects eye-to-eye. The book begins on January 14, 2021. Here are the first few sentences: 

      “Faith Fairchild set her phone down with the first sigh of relief she had felt for almost eight months…Such was the effect of the call from her husband Tom, the Reverend Thomas Fairchild, with the stunning news that as one of the local VA hospital’s chaplains he was eligible for vaccination and was on his way to get the shot. A simple sentence, a series of words turned the room from the everyday to a rare setting she would always remember as the beginning flicker of hope.” 

     I thought the book needed to begin with this emotion since it will also look back at those worst weeks and months, we experienced beginning in late February 2020. Norway’s Resistance Movement is storied and today I am recalling the food packages we sent after the war and how desperate things were there but hope never died. Norway survived and although it is a very wealthy nation now, there is still a sense of remembrance, cherishing the survival of that time, passing this down to children, grand and great grandchildren. 

     I received a number of comments about rereading or reading The Body in the Lighthouse, which I was writing just before 9/11 and had to put aside until I could write again after some months. The following is part of the Author’s Note in the new book and especially resonates today: 

Rereading the Lighthouse note, I’ve been struck by how I could simply have copied it, changed the date, several descriptive sentences and it would apply—saying what I want to say to you now. “There were no degrees of separation on September 11” I wrote and that was true at the start of the pandemic. “We are all in this together.” I am not naïve and there are deep divisions in our country, but throughout the pandemic, and continuing as each new variant like the Hydra’s head raises fears and causes a spike in cases, people helped each other. Acts of kindness were enumerable. The heroic work of healthcare workers of all kinds, putting their lives on hold and on the line will be remembered when the history of all this is written in the future. The future. At the close of the Lighthouse note, I write “Just as many of us date things from before the Cuban missile crisis and before the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Jr., we now have another ‘before’.” Now we have an even greater “before”. “Pre-pandemic” has entered our daily conversations. “I saw someone…” “That was…” and so forth. After September 11th, I mourned a world lost to our children that had seemed a place safe from such an attack. Those children are adults now, many with children of their own, and I mourn the loss of the pre-pandemic world for them. The toll that remote learning, isolation, and loss has taken in multiple forms can never be remedied. As we enter in what is being termed, “Living with Covid”, my wish for you, dear readers, is the same as I expressed all those years ago. That we hold on to hope—and in every way possible, each other. Altogether. 

     And so, as we think back and look forward, let’s enjoy whatever heritage we represent—I’ll have some Aquavit (Dad’s Anglo Saxons might have had ale) saying “Skål”. Cheers to all of you!! 

      P.S. A photo of much much younger me wearing my Vestfold (the part of Eastern Norway on the Oslofjord) Bunad, traditional dress for the holiday!! 

And as an extra treat here is Faith Fairchild's Beer Bread recipe: 

Katherine Hall Page is the award-winning writer of the Faith Fairchild series (Wm Morrow/Avon), a recipient of the Agatha for Best First, Best Short Story, and Best Mystery Novel as well as other Agatha, Edgar, Mary Higgins Clark, and Maine Literary Awards nominees. She received Malice Domestic’s Lifetime Achievement Award and another—Crime Master—from the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. The Body in the Web is the 26th in the series. She has also published a cookbook, Have Faith in your Kitchen, and books for YAs and Middle Grade readers. A New Jersey native, she lives in Massachusetts and Maine. 

www.webmaster@katherine-hall-page.org