research – Ink-Stained Wretches

The Research Rabbit Hole: Jewel Theft 1950s-1960s

I’ve been researching background for another story featuring my character Jerry Milam, a World War II veteran and ex-cop turned PI. In looking for crimes for my detective to solve, I started digging into old newspapers for information on jewel thefts. I chose the topic because I’d read about the robbery of the American Museum of Natural History in New York in 1964. While the robbers were later caught, only ten of the twenty-four stolen gems were recovered. In researching that theft, I discovered that the Witte Museum in San Antonio was robbed in 1969, with a thief smashing a glass display case in order to snatch the forty-nine carat McFarlin Diamond, a canary yellow, emerald cut stone described as being the size of a hen’s egg, which was also never recovered.

Then, I fell down the rabbit hole.

Back in the days when J. Edgar Hoover was still in charge of the FBI, jewel thefts were all the rage in crime. Jewels, once removed from their settings, were impossible to identify because, unlike today, they had no microscopic serial numbers etched on them. Etching of jewels for identification purposes began in 1983. While watches had serial numbers, most people didn’t bother to make a note of theirs. Fences were happy to purchase stolen jewels and watches because they were so hard to link back to the original owners. Most gem stones were easily recut or reset and resold, vanishing forever.

Most jewel robberies in the 1950s and 1960s were committed by stealth, leading to the image of the lithe cat burglar crawling over rooftops firing the popular imagination. Alfred Hitchcock even made the movie To Catch a Thief, released in 1955, with Cary Grant playing a retired jewel thief known as the Cat.

Between 1959 and 1967, Lauren Bacall, Winston Churchill, Sophia Loren, Eva Gabor, and Yul Brenner, along with other famous and wealthy people, were relieved of their jewels by thieves. With the exception of Eva Gabor, none were present at the time of the theft. Thieves, likely the same ones who robbed the American Museum of Natural History’s gemological exhibit a few months later, waited for Eva Gabor and her husband to return to their hotel room in order to steal her twenty-five-thousand-dollar diamond ring, which they had been unable to locate while she was away from the room. They pistol whipped and bound Ms. Gabor and forced her husband to retrieve the ring from the hotel safe before making their getaway.

If you are wondering why one ring was enough for the thieves to risk adding armed robbery and kidnapping to the charges against them, consider that the average income in 1965 was less than seven thousand dollars a year. A twenty-five-thousand-dollar ring was worth several years income to most people.

My research led me to realize that even without serial numbers and etched identification codes, certain jewels would be easier to trace than others. Which jewels might be more traceable? Cabochon star rubies and sapphires. A rounded, polished shape, called a cabochon, was how all jewels were prepared before cutting was developed for gemstones. Opals are still prepared and set as cabochons.

Star rubies and star sapphires exhibit a phenomenon called asterism, a star pattern visible when light hits the stone. The star is created by long inclusions inside the stone. Stones with asterism are rounded and polished as cabochons, not cut, to preserve the star within them.

The Edith Haggin DeLong Star Ruby
By Vicpeters – Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=165353250

Star rubies and star sapphires are valued based on the clarity and size of their stars, the color saturation and transparency of the stone, by their shape, and by their inclusions and cloudy areas. These same features make the stones more easily traceable and identifiable. While other gems can be recut and reset to disguise them, star rubies and star sapphires can’t be cut because the rounded shape is what allows the star to be seen.

Is it any surprise that the most valuable stones recovered from the American Museum of Natural History robbery were the Star of India, one of the largest blue star sapphires in the world, and the DeLong Star Ruby, while the Eagle Diamond was never found?

That’s enough rantings from the rabbit hole.

*****

N. M. Cedeño is a short story writer and novelist living in Texas. She is active in Sisters in Crime- Heart of Texas Chapter and is a member of the Short Mystery Fiction Society. Find out more at nmcedeno.com.

Words, words, words . . .

By Dixie Evatt

Words, words, words . . .
~ Shakespeare

Before we had powerful computers in our pockets or on our laps, we had reference books. . . shelves and shelves of them.

One of my favorite possessions is a vintage Webster’s dictionary, published 1956 – when I was 10 years old. All 11-plus pounds of the five-inch-thick book teeter on a top shelf in my office. I can no longer safely lift it and the pages are laid out in three columns of typeface so tiny that my aging eyes strain to make out the words.

My book is a holdover from the days when library dictionaries were housed and opened on a specialized wooden lectern. I wonder, do libraries still have these throwbacks to that bygone day or have the enormous books all made their way to the shredder?

