09 January 2023

Weaving the Past into the Present


Leslie Budewitz, my guest blogger today, is one of my oldest mystery writer friends. We met in Sisters in Crime Guppies, of which she was a founding member back when we really were the Great UnPublished. Liz

by Leslie Budewitz

I love curling up with a good historical novel. While most of my work is contemporary, my newest standalone suspense novel, Blind Faith (written as Alicia Beckman), weaves together a contemporary cold case investigation and historic scenes going back nearly fifty years. And I’ve dipped into historical mystery with several short stories set in the 1880s and a novella set in 1910. But the past is always present. Sneaking a bit of history into a contemporary tale can add layers to the plot and setting, and even character, that make for a richer, more textured read. Plus, it’s fun.

One way to use history in a contemporary novel is to weave in the history of place. My Spice Shop mysteries are set in Seattle’s Pike Place Market, which was founded in 1907. It’s a farmers’ market, but also home to locally-based retailers, craftspeople, and restaurants, as well as several hundred residents. It was the first mixed-use residential and commercial property listed on the National Historic Register. History is key to the place and to the experience of it.

And so my main character runs a spice shop and tussles with Market managers over exterior signage (“If it wasn’t there in 1937, there’s no putting it up now”) and funky wiring. She hangs a map showing the origins of her spices over cracks in the plaster that no caulk can fix. She chases baddies down cobblestone streets and up hidden staircases. She curses the place for its quirks and loves it for the very same reason.

When we describe a scene, we’re giving our readers cues and clues that allow them to create it in their own mind. They’ll never see just what we see, unless we’re using a real place they’ve visited. But whether the place is real, like the Market, or entirely fictional, like the historic lodge in my first standalone suspense novel, Bitterroot Lake (written as Alicia Beckman), details that flesh out the characters’ relationship to a place and its history create a deeper connection to the setting and story.

The history of a place can also spark plot. David Edgerly Gates gave a great example of this last month here on SleuthSayers when he discussed the TV series Three Pines, based on Louise Penny’s books. The TV writers added a brilliant (to me) story line about the experience of Indigenous people in the region, rooted in the residential school, a building that still dominates the town. While the murder in the second pair of episodes did not stem directly from that history, the victim’s connection to the school gave the writers an opportunity to tell the story of the horrors inflicted and show how building’s continued existence kept the wounds open. And they were able to show how the townspeople came together to end that.

In Bitterroot Lake, my main character returns to her family’s historic lodge in NW Montana, seeking solace after her husband’s death. A murder the day she arrives ties into a tragedy she and her friends experienced twenty-five years before as new college graduates. While cleaning up damage after a windstorm, she discovers a scrapbook detailing the lodge’s construction a century earlier. Through the photographs, along with letters and journals she finds in an old trunk, she uncovers a mystery about the lodge that answers questions about tensions with a neighbor and eventually helps her unmask the present-day killer. I love old homes, art, and furniture, and had a great time creating Whitetail Lodge, using memories of private and public lodges I’ve visited, and poring over real estate listings, magazine articles, and local history books.

That’s also how I discovered the region’s history of ice houses, including a survivor now in the parking lot of a building supply company in the next town. Closed up but well-preserved, it sits alongside a path built where railroad tracks once ran. With drawings of the plans and my site visit in mind, I staged the novel’s climax in a similar relic. And if I introduced readers to lodge culture, timber and railroad history, and social issues of a century ago, even better.

Every community has inherent tensions, often with origins that are no longer visible. In Six Feet Deep Dish, debut cozy author Mindy Quigley uses her fictional Wisconsin town’s beginnings as a summer refuge for wealthy Chicagoans to illustrate continuing conflicts between the haves and have-nots. She also mines it for humor, decorating her protagonist’s pizza joint with old photographs of mobsters, including Al Capone as a baby. Fortunately, the homicide detective, a direct descendant of the crime boss, takes it in stride.

Crime fiction often involves an incident in the past that triggers a present-day conflict, whether it occurred in 1925 or 1985. In Blind Faith, a cold case investigation draws us deep into the past, untangling the threads that tie a prominent family to the unsolved murder of a priest. Both personal history and stories about the community help us understand the motivations behind a series of crimes that continue to have ripple effects.

Our lives are influenced by the past on every level. And when we use history to explore events in the present, we can tell richer, more meaningful stories.


