Murder and Mystery in Brooklyn

Please welcome my guest, Triss Stein, a small-town girl from New York state's dairy country who has spent most of her adult life living and working in New York City. This gives her a useful double vision of a stranger and a resident for writing mysteries about Brooklyn, her ever-fascinating, ever-changing, ever-challenging adopted home. Brooklyn Graves was published by Poison Pen Press in March and is second in the series, after Brooklyn Bones. Triss is active in both Sisters in Crime and Mystery Writers of America and is on the board of the MWA NY chapter. Welcome, Triss!

 

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Judy has kindly invited me to write a guest blog as I am blog touring for my new book, Brooklyn Graves.

This is the second book in a new series about Brooklyn, after Brooklyn Bones. Though I have lived in Brooklyn for many decades I am not a native. Believe me, there is a difference, and the question I am asked most often is how I came to write a Brooklyn series. It is a multi-part answer.

I grew up in New York, the state ( really upstate - near Canada) but I had many relatives in New York, the city. It was not the big bad city to me; it was a goal. I planned to have a bachelor girl apartment there someday. Clearly, I was influenced by Doris Day movies, but I did live in New York, the city, as a young woman.

I worked for the public library system in Brooklyn, and they liked to move us around to different neighborhoods. Even then, it seemed to me those neighborhoods were a lot like small towns. People didn't say they were from New York or even Brooklyn; they said they were from Red Hook or East New York. They might even say they were from a mini-neighborhood or project - Ditmas Park or Linden Houses. They maybe went into the big bad city (that would be Manhattan) once a year.

When I started thinking about a new mystery series, it seemed to me that no one was really setting mysteries against the background of ordinary life in New York. Most of us don't walk the mean streets, trade in drugs, join youth gangs. We have jobs, families, local issues, though they all have a special New York flavor. Or at least we like to think so.

By then I owned a home in Brooklyn, had my own neighborhood, raised my daughters there, and sent them to public schools. I had a small garden! Could I write a series about that, set in different neighborhoods where their infinite variety of history, culture, quirks and - of course! It’s a mystery series - conflicts? And crimes old and new?

My heroine is an urban historian in training whose work gives her a reason to ask questions that - sometimes- people don't want to answer. In Brooklyn Bones, the setting is her own neighborhood (and mine, not by coincidence) gentrifying Park Slope, and her own house, where an ugly secret is uncovered during renovation. In Brooklyn Graves, the setting is a Brooklyn landmark, beautiful Green-Wood cemetery, where there is history, memories, and art worth serious money. And of course, there are living people with needs, desires and conflicts.

The next one will be about a tough neighborhood, then and now, that has produced generations of criminals and boxers. After that? Who knows? I'm never going to run out of Brooklyn stories.  If you would like to see some odd ones - wild parakeets and Winston Churchill's mother (yes, she was a Brooklyn girl) - my website has a tab for Brooklyn Fun Facts. http://trissstein.com/brooklyn-fun-facts/com Those are stories I haven't figured out how to put in a mystery. Yet.  

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And here's the blurb for Brooklyn Graves--

 

 A brutally murdered friend who was a family man with not an enemy in the world. A box full of charming letters home, written a century ago by an unknown young woman working at the famed Tiffany studios. Historic Green-Wood cemetery, where a decrepit mausoleum with stunning stained glass windows is now off limits, even to a famed art historian.

Suddenly, all of this, from the tragic to the merely eccentric, becomes part of Erica Donato’s life. She is a close friend of the murdered man’s family and feels compelled to help them. She is arbitrarily assigned to catalogue the valuable letters for an arrogant expert visiting the history museum where she works. She is the person who took that same expert to see the mausoleum windows.

Her life is full enough. She is a youngish single mother of a teen, an oldish history grad student, lowest person on the museum’s totem pole. She doesn’t need more responsibility, but she gets it anyway as secrets start emerging in the most unexpected places: an admirable life was not what it seemed, confiding letters conceal their most important story, and too many people have hidden agendas.

In Brooklyn Graves a story of old families, old loves and hidden ties merges with new crimes and the true value of art, against the background of the splendid old cemetery and the life of modern Brooklyn.

 



 

 

 

Digging up my roots

I realized today how little I have explored my roots. Oh, I know who my grandparents were, and I’ve actually done some work on Ancestry.com. I can trace my father’s MacBain family back to the time the first MacBain came to Canada from Scotland (War of 1812) but my mother’s family, first generation German, were a complete blank. I can’t even spell my grandmother’s maiden name, though I can pronounce it.

It’s the little but significant things about immediate family that I realized today I don’t know. My father died in 1975, when I was married, living in Texas, with four young children. Dad died at M. D. Anderson in Houston following surgery for an aortic aneurysm. We had a memorial service in Fort Worth and were gratified that colleagues from Chicago with whom he’d worked almost all his life flew down for it. It’s a blur now, all these years later, but I think we had a reception at our house. And then we took Mom back to Tryon, North Carolina, where they were living, for a memorial service and to ready the house for her move to Fort Worth.

