How Layers of History Add a Rich Flavor to Contemporary Mysteries

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Like many readers, I love a good historical mystery. A mystery that unlocks secrets of the past, reveals a forgotten story, or sheds light on tensions still plaguing the modern world.

While most of my work is contemporary, I’ve discovered that the skillful use of history can deepen the traditional mystery, including the cozy. In my Spice Shop mysteries, set in Seattle’s Pike Place Market, history is in the air—along with the smells of fish, produce, and flowers, the sounds of buskers, and the hubbub of ten million visitors a year. Founded in 1907 and saved from the wrecking ball by voters in 1971, Pike Place is the country’s oldest continuously-operating farmers’ market. It’s a collage of venerable structures with distinct origins and styles, replete with lower levels and secret passages, woven together by a cobbled street, open-air arcades, and an atmosphere of magic. As Pepper Reece, the Spice Shop owner, goes about her business, she feeds us tidbits of history: The early market master who may or may not still dance in the former ballroom windows. The spirits that toss bottles off a bar’s shelves, appeased by a pitcher of brew. The first business in the city licensed to a woman, going strong. The stories that live on.

And readers love it as much as I do.

Historical mysteries are often based on or inspired by real events. In contrast, history adds layers to a contemporary mystery, bringing a place to life through the characters’ experience of it. A historical event—fact or fiction—may play a part in the main plot or a subplot.

Author Connie Berry often uses an object as the focus in her Kate Hamilton mysteries, featuring an American antiques dealer in the UK. In The Shadow of Memory, Kate is asked to appraise items offered for sale by the trustees of a long-closed Victorian sanatorium to finance its conversion into luxury apartments. Kate suspects a prized painting in the collection may be a forgery. Her questions lead to stonewalling and denial, and ultimately to danger. Clues surface in the sanatorium and a nearby house once lauded for its mid-century architecture, appealing to readers like me intrigued by design. Ultimately, Kate discovers the truth about a decades-old murder as well as three recent killings.

Iced Under, a Maine Clambake mystery by Barbara Ross, starts with the arrival of a package containing the Black Widow, a black diamond necklace once owned by Julia Snowden’s great-grandmother—and not seen for a century. While tracing the package, Julia meets relatives she never knew and probes a fresh mysterious death. Along the way, she learns more about the history of the ice business in New England, the source of her family’s long-gone wealth. Long-gone except for the necklace and Morrow Island, where the family runs a clambake in the shadow of Windsholme, once a grand summer home. An intriguing slice of history, a rundown mansion, and black diamonds—the perfect late-night read.

Authors also blend past and present by weaving parallel stories. Rhys Bowen is a master of dual timelines. A reference in a letter sends a young British woman on the wartime trail of her late father in The Tuscan Child. Not only is the past not dead—it could still kill. And in The Venice Sketchbook, we travel in tandem with two women: one who sketches a city on the verge of war, capturing both love and memories, and her great-niece, seeking solace as she follows clues the recently-deceased woman left behind, rediscovering herself in the process.

“The setting feels like a character,” readers sometimes say. The secrets old walls hide and the atmosphere they create is a popular element in suspense novels, eerily illustrated in Carol Goodman’s The Stranger Behind You. When Joan moves into a Manhattan apartment building called The Refuge—just what she’s seeking—she has no idea it was once a notorious Magdalen laundry, a home for wayward girls in the early 20th century. The nooks and crannies of the real building, long demolished, and the story of the mysterious neighbor amplify the fear and danger that dog Joan. The author writes that the building’s existence “seemed to have vanished from living memory, as if it were an embarrassment.” This is the best kind of history—to take us back to a forgotten time.

Cleo Coyle’s Haunted Bookshop series brings the past to life in a very different way, through a pair of sleuths: modern-day bookseller Penelope McClure and the ghost who haunts her shop, a PI named Jack Shephard. In The Ghost Goes to the Dogs, Jack’s adventures pursuing a case in the 1940s give Penelope a clue to her own predicament. Readers get the best of both worlds, a delightful combination.

A few years ago, my husband and I toured the Wing Luke Museum in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District. It’s a fascinating place, featuring a replica of a Chinese grocery and tours of the adjacent Kong Yick Hotel, once a community center and boarding house for Chinese laborers.

What if, I wondered, a body was found in the basement of a closed residential hotel? A brand-new body, dressed like a lion dancer and found during Lunar New Year festivities. What if Pepper, my Spice Shop owner, was drawn into the mystery not just to name the dead, but to probe the other secrets of the Gold Rush Hotel?

I read about the role of residential hotels in the Chinese community and about national and local politics surrounding Chinese immigration in the late 19th century. I pored over websites cataloging historic Chinese pharmacies in rural Oregon and Montana. In my mind, I created shelves crammed with old bottles and jars, boxes labeled in old calligraphy, and other mysterious objects. And when I found a historian’s account of traveling with her immigrant father in the Midwest, selling produce and visiting the old Chinese hotels and restaurants, I felt a mental click. Community is key to every immigrant, but especially to those who have faced extreme prejudice and legal exclusion. That, I realized, was why my fictional hotelier, Francis Wu, held on to the Gold Rush long after the hotel closed. Why he was so determined that it stay in the family, despite his son’s indifference.

Why he did not destroy the apothecary in the basement, despite what it had cost him.

Last fall, I walked Seattle’s Chinatown-International District again, snapping pictures and feeling the cobbled streets and alleys beneath my feet. I hope you feel it too, on the page.

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