The Denis-Loft School, a prestigious private girls school in Brooklyn, founded in the 19th century.
I’ve been drawing on my own past while sketching out a new mystery for architect Wren Fontaine and her beloved, chef Hadley Vanderwerf. It wasn’t a happy past for Wren, or for me, for that matter.
Normally, a chance to update a grand Victorian building would be a cause for celebration, but her latest assignment is at Denis-Loft, a distinguished girls’ prep school—and Wren’s alma mater. “Alma mater” literally means “nourishing mother” but not for Wren, who loathed it. She hasn’t been back since graduation.
But she knows having had a bad high school experience is no excuse to turn down an interesting and lucrative assignment: Denis-Loft is a day school, but it had a dorm that housed girls until the 1930s, when it was closed down. A benefactor has donated funds to renovate the dorm for new purposes. Wren must confront both her own painful memories and the dorm’s dark past—missing girls and other scandals.
I went to a co-ed prep school myself, the Fieldston School in New York. I disliked it. I disliked it intensely. But for a writer, even bad experiences have their upside: I can use them to recreate Wren’s own dark experience.
Of course, I’m not the first writer to portray difficult educational experiences. We have:
- Gradgrind’s school, from Charles Dickens’ “Hard Times.”
- Lowood School, from Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre.”
- Marcia Blaine School, from Muriel Spark’s “Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.”
Three brilliant books, and readers can happily research those writers to see what led them to create those institutions. I know my book is unlikely to reach those heights (still, a boy can dream!), but I’m hoping to use my poor skills to show how Wren as a distinguished professional comes to terms with Wren as a frightened teenager.
It’s been said that the difference between fiction and nonfiction is that fiction has to make sense. So I can promise to give Wren some resolution by the last page. And if I’m good and lucky, I met get some resolution for myself as well.
Meanwhile, Wren’s latest mystery, “The Cadieux Murders,” is a finalist for an Indies Award, in the LGBTQ category.
A New Hero on the Horizon…
My next book is a slight change of pace, although we’re still dealing with a troubled sleuth. Captain Edmund Winter is a decorated veteran of the Napoleonic Wars. He came through many battles with no physical scars—but perhaps some emotional ones. A lover asks him why he left the army. “I couldn’t stand the carnage anymore,” he says. She calls him a liar: “You didn’t leave the army because you minded the slaughter too much. You left because you stopped minding it at all.”
Captain Edmund Winter, “special emissary” of the Home Office.
Before England even had a formal police force, a shadowy government agency assigns Winter to discreetly find out who murdered a young woman from a prominent family, redressed her corpse, and dumped her body in London’s worst slum. Winter finds that the drawing rooms of the wealthy are no less dangerous than London’s dark streets. Meanwhile, a farmgirl wants to bring back Winter to her family’s farm to start over, but he suspects he is too damaged to appreciate her or the life she offers. A young noblewoman has fallen for him too and says she will throw away her life to be with him—but he knows he can offer this sheltered and naïve woman nothing but misery.
Then Winter meets one of London’s greatest beauties, cool and shrewd and self-made like he is. She truly understands him, and Winter could see himself spending his life with her. The only problem is that if he crosses her in his investigations, she just may have him killed.
Captain Winter first appeared in “Winter’s Journey,” in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. The first novel, “Winter’s Season,” will come from Histria Books in January.