I never look at mine that I’m not reminded of the 1950s movie, Born Yesterday, starring Judy Holliday. She won an Oscar for her portrayal of the brassy girlfriend of an uncouth tycoon. Her character tries to overcome her limited education and rudimentary vocabulary by reading, among other texts, Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. In one of the more humorous scenes, she struggles to make meaning of the archaic text and is advised to simply check the dictionary if she encounters any words she doesn’t understand. The increasingly frustrated Holliday would no more than read a sentence before she is up again, consulting a dictionary. Word by word. Trip by trip. Written today, the scene would surely lose its charm since she would likely be reading Tocqueville on a Kindle where all you must do is press and hold a finger on a word for the meaning to flash before you.

Like Holliday with a Kindle, writers don’t have the need for shelves full of reference books since language prompts are everywhere from the demons in autocorrect to the drop-down menus in word processing programs that produce synonyms.

The 19^th Century French author Jules Renard is credited with saying, “What a vast amount of paper would be saved if there were a law forcing writers to use only the right word.

Yet, finding the right word isn’t always so easy even with all our modern assets. Luckily there are still some reference sources to help. Here are a few:

Evan Esar’s “20,000 Quips & Quotes: A Treasury of Witty Remarks, Comic Proverbs, Wisecracks and Epigrams.” If she’d thumbed through this one, Holliday would have learned that Tocqueville said, “The last thing a political party gives up is its vocabulary.”

“The Allyn & Bacon Handbook” by Leonard J. Rosen and Laurence Behrens. You must love any book that is willing to devote 22 pages to the uses and misuses of the comma alone.

Theodore M. Bernstein’s “Dos, Don’ts & Maybes of English Usage.” For instance, he explains why Mark Antony didn’t say “Friends, Romans, countrymen, loan me your ears.”

“Describer’s Dictionary: A Treasury of Terms & Literary Quotations,” by David Grambs and Ellen S. Levine. It indexes illustrative passages of more than 600 authors from travel writer Paul Theroux to contemporary British novelist Zadie Smith.

Eli Burnstein’s “Dictionary of Fine Distinction Book,” offering a humorous look at often misused words and phrases. For instance, couch vs. sofa.

Valerie Howard’s “1,000 Helpful Adjectives for Fiction Writers,” promises to spice up characteristics, qualities or attributes of a noun when a writer is having trouble capturing just the right word.”

Bill Bryson’s “Dictionary of Troublesome Words: A Writer’s Guide to Getting it Right” sets out to decipher the idiosyncrasies of the English language. Things such as 126 meanings of “set” when used as a verb and another 58 when used as a noun.

Brian Shawver’s “The Language of Fiction: A Writer’s Stylebook.” Need to be reminded when to use a comma or semicolon? Shawver’s there to help.

Kathy Steinemann’s “The Writer’s Lexicon: Descriptions, Overused Words, and Taboos.” Among other things, she offers writers cures for overused modifiers (I’m talking about you “very”).

John B. Bremner’s “The Columbia Dictionary for Writers: Words on Words.” Here you can learn the history of H. L. Mencken’s inspiration for coining the term “ecdysiast” to replace “striptease.”

Christine Lindberg’s “The Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus.” Writing about bread? How about a baker’s dozen choices: dal, pita, rye, naan, tortilla, focaccia, ciabatta, challah, corn, sourdough, pumpernickel, baguette, etc.

“Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law” has been found on the desk of every journalist for decades since it dictates uniform rules for grammar, punctuation, style for capitalization and numbers, preferred spelling, abbreviations, acronyms, and such.

“Words, words, words,” is the sarcastic response Hamlet gave when Polonius asked him what he was reading. Fortunately, authors still have no shortage of excellent reference books to help them find the right ones.

***

A former political reporter in Austin, Dixie also taught writing at Syracuse University. When she teamed up with Sue Cleveland to write fiction, they sold a screenplay to a Hollywood producer. Although the movie was never made, the seed money financed ThirtyNineStars, their publishing company. Through it they published two award-winning thrillers (Shrouded and Digging up the Dead) under the pen name, Meredith Lee. Dixie’s first solo mystery was Bloodlines & Fencelines, set in a tiny Texas town near Austin. Kirkus reviews described the book as, “A twisty whodunit that’s crafted with care and saturated with down-home Southern charm.” She is working on second mystery in the series. www.dlsevatt.com

***

Image of dictionary by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay

Publicity photo of William Holden and Judy Holliday for Born Yesterday via Wikipedia

Image of tablet by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Writing “Galápagos People Watching”

As some readers may already know, my husband is from Ecuador. I met him when we were both students at the University of Texas at Austin.

View of the harbor from the hotel – Puerto Baquerizo Moreno. My son being held by my husband’s cousin. Photo by NM Cedeño, 2003.