Leslie Budewitz is the author of the Spice Shop and Food Lovers’ Village mysteries. As Alicia Beckman, she writes moody suspense. She is the winner of three Agatha Awards, including the 2018 Agatha for Best Short Story, “All God’s Sparrows,” set in Montana Territory in 1884 and featuring a real-life figure, “Stagecoach Mary” Fields. A past president of Sisters in Crime and MWA board member, she lives in NW Montana.

14 comments:

  1. Leslie, nice article. The other interesting thing about history is that opposite sides in an event may tell a different story, slanting what happened in their favor.

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    1. Thanks, RT. Such a good point. We often talk about history as though it were a fixed thing, but while dates and places and some names may be known with certainty, motives and meaning are often up for debate, decades and even centuries later. And the untold stories are critical -- both the stories themselves and the reasons they've been left out. I think that's one of the key things history can add to fiction -- a deeper, more personal understanding and a wider scope of story.

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  2. Good article, Leslie. R.T.'s right - opposite sides generally present opposite versions of history, and using that can really twist the narrative. Here in South Dakota, we have many Native Americans who were in residential schools - their horror stories are sickening, to put it mildly. And we also have a lot of small towns whose residents think the Indian Wars did not go on long enough, if you catch my drift... And don't even get me started on the South.

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    1. Thanks, Eve. Have you read Perma Red by Debra Magpie Earling? It's set on the Flathead Reservation in W Montana, where I lived for several years although I am not a tribal member, and it's a hard-hitting but beautiful story that illustrates some of the impact of the schools.

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  3. Welcome to SleuthSayers, Leslie! I used the bio you gave me, but I keep wanting to jump up and down and say, "And she's a lawyer too!" I loved the way you used that part of your own "write what you know" in Blind Faith. In my Mendoza Family Saga, which I've kept going by following up the novels with a potentially unlimited number of short stories, I mix past and present in some of the stories by giving the original Mendozas a host of descendants all the way to the present day or whenever I want to set them. A few artifacts and some of the legends and traditions of the original characters have been passed down to them. In real life, that's true of families like the Mendozas, who are Jews expelled from Spain in 1492. Centuries later, families in Central America, for example, were still lighting candles on Friday night and performing other rituals because they were "the old ways," though they had no idea of their own Jewish heritage.

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    1. Thanks for the invitation and the welcome, Liz! Yes, I am a lawyer; my first book, and first Agatha :), was a guide for writers on using the law in their fiction, called Books, Crooks and Counselors: How to Write Accurately About Criminal Law and Courtroom Procedure. Blind Faith features my first lawyer protagonist; I enjoyed that more than I expected, so she may not be the last!

      Love your example about the lighting of the candles -- it shows some of the richness of tradition, even when it becomes separated from the stories behind it. With fiction, we can re-make some of those connections, and show the interconnectedness of people across time and cultures.

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  4. Love this because I also like to bring history into my contemporary mystery novels, and the history of "place" and "objects" is so important to readers. History gives meaning and weight to our contemporary stories. Great job with this post!

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    1. Thanks, Christine. We are surrounded by objects with personal history, and so are our characters -- one more way to give them dimension and interest on the page.

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  5. Love that you are bringing history to life. I have always enjoyed reading about the past and learning more about our history is one way to carry on the traditions. deborahortega229@yahoo.com

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    1. Thanks, Deborah. You touch on another point: history in fiction helps connect our readers to the story, as well as educate them.

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  6. Injecting a touch of history into your work is a wonderful way to show your readers the past’s effect on present-day life. Your post and replies to comments show the added value you bring to your writing. Perma Red should be required reading in all high schools and colleges.

    Thank you, Elizabeth, and Leslie, for today’s blog and for sharing about missing and taken Native American women.

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    1. Thanks so much. Perma Red was originally published in 2002 and republished by Milkweed this past fall. More about it here: https://milkweed.org/book/perma-red

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  7. Baby Snorky! How clever. I'm impressed.

    Please don't hate me. I confess I have not read your novels, but I promise that will change. As a child, I was steeped and marinated in a few hundred years of family history and local history, so your descriptions resonate within me.

    And may I add, welcome to SleuthSayers!

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  8. Thanks for featuring Six Feet Deep Dish in your post! I was thinking about a lot of these themes yesterday watching The Pale Blue Eye on Netflix. A lot of real history was intertwined with the fictional mystery. And there was an icehouse!

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