But what happened after that? Did Mom go to Canada for a burial? Dad was born in Mild May, Ontario, and grew up living in every small town in southern Ontario. Whenever we drove through that country, we’d go through a small town, and he’d say, “That was the parsonage we lived in.” His family was moved every two years so it was hard to say where he was from except Ontario. By the time I came along, my widowed grandmother lived in Oakville, and that was Canada for me, except for rare trips into Toronto..

Today, doing some work on my cousin’s affairs (she is disabled, and I handle her affairs), I realized I don’t know where my father is buried, except that he’s buried next to my sister, who died as an infant, in some cemetery, probably in Oakville. When I was a child, Oakville was a small, placid town. My grandmother lived a block and a half from Lake Ontario and a few blocks from the small center of town. We walked. Today Oakville is a sprawling, huge suburb which someone told me is a fashionable place to live. I can’t even remember the name of the street my grandmother lived on, though I could walk you room by room through a house that is probably no longer standing.

My cousin has some furniture in her room, and I’ve asked the Senior Health Centre folks to take pictures and send them to me. I want to see if I recognize anything from my grandmother’s house. But of course, there was a whole other side to my cousin’s family—her mother was a MacBain, like me, but her father was a Denison, and she will someday lie in the Denison family cemetery. I have this all figured out, but I can’t find my father or my sister.

I remember when my grandmother died but I didn’t go to Canada for the funeral; if I had I might know where my father is. It’s one of those times I want so badly to talk to my mother.

Tonight at the dinner table, my son-in-law was appalled that I haven’t visited my mother’s grave, here in Fort Worth, for years, and he was even more appalled that I don’t know where my father is buried. We aren’t the kind of people to visit cemeteries. I can’t remember ever being taken to do so as a child or young person. But suddenly it seems important to me to find my father. I guess I’ll begin searching on the Web.

Family ties

As the mother of four adopted children and a woman who has been befriended by so many people, I have long said it's not blood that counts. It's love, what you do for others, what they do for  you. I'm having the opposite experience of that right now in an odd way.
I have a cousin in Canada who is bipolar, 78 years old, in a nursing home, and not in good health. She's in a wheelchair and can be verbally abusive when she doesn't get her way. Since she can't handle her own affairs, I have power of attorney and have been handling her affairs for several years. I remember my father saying years ago, when I was maybe 20 and he and Mom were about to set off on a trip, "Judy if anything happens to us,  you will take care of Jenny, won't you?" All these years later, those words have come home.
I have not seen Jenny since I was perhaps ten or twelve, so I can't claim we're close. And these days I can neither understand her on the phone nor read her handwriting. Sometimes she dictates a note to a nurse to send to me. She loves dogs (when I first got into this she had several animal shelters on an automatic withdrawal plan from her checking account and was donating $500 or more a month--I had to put a stop to that). But I send her pictures of Sophie, and since she's a packrat, I occasionally send a stuffed animal. And I send email notes through a wonderful lady at the home.
The other day the Senior Health Centre said they like to have final arrangements information on file in case a patient dies unexpectedly. No, they assured me, she had not taken a turn for the worse. So I've been planning a future funeral and on a journey through a branch of my father's family I know little about, tracking down her mother's birthplace--I have no idea and my dad is the only one who could tell me, so that's out. My grandfather was an Anglican minister who moved his family to a new parish every two years, and I swear they lived in every small town in southern Ontario. I give up equally on her father's birthplace and his mother's maiden name--I barely remember Uncle Walter and was never close to Aunt Rachael. Why do funeral homes need this? Then I got an estimate sheet--holy cow! It's expensive to die! Since there is no family I simply requested an Anglican minister say a prayer at the gravesite. But it's a lot more complicated than that-- they would have to hire pall bearers, and have cars to transport staff and clergy, use a hearse. If there's no funeral, why do they need staff? All of this makes me feel kind of ghoulish, since she's still living and shows no signs of dying soon.
I knew that somewhere in my files I had a record of the Denison Family Cemetery, so tonight I went through nine years of files--and found it in the last place I looked. The current file. Went to the website only to be warned it had a known threat. Wrote to the person who maintains the Denison family Web page, but it bounced back. So somehow I have to verify that Jenny's parents are buried there and there is a plot for her. All of this, of course, makes me nostalgic about family ties and sad that so little is known about Jenny, grateful that my children will carry on my legacy, such as it is.
And my one major thought about Jenny is what a sad, unhappy life she has had--sometimes off her meds and dumpster diving, never married, never worked, never had the ordinary life that most of us have.
So I'll keep digging until I contact someone at St. John's Cemetery on the Humber, beside Denison Park, in North York, Toronto--which is a long way from Texas.