Most of my husband’s extended family still lives in Ecuador. On our second trip to visit them, in 2003, my husband’s grandmother asked if we’d like to go to the Galápagos for a few days. We said, “Yes, thank you!” So my husband, son, my brother, two of my husband’s cousins, his aunt and uncle, and I all flew from Guayaquil to Puerto Baquerizo Moreno on San Cristóbal Island. From the memory of this trip, the story “Galápagos People Watching” was born.

The boat tour featured in the story is drawn from a tour we took during that trip. We visited Leon Dormido and Isla Lobos to see blue-footed boobies, frigate birds, marine iguanas, sharks, and sea lions, just as the characters do in the story.

Those familiar with the history of the Galápagos will note the use of the surname Cobos for one of the characters. Manuel Cobos was the first owner of San Cristóbal Island and started a plantation there. The ruins of his house, left abandoned after a revolt by the prisoners he used as forced labor, can be seen on the island.

Characters’ names in the story are inspired by the Ecuadorian propensity to name people after famous historical figures. Top 100 Ecuadorian male first names include Washington, Jefferson, Lenin, Edison, Franklin, César, and Ulises. One can even find people named Stalin and Hitler.

The hardest thing about writing the story was not putting in too many details. Did I need to explain the different fees paid by foreign tourists vs Ecuadorian citizens when arriving in the Galápagos? No. Did I need to describe every activity a tourist can do on San Cristóbal? No. Did I need to mention the newer system that tracks how often Ecuadorians visit? No. My first draft of the story contained far too many details that had to be cut.

But once I cut all the extraneous information, a story of family, finding one’s path in life, and crime emerged. Editor Michael Bracken selected “Galápagos People Watching” for publication in Black Cat Weekly #164.

Eye Update

After several months attempting conservative treatment, my eye doctor sent me to a corneal specialist. The specialist formally diagnosed me with map-dot-fingerprint dystrophy of the cornea. The “fingerprint” patch on my cornea covered half my pupil, which left me seeing through the unaffected part of my cornea and the damaged part simultaneously. The result was blurred, double vision in my right eye.

To resolve the problem, in early October, the doctor performed a superficial keratectomy using a tiny laser to remove the damaged epithelial layer on part of my cornea. The procedure took less than five minutes and was relatively painless. About thirty minutes after the procedure, when the numbing drops in my eyes wore off, extreme discomfort started and lasted for about four days. My cornea took about three weeks to completely heal.

I am happy to report I am no longer seeing double through my right eye. My vision is back to normal. I can once again read print on screens and on paper without severe eyestrain forcing me to stop.

The eye condition hampered both my reading and my writing in June, July, August, September, and October. I definitely won’t meet the writing goals I set for myself this year. But at least the problem is solved. There’s always next year!

In other news, my story “Predators and Prey” was published by editor Rusty Barnes at Redneck Press! It’s free to read online.

*****

Researching the 1970s for “A Woman’s Place”

By N.M. Cedeño

The 1970s! Disco! Abba! The Eagles! Richard Nixon. The end of the Vietnam War. Women’s Rights. And, umm, yeah, other stuff. I was born mid-decade and have no real memories of the 1970s. Writing about the 1970s, for me, isn’t a matter of “write what you know,” but rather one of “research what you need to know.”

When editor Michael Bracken asked me to submit a story for the Private Dicks and Disco Balls: Private Eyes in the Dyn-O-Mite Seventies (Down & Out Books, May 2024) I read the requirements, which specified including some historical event from the 1970s, and knew I would have to dive into research.

I began searching for events of the 1970s with the help of the internet and my local library card. Logging into my local library online gave me access a plethora of research material, including the archives for Time Magazine (1923-2000), Life Magazine (1936-2000), one hundred years of The Austin American Statesman (1871-1980), and access to Newspapers.com for free. I skimmed or read news articles from major newspapers covering crime, disasters, and political issues of the 1970s. Women’s rights issues, including Title IX, employment protections, and the attempts to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, recurred in my search, leading me to the event I needed for the story: the Battle of the Sexes tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs. The Battle of the Sexes took place in Houston in September 1973.

I even found video from the era, including video from the tennis match itself. Archived videos are fabulous research resources. I discovered news broadcasts from Houston during the 1970s and watched several segments. The benefit of video in research for writing can’t be overstated. Watching news broadcasts provided glimpses of linguistic quirks, clothing styles, hair styles, technology, and automobiles of the 1970s. The insane way (by today’s standards) in which reporters wandered into crime scenes, shoved microphones into the face of working doctors in hospitals, and even sickened themselves while reporting on chemical disasters fed into my understanding of the decade. If a reporter could get away with that much, a private investigator could do that and more.

