Confessions of a Super Fan by Katie Tietjen

 

LUCY BURDETTE: Back in April, I did an event for the Friends of the Library in Durham, CT. There I met Katie Tietjen, a brand new author with Crooked Lane Books. Since then, I attended her book launch at RJ Julia Booksellers, read her wonderful debut, Death in the Details, and persuaded her to blog with us. Welcome Katie!! 

KATIE TIETJEN: Since 2017, I’ve been stalking a dead heiress.

Here’s what you need to know first: Before Frances Glessner Lee became the mother of forensic science, she made dollhouses. 

Lots of them.

After all, domestic arts and crafts were a socially appropriate hobby for a good little heiress—and she was great at it. 

One year, for her parents’ anniversary, she created an exact replica of their beloved Chicago Symphony Orchestra. She nailed every detail, from the musicians themselves to their instruments, including miniscule violins that actually played. 

Decades later—after she married, raised three children, and divorced—she began putting her miniature-making skills to a very different use: death investigation.

I know, I know—that sounds like an incongruous leap, but stay with me. 

Lee had become fascinated by the field of legal medicine. The more she learned about America’s corrupt coroner system and the haphazard way investigators trampled all over potential evidence, the more it ate at her. Sloppy miscarriages of justice in the real world clashed terribly with the tiny, precise, orderly worlds she created. 

And so she decided to use the second to try and fix the first.

Photo courtesy of the Glessner House Museum

Lee created eighteen Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, each one of which depicted a detailed scene of someone’s demise. Was it murder? Suicide? Accident? Police officers from across the country attended Lee’s seminars at Harvard to learn better investigative strategies from studying her nutshells. 

It was the perfect mashup of the traditionally feminine art of miniatures and the traditionally masculine world of legal medicine, and Lee existed in the small center section of this very unique Venn diagram.

photo courtesy of the Glessner House Museum

As soon as I heard an NPR story about the Nutshells being on rare public display at the Smithsonian, I immediately booked a trip to Washington, DC. Within the next few years, I would also travel to New Hampshire and Chicago on Frances Glessner Lee-related missions.

Meanwhile, I started drafting fiction inspired by Lee. While walking around the Smithsonian, I decided it’d be fun to write a series of murder mysteries based around the different scenes depicted in the Nutshells. For Death in the Details, my inspiration was the one called “Barn,” and it shows a farmer hanging from a noose in (you guessed it) a barn.

Like Lee, my fictional protagonist, Maple, has a strong commitment to justice, an incredible eye for detail, an almost ruthless work ethic—and a penchant for making dollhouses, of course. Unlike Lee, Maple grew up in poverty and is a recent WWII widow who finds herself suddenly strapped for cash. 

Though she trained as a lawyer, she can’t get anyone to hire her in that field. To make ends meet, she decides to make and sell custom dollhouses, but when she goes to deliver the first one, she discovers her customer’s dead body hanging from a noose in his own barn. 

Maple sees details at the scene that could point to foul play; when the sheriff dismisses her concerns, she builds a miniature re-creation of the scene, marches into his office with it, and begins walking him through all the ways he messed up. 

You can imagine how well that goes (hint: he throws her out of his office), but by the end of the story, Maple figures out what happened to Elijah Wallace. Order is restored, at least to some extent, and justice is served.

I’m grateful to Frances Glessner Lee for so many things—first and foremost, her incredible work to advance the field of legal medicine and her willingness to break into a space not many women were occupying.

Photo by Karen Wylie Moore

But I’m also grateful to her for providing my imagination with a launching pad, for letting me study her Nutshells and think what if…? I had so much fun writing this book, and at the end of the day, the credit for that goes to her. 

What person (real or fictional) do you find so fascinating that you can't get them out of your head? 

Katie Tietjen is an award-winning writer, teacher, and school librarian. A Frances Glessner Lee enthusiast, she’s traveled thousands of miles to visit her homes, see her nutshells, and even attend her birthday party. Katie lives in New England with her husband and two sons. Death in the Details is her first novel. (FGL photos credit to The Glessner House Museum (Chicago)

ABOUT DEATH IN THE DETAILS: Maple Bishop is ready to put WWII and the grief of losing her husband Bill behind her.

But when she discovers that Bill left her penniless, Maple realizes she could lose her Vermont home next and sets out to make money the only way she knows how: by selling her intricately crafted dollhouses. Business is off to a good start—until Maple discovers her first customer dead, his body hanging precariously in his own barn.

Something about the supposed suicide rubs Maple the wrong way, but local authorities brush off her concerns. Determined to help them see “what’s big in what’s small,” Maple turns to what she knows best, painstakingly recreating the gruesome scene in miniature: death in a nutshell.

With the help of a rookie officer named Kenny, Maple uses her macabre miniature to dig into the dark undercurrents of her sleepy town, where everyone seems to have a secret—and a grudge. But when her nosy neighbor goes missing and she herself becomes a suspect, it’ll be up to Maple to find the devil in the details—and put him behind bars.