How Grandma’s Old-Time Songs Inspired My New Mystery Series

By Elaine Viets, Guest Blogger

Elaine Viets, our guest blogger today, is a highly popular mystery author whose fourth series launched this month. She’s won the Agatha, Anthony, and Lefty Awards and was honored with Malice Domestic’s Lifetime Achievement Award. With Sex and Death on the Beach, Elaine returns to her adopted home, South Florida.

My grandmother liked to sing. She’d sing while she cooked in her kitchen, pulled weeds in her garden, or rocked in her porch glider. On summer nights, she and her friends would drink highballs, play cards, and sing. Comforting songs from when Grandma was young, like “Shine On, Harvest Moon,” “Pennies from Heaven,” and “Blue Skies.”

But one of Grandma’s favorites sounded downright creepy to me. It began:

“Tell me, pretty maiden, are there any more at home like you?”
“There are a few, kind sir, but simple girls and proper too.”

Ick. Where did that come from?

I didn’t track that song down until the advent of the Internet, when I learned the tune Grandma used to sing was “Tell Me Pretty Maiden,” a showstopper in a hit musical comedy called Florodora. The musical debuted in London, where it was wildly popular, and was transplanted to Broadway in 1900.

Florodora was set on a mythical island, which produced a perfume by the same name. The characters included an evil millionaire, snooty Lady Holyrood, a ridiculous phrenologist, a stolen fortune, and of course, beautiful showgirls, the Florodora Girls.

Florodora Girls were such stunners that supposedly they all married rich men. There was also scandal. Real live juicy scandal. The notorious Evelyn Nesbit was in Florodora.

Once I knew this, I had to have a Florodora Girl in my new Florida Beach series. Except the series was set in the present, featuring Florida Men and Women. And Florodora hadn’t been on Broadway in more than a hundred years. So I gave my character, Norah McCarthy, a racy Florodora grandmother, who seemed capable of almost anything. Maybe even murder. Norah’s grandma built an apartment house in mythical Peerless Point, Florida, and Norah inherited it.

Sex and Death on the Beach opens when the body of a porn star is found buried by the pool at the Florodora apartments. Norah is the prime suspect. Worse, another body is unearthed, buried when Norah was a little girl. Did Grandma kill that person?

The residents of Norah’s building belong to an exclusive group. They must be Florida Men and Women, but the benign variety. The exploits of Florida Man often include alligators and alcohol. You’ve seen the headlines: “Florida Man Busted with Meth, Guns, and Baby Gator in Truck.” Norah’s feelings about Florida Man and Woman are “somewhere between appalled and perversely proud.” She’s descended from an early Florida Woman, her grandmother, Eleanor Harriman.

Norah’s grandma had a soft spot for scapegraces, since she was one herself. She was a Florodora Girl, a superstar chorus girl a century ago. Norah’s grandmother was in the 1920 Broadway production of Florodora before she eloped with handsome Johnny Harriman, a millionaire, back when a million was real money. She was married at sixteen and madly in love. When Norah was old enough, “Grandma told me about poor Johnny’s accidental death, which involved a champagne bottle and a chandelier.”

Like Norah’s grandmother, my own grandma married at sixteen. But my grandfather was no champagne-swilling millionaire. Grandma worked at a pickle factory. She married on her lunch break and went back to work. The bride and groom each went home to their parents. They were too poor to have their own home. They were married more than fifty years.

At seventeen, my character Norah’s grandmother was a rich widow who moved to Florida and built an apartment building, the Florodora, right on the ocean in 1923. The Florodora was quirky as Norah’s grandmother, with grand rooms, odd hideaways, and at least one secret staircase. To her bedroom. Norah was orphaned at age four and raised by her grandmother. The eccentric residents became her honorary uncles and aunts. When Norah’s grandma died at ninety-eight some twenty years ago, Norah inherited the Florodora.

The painting of Norah’s grandmother, commissioned by her doting husband when Eleanor was seventeen, displays her in all her Florodora glory. She wore a black picture hat, pink ruffled dress, long black gloves, and a frilly parasol.

Despite the modest costume, some critics were scandalized. A reviewer from the show’s first run in the US called it “one of the most uncompromisingly filthy plays ever seen in New York.”

What was so outrageous? Most of the girls didn’t wear pink tights when they danced.

That sounds quaint, but Florodora Girls were mixed up in modern crimes like murder, date rape drugs, and underage sex. Architect Stanford White was shot and killed by Harry Thaw, the husband of Evelyn Nesbit, for drugging and raping the Florodora beauty. You may recognize Evelyn from the movie Ragtime or an even older movie, The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing. Don’t waste your sympathy on Stanford. He was a married man in his fifties when he seduced Evelyn.

If you drive past the Florodora Apartments on Ocean Drive, you’ll see the old white building looks much the same as it did during the roaring Twenties. The Florodora Apartments are Spanish Colonial, a white stucco structure with a red barrel-tile roof. The front windows have elaborate plaster Churrigueresque, which make the windows look like they’re framed in cake frosting. The Florodora’s almost the only old Florida building left on Ocean Drive. The rest are high-rise condos. Most look like shoeboxes standing on end. The Florodora is a reminder of Florida’s glamour days in the Twenties.

What you can’t see from the road is the beachfront. The Florodora sits on a wide boardwalk teeming with tourists and vendors selling everything from rum-filled pineapples to T-shirts and beach umbrellas. The sea air smells of salt and suntan lotion and the breeze is soft on the hottest days.

When I was nine, I realized my own grandmother lived during the roaring Twenties. Just like in the movies. I was sure my law-abiding Grandma wore beaded dresses, slammed back champagne with gangsters, and dodged police raids at speakeasies.

“What were the Twenties like, Grandma?” I asked her. “Were they fun?”

“Any time was fun,” she said. “If you had money.”