My research uncovered regulations on who could and couldn’t be a police officer, leading me to articles explaining how, for decades, the height requirement for the Houston Police Department eliminated all the Hispanics who applied for the police academy. The height requirement was changed in the early 1970s to allow for greater diversity in the department. I learned how women’s roles in police departments were limited and about efforts to remove those limits. This research helped in the creation of one of my secondary characters for the story: a petite, Hispanic woman with quashed aspirations for law enforcement.

In researching fires and industrial accidents, I found articles on hazardous materials being routed through Houston and the dangers they posed. I read calls for the creation of hazardous material routes around big cities. Then I reached out to an expert with knowledge of industrial explosives from the 1970s to 2000s. My father worked as an insurance underwriter for a special risk program that included insuring businesses that manufactured, distributed, or used things that go “BOOM.” He had to learn a lot about explosives. He was, and is, a fount of information.

As I worked, I learned more than I needed for my story, and the research began to coalesce into a plot involving my detective, Jerry Milam, in an arson investigation that led him from Austin to Houston during the week of the Battle of the Sexes tennis match. Jerry Milam previously appeared in Groovy Gumshoes: Private Eyes of the Psychedelic Sixties, (Down & Out Books, 2022, edited by Michael Bracken) in a story entitled “Nice Girls Don’t.”

They say “write what you know,” but the caveat to that is “learn what you need to know.” I researched what I didn’t know and I melded it with what I already knew. I was already familiar with my setting in Houston, although I did consult a few maps. Describing Houston is easy for someone who was born there and visits the city regularly. Also, tucked into the story are details that I know because I have an affinity for trivia, including details that my PI would have known: like who was Red Adair (hint: John Wayne played a version of him in The Hellfighters) and what happened in Texas City in 1947 (hint: worst industrial accident in US History).

My local library online research resources are phenomenal and are my favorite place to browse when I need very specific historical information. Reaching out to experts is also beneficial for getting the nitty-gritty details right. Do you have favorite research sites? Where do you look when you need accurate information quickly?

****

Can I Trust AI Writing Apps?

By K.P. Gresham

I’ve been reading quite a few headlines about the new Artificial Intelligence writing apps that burst onto the scene in November of 2022. Reviews have been mercurial. Some say is the end of our ability to think. Others say it is the savior of our intellectual future.

I’m a curious person, so I decided to give it a go. I joined ChatGPT via chatopenAI.com, and put in the following prompt:

“Compare books by K.P. Gresham and J.D. Robb.”

(Of course, I chose J.D. Robb—she’s my favorite author. Just once I wanted to see my name and her name in the same sentence!)

Here are excerpts from ChatGPT’s response:

J.D. Robb and K.P. Gresham are both authors who write mystery novels, but their books differ in several ways.

J.D. Robb’s books are primarily crime and suspense novels, featuring a recurring cast of characters led by the protagonist, Eve Dallas, a New York City police detective…

K.P. Gresham’s books, on the other hand, are typically set in small towns in Texas and deal with more personal, often domestic, crimes…

Another difference between the two authors is their approach to character development. J.D. Robb’s books are centered around a recurring cast of characters, including Eve Dallas and her husband, Roarke, who are well-developed and have complex backstories that are gradually revealed throughout the series. K.P. Gresham’s books, on the other hand, feature a different set of characters in each novel, with some recurring characters that show up occasionally.

In summary… While both authors are skilled at creating engaging and suspenseful stories, their books differ in terms of genre, writing style, setting, and character development.

Okay! I’ll take that. But there was a hiccup in my info: I do not have a different set of characters in each novel. My mysteries feature Pastor Matt Hayden and his cronies in every book.

I responded to the post: “I thought K.P. Gresham’s books feature Pastor Matt Hayden and his friends and family.”

Excerpts from ChatGPT’s Response:

You are correct, and I apologize for my previous response. K.P. Gresham’s books do indeed feature Pastor Matt Hayden and his friends and family. I was mistaken in my previous response, and I appreciate you bringing this to my attention.

“K.P. Gresham’s mystery novels, including “Murder in the Second Pew,” “Dying for a Change,” and “Murder in the Choir Loft,” are set in the small Texas town of Shady Grove and feature Pastor Matt Hayden as the main character…

Similar to J.D. Robb’s books, K.P. Gresham’s writing style is character-driven and creates a strong sense of place… K.P. Gresham’s books are centered around Pastor Matt Hayden and his family and friends.

In summary, K.P. Gresham’s mystery novels do indeed feature Pastor Matt Hayden and his friends and family, and the books are characterized by a strong sense of place, character development, and personal crimes that occur in the small Texas town of Shady Grove.”

Actually, this is great stuff—for the most part. Except I didn’t write Dying for a Change or Murder in the Choir Loft.

My response? “K.P. Gresham did not write Dying for a Change nor did she write Murder in the Choir Loft. She did write The Preacher’s First Murder, Murder in the Second Pew, Murder on the Third Try and Four Reasons to Die. Her stories do not take place in Shady Grove, but in Wilks, Texas, and Austin, Texas.”

Excerpts from Chat GPT’s Response:

Thank you for bringing this to my attention, and I apologize for my previous mistakes. You are correct that K.P. Gresham did not write “Dying for a Change” or “Murder in the Choir Loft” and that her novels do not take place in Shady Grove, but in Wilks and Austin, Texas.

“K.P. Gresham’s mystery novels, including “The Preacher’s First Murder,” “Murder in the Second Pew,” “Murder on the Third Try,” and “Four Reasons to Die,” are set in small Texas towns and feature Pastor Matt Hayden as the main character. Her writing style is character-driven, with a focus on creating a strong sense of place and developing the personalities and relationships of her characters…

Once again, thank you for correcting my mistakes, and I hope this response provides a more accurate comparison between the books of K.P. Gresham and J.D. Robb.”

That’s my glimpse of Chat GPT. It got the big, important stuff right (i.e. all the J.D. Robb information). When it came to little ol’ me, it needed some important corrections. (Important to me, anyway.)

My takeaway? If you’re using a writing AI, don’t count on it for lesser known info. As a writer, I take my research VERY seriously. I don’t think this technology shows enough promise to depend on everything it says. Is the AI teachable? Yes. Reliable? Not so much.

Stay safe by doing your own research. (Hey—next time I’m going to write a blog on making the “perfect” Old Fashioned adult beverage. Talk about enjoying your research!).

And, as always, keep on writing!

K.P. Gresham, Author

Professional Character Assassin

K.P. Gresham is the award-winning author of the Pastor Matt Hayden Mystery Series as well as several stand-alone novels. Active in Sisters in Crime and the Writers League of Texas, she has won Best Novel awards from the Bay Area Writers League as well as the Mystery Writers of America.

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Website: http://www.kpgresham.com/

Email: kp@kpgresham.com

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https://austinmysterywriters.com/

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Books by

K.P. Gresham

Three Days at Wrigley Field

The Pastor Matt Hayden Mystery Series

The Preacher’s First Murder

Murder in the Second Pew

Murder on the Third Try

Four Reasons to Die

Mining Family History for Characters

My father is the family genealogist. He did extensive research into both his family and my mother’s family. Dad’s family is rather straightforward—all arriving in Texas in the 1870s and 1880s from what is now the Czech Republic. My mother’s mother was Irish American. Her parents arrived in the US just before 1900, so she had aunts, uncles, and cousins in Cork. While some of my Czech and Irish relatives had life-threatening adventures in settling in the US, they didn’t inspire the characters in my short story, “Danger at Death’s Door.” That honor goes to my Danish relatives.

Lars Peter took the last name Ottosen after his step-father Otto.

One ancestor whose history I researched to create a character was one of my great-great-grandfathers on my mother’s father’s side, a man named Lars Peter. Lars Peter’s mother was unmarried when she gave birth to him in 1842 in Denmark. Family oral history says that she was employed at the court in Copenhagen, left to give birth, and was later ‘recalled’ to court. Her child, Lars Peter, was sent away to boarding school where he excelled scholastically. Among other things, he learned to speak, read, and write in both English and Danish. (We have proof of his lovely penmanship because later in life he was a US census-taker, and the names and addresses of his neighbors are recorded in his beautiful handwriting.) After leaving school, Lars Peter joined the military. He was a big man for his time, reaching over six feet tall and 190 pounds as a teenager.

In 1864, sick of Danish-German wars, Lars Peter left the military and signed on to crew a ship bound for the US from Denmark. He arrived in the midst of the US Civil War. Lars Peter jumped ship, ran for his life to avoid being forced into the Union Army by men seeking to draft newly arrive immigrants, made his way to the Great Lakes region, married, and settled on Washington Island. After presenting him with five children, three of whom survived, Lars Peter’s first wife died in childbirth along with a sixth child. The women on the island advised Lars Peter to remarry because he needed someone to care for his young children while he worked. So he crossed to the mainland on his sailboat and walked to farms, looking for an unattached female of marriageable age. He found a woman named Christine (apparently tripping and falling through her family’s front door).

Christine also features in my story, although very briefly and under a different name. She was an immigrant from Denmark of the serf class, uneducated in anything but sewing and farm/household work. She also had one eye that wandered because she was born with it fused closed, and it didn’t open until she was three years old. Christine emigrated to escape near slavery, her life controlled by the Count who owned the estate where she was born, and to escape the scandal that attached to a woman if a man jilted her, refusing to marry her after a marriage had been arranged by their families. She was visiting relatives while recovering from an extended illness, when Lars Peter asked her to come care for his children, and if she liked the situation, get married. She agreed to go with him. Christine fell for his children, and possibly him, and they were married. They went on to have seven children, the last of whom was my great-grandfather, Robert, born in 1897.

Family history states that Lars Peter admitted knowing who his father was, but he refused to name the man. That line of the family tree remains a mystery. Lars Peter died in 1924, a highly regarded citizen of Washington Island, having served as census taker, postmaster, town clerk, town chairman, assessor, and roadmaster at various points in his life.

Lars Peter’s history provides much of the background for the character named Lars Pedersen in my short mystery story “Danger at Death’s Door.” My Lars Pedersen character is also an “educated bastard” from Denmark and a widower in need of a mother for his young children. I named one of the children in the story Robbie, after my great-grandfather Robert, even though he wouldn’t have been born yet. Robert died in 1990 in Texas and lives in my memory as Great-Gampie, a tall man, several inches over six feet, with broad shoulders and a penchant for storytelling.

In my story, my character Lars takes a voyage across the Great Lakes. During the voyage, the ship’s captain hands Lars “one more thing to worry about” when he asks him to investigate a crime aboard ship. As far as I know, the real Lars Peter never encountered a mystery aboard a ship that required him to act as a detective. That portion of the story is entirely fictional.

“Danger at Death’s Door” is scheduled for publication in March 2023 in the mystery anthology Crimeucopia: One More Thing to Worry About, from editor John Connor at Murderous Ink Press.

***

Writing “It Came Upon a Midnight Ice Storm”

By N.M. Cedeño

People like to ask writers, do you ever use details from your life in your writing? Answer: Sometimes. It depends on what I’m writing. If I’m writing science fiction or noir, nothing in the story may be evocative of my life. Other times, details from my life do creep into my stories. “It Came Upon a Midnight Ice Storm” is one of those stories that has a bit of my life in it.

Written originally in 2010 or 2011, the manuscript sat forgotten in a file for seven or eight years before I decided to revise and submit it for publication. The story is available in Black Cat Mystery Magazine #12, the special cozies edition, edited by Michael Bracken.

Without further ado, here are some things from my life that influenced my writing of the story “It Came Upon a Midnight Ice Storm.”

The story is set in Dallas during a Christmas Eve ice storm that traps a party of houseguests together overnight. Trouble ensues when one guest accuses the others of stealing her bracelet. I grew up in Dallas County where ice storms hit the city every few years. The city doesn’t get frozen precipitation often enough for anyone to have to drive on it with any regularity. When an ice storm hits and coats everything with an inch of ice, the city shuts down and everyone stays home for a day or two until it melts. Historical note: the first draft of the story was written about ten years before the 2021 catastrophic ice storm that hit Texas. Texans are used to ice storms hitting sections of the state. Ice storms big enough to coat the entire state in frozen precipitation for a week, as happened in 2021, are a whole other matter.

Things I’ve baked and decorated.
N.M. Cedeño

The main character in the story, Eleanor, spent the day baking and preparing for a Christmas Eve family gathering. I enjoy baking. A lot. Cookies, cakes, brownies, muffins, quick breads, scones, and scratch-made baking powder biscuits are the favorites in my house. Pies and fudge appear seasonally. As much as I enjoy baking, there have been times, usually after prepping for an event, where I have been utterly tired of baking, a feeling shared by my main character.

Eleanor’s husband Joe has three siblings with whom he is close in age. I come from a large family and grew up with two brothers and two sisters for a total of five of us, plus two parents, plus assorted dogs. Between friends and relatives our house was frequently packed. Holidays in my family have always involved a lot of people, and, thus, family dynamics. However, none of the characters in the story are like my siblings or my husband’s siblings.

As with Joe’s family in the story, my husband’s family has a Christmas tradition involving setting up a prominently-displayed, elaborate Nativity scene in their home in which the infant Jesus in the display remains covered from head-to-toe in a cloth until December 25^th.

According to the character Luke, Die Hard is a classic Christmas movie. Most of my family would agree with this statement.

Like Becky in the story, two of my siblings and my eldest son attended UT Dallas.

Among my more than a dozen nieces and nephews you will find an Eleanor, a Joseph, a Luke, a Rebecca (not called Becky), and a (middle name) Helen (not Helene). However, two of them were born AFTER the characters in this story were named and, in truth, all of the names are coincidental. I wasn’t thinking of anyone in particular when I named the characters. This isn’t the first time I have used a family member’s first name for a character. If the first name fits, I use it.

The above are all details to the story. The plot about the disappearance of an expensive bracelet during a Christmas Eve party is entirely fictional.

*****

Getting Texas Wrong in Fiction- Details Matter Y’all

Anyone who lives in Texas knows that Hollywood’s version of Texas and the actual Texas are very different places. Mostly, we Texans roll our eyes and dismiss the errors, but it’s difficult to ignore errors when they yank us out of whatever story we are trying to enjoy. Recently I watched a movie set in Texas and read several stories that were set in Texas or that featured Texan characters. However, as a Texan, I could tell the director of the movie didn’t care about getting the setting details right, and I could tell the authors of the stories didn’t understand Texan speech patterns. Errors distracted me from the plots in both the movie and the stories.

On someone’s recommendation, I watched the Tom Hanks movie News of the World. I learned quickly that the director favored filming sweeping vistas and that the background and environment were essential to the plot. The director, unlike the author of the book on which the movie is based, clearly didn’t care about getting the setting details right. The movie got Texas disappointingly wrong, which distracted me from the story line several times.

The same standard holds true for literature as it does for movies. If you don’t get the details right, no matter how great your plot is, you can lose the reader. For example, in some stories I read recently featuring characters from Texas, the author used regional speech incorrectly. Specifically, the authors used the word “y’all” wrong.

A Word on the Meaning of “Y’all”

Lots of people are aware that Texans, and a lot of Southerners, say “y’all” as a term for the second person plural. And we do. “Y’all” is a contraction of “you all” which means “all of you people.” No Texan would ever call a single individual “y’all.” Not ever. It’s a reference to a group, not an individual.

Now, I may walk up to my brother and say “Y’all should come to lunch tomorrow.” He may be the only one standing there, but he will know from my usage of the word “y’all” that I’m including his wife and kids in the invitation. If I wanted him to come alone, I would say, “You should come to lunch tomorrow.”

Or one college student may say to another, “Y’all should come hang out at my place with us.” This translates to “you and your friends should come and hang out with me and my friends at my residence.” Only two people may be in the conversation, but the usage of the word “y’all” tells anyone listening that more people are involved than are present.

To reiterate: when a Texan says the word “y’all” to a single individual, they are referencing some group to which that individual belongs, and the individual being addressed will understand that group reference because the speaker used the word “y’all” instead of “you.”

Getting “Y’all” Wrong

Back to those stories I read that got things wrong: if a law enforcement officer in a story set in Texas walks up to a single suspect and says to that individual, “Y’all are under arrest,” then the author has failed miserably at using the word. That error will pull the Texan (and probably any Southern) reader completely out of the story.

Or if a mystery author writes a story featuring a character who is supposed to be the only Texan in the story and has that character call an individual “y’all,” that author just created confusion. When I read the above instance in a story, I hoped the misusage of “y’all” was a clue that the character might be lying about her background. Alas, it wasn’t a plot point. It was an error by the author.

Details matter in story telling. When we get them wrong, we pull the reader out of the story, and, depending how egregious the error is, the reader may not come back.

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Writing “Nice Girls Don’t” for Groovy Gumshoes

So what if I wasn’t born in the 1960s? I can do research!

In 2020, I came across a call for submissions for mystery short stories to be included in an anthology. The anthology was to be called Groovy Gumshoes: Private Eyes in the Psychedelic Sixties. The editor, Michael Bracken, wanted stories set in the 1960s featuring private detectives, with bonus points given if the story included a major historical event.

The call caught my attention, but not having been born in the 1960s, I searched my brain for any specific event that I might use as starting point for a story. Two events for which I had a wealth of knowledge at my fingertips came to mind. One was the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. When you grow up in Dallas, this one comes to mind quickly. But I thought that event, given its extreme historical prominence, might be covered by too many other authors submitting stories.

So I selected the second event: the UT Tower Shooting.

The University of Texas Tower Shooting on August 1, 1966, is a dark shadow on Austin’s history. It was a mass shooting at a school that happened decades before such events became regular occurrences. The Tower Shooting, like the JFK assassination, is reviewed regularly by the local media on anniversaries of the event. And I am intimately familiar with the locale where the shooting occurred since I attended the University of Texas at Austin and walked in the shadow of the Tower daily for four years. Additionally, the shooting is well-documented. Video taken that day is even available online. I knew that finding background details for a short story set around the time of the shooting wouldn’t be hard.

However, none of that is why the Tower Shooting came immediately to mind.

It came to mind because I knew someone I could question about life in the 1960s in Austin, Texas, and about the Tower shooting in particular: my father.

My father, whose grandparents were all Czech immigrants who arrived in Texas after the Civil War, graduated from tiny Rogers High School in rural central Texas and set out be the first in his immediate family to graduate from college. He worked his way up: first attending a junior college, then transferring to a small private college, then transferring, finally, to the University of Texas at Austin. On the fateful morning of August 1, 1966, my father turned in the final paper for the final class he needed to graduate. He arrived on campus early in the morning and left to report to his job at an Austin grocery store.

He had a lot on his mind that day. With his upcoming graduation at the end of the summer term, my father should have been considering his improved employment prospects. But he wasn’t looking for jobs. He knew that his draft number was coming up in October. He had to make a decision: volunteer for the draft or wait to be drafted into the military in the midst of the Vietnam War. He volunteered for the draft in September 1966.

Twenty-seven years later, on my first day living in the dorms at UT, my father showed me where people had died near the balustrade on the South Mall. He pointed out the bullet holes marking the stone. He recounted his memory of leaving campus and listening to the shooting on the radio while at work. His story of that day, woven into the story of his life, became a piece of family lore, embedded in my memory.

And so, after picking my father’s brain and doing a ton of research, my short story “Nice Girls Don’t” came into being. The story features a private detective hired in September 1966 to investigate the death of a young woman, a UT student who died the day of the Tower Shooting. The girl’s parents believe their daughter’s case was ignored because the police were too busy dealing with the Tower Shooting to give her death the attention it deserved. The parents want the detective to find out what really happened.

After completing my story, I submitted it to the editor, hoping it might be selected for inclusion in the anthology… And the editor, Michael Bracken, chose my story to be included in Groovy Gumshoes: Private Eyes in the Psychedelic Sixties, coming from Down & Out Books in April 2022!

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N. M. Cedeño is a short story writer and novelist living in Texas. She is active in Sisters in Crime- Heart of Texas Chapter and is a member of the Short Mystery Fiction Society. Find out more at nmcedeno.com.

Creating Multiple Identities: the Research Rabbit Hole

by N.M. Cedeño

Setting a story in the past requires the author to do research to make sure the details of the story are correct. For me, researching topics means risking falling down the research rabbit hole and discovering way more information than I need. This week’s research topic: how a character could create fake identities during the 1960s and 1970s.

My current work-in-progress, a short story, involves a character with a penchant for using fake identities in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I wanted to know how hard it would be for my character to have multiple bank accounts and jobs under different identities during that time period. This necessitated research into social security numbers (SSNs) and how they were issued in the past.

Creating a fake identity prior to 1974 took very little effort because laws regarding obtaining SSNs and starting bank accounts were lax. For instance, for my character to open bank accounts under different names was fairly easy. Social security numbers were not required for starting financial accounts at banks or other institutions until 1983. However, even if the banks had required SSNs, my character could have easily provided multiple SSNs for multiple fake identities.

Before April 1974, anyone could request a social security number by completing an application without providing evidence of their age, identity, or citizenship status. Electronic tracking of social security numbers, using a punch card computer system didn’t start until 1979. This ease in obtaining SSNs led to all kinds of irregularities and problems in the system that lasted for decades. As late as 2007, the Social Security Administration identified 4.7 million people who had more than one SSN. Most of those people had requested numbers before 1974 when the requirements for providing evidence of identity and age went into effect.

Why did so many people have more than one social security number? Was identity fraud rampant?

No. Most of those people weren’t trying to commit any crime. After SSNs were introduced in 1936, not everyone understood how they worked. Some people thought they needed a new number every time they started a new job. If workers lost the card with their number on it, they simply applied for a new number. Other people applied for a social security number when the cards were first introduced. Then, when they started working a new job, they filled out paperwork provided by their employer to get another one as employers tried to make sure their employees had SSNs.

It wasn’t even unusual for more than one person to use the same SSN.

For example, in 1938, a wallet manufacturer in New York sold wallets in stores with a sample social security card inside to show the buyer how the card would fit in the wallet. That sample social security card had a number on it which many buyers of the wallet then adopted as their own. By 1943, at least 5,755 were using the sample SSN that came with the wallet. As late as 1977, twelve people were still using that same number.

Prior to the late 1980s, most people didn’t have to get a social security number until they got a job and had to pay taxes. A pilot program to get children SSNs at birth started in 1987. Before 1986, most kids didn’t need SSNs since they could be listed as dependents on tax forms without one. From the time the SSN was introduced in 1936 until the late 1980s, most people only applied for social security numbers when they reached a point in life where they needed one. Therefore, it was common for adults to apply for cards.

All of this means that the character in my story could easily have created multiple fake identities before 1974 by filling out applications for multiple SSNs. He could hold jobs under different SSNs and keep many unconnected bank accounts. But now, all of this research will be filed away, because I can’t use it in my story. I only needed to know that my character could indeed obtain documentation for multiple fake identities without getting caught immediately.

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N. M. Cedeño is a short story writer and novelist living in Texas. She is currently working on a paranormal mystery series called Bad Vibes Removal Services. Ms. Cedeño is active in Sisters in Crime- Heart of Texas Chapter. Find out more at nmcedeno.com.

Note: All pictures by Pixabay.