Launch: Cecelia Tichi’s Death in a Gilded Frame
INTERVIEW BY LESLIE S. LOWE
Cecelia Tichi’s fascination with Gilded Age America calls readers to the Val and Roddy DeVere Gilded Age series, mystery crime novels that pulse with turn-of-the-century American life… and death! An award-winning author and Professor of English and American Studies Emerita at Vanderbilt University, Cecelia brings fiction’s “odd couple” to crime scenes where they match wits to discover “whodunit.”
How would you describe this book and its themes in a couple of sentences?
A silver-mine heiress from Nevada and her New York “Four Hundred” husband team up to solve murders in Gotham and Newport, 1888–1889. While sleuthing, courtroom lawyer Roderick DeVere, Esq. (aka Roddy) defends taverns from Temperance zealots and invents new drinks called cocktails, while Valentine (Val) faces society’s headwinds as the “Wild West” woman, too rich to be black-balled but too “low” for full acceptance by the society that is her husband’s birthright.
What inspired you to start writing historical fiction and what has been most rewarding about it?
I am passionate about bringing the tumultuous first Gilded Age into the present that tracks so closely with that earlier time. If you Google “Gilded Age,” umpteen present-day issues pop up to verify this second Gilded Age! Both Gilded Ages mirror one another. As a favorite saying of mine goes, “We live in history, and history lives in us.”
The reward is tapping into long-term classroom teaching and library research to bring to life the Gilded Age characters who deserve my time and the readers’ who love to read about it.
How is this latest novel different from the other novels in The Roddy and Val DeVere Gilded Age Series?
From A Gilded Death (#1) through A Gilded Drowning Pool (#5), Val and Roddy have solved murders in tandem. Not this time! Death in a Gilded Frame finds Roddy distracted and busy, while Val is shamed and shunned in Newport, disdained at a luncheon, taunted on a yacht, cartooned at a dinner party. In this 1899 summer, the burden is hers to clear her name from suspicion of murder and find the killer!
Why the focus on this topic now? Is there a historical event you found in researching that inspired you to write this story to portray a key message for now?
All mystery/crime novels present a world gone dangerously off- kilter. The major characters’ mission is to restore a previous “golden age” or to march toward a better future. Either way, justice must be served.
Two historical figures inspired this series and key into the present. First, the Irish immigrant John Mackay, who became a late 1800s western “Silver King” through intelligence and hard work. Second, Evalyn Walsh McLean, who slept on satin sheets after daddy struck gold in the Rocky Mountains, but always remembered her girlhood nights under bearskin rugs in subzero weather.
In sum, these two historical figures are so relevant today: the hardworking immigrant, when the Irish were not considered to be racially white and the privileged woman, who never forgot where she came from and why it matters to remember others in hard circumstances. Mackay and Walsh McLean are my models for Val and her papa.
How do the characters transform within the story over the series? What did that journey mean to you as you wrote it?
A series offers a wonderful opportunity to deepen the major characters book-by-book and the recurring minor characters as well. A new storyline asks characters to reveal themselves in ways not encountered in prior conflicts. Present obstacles must be overcome by drawing on resources previously not understood. In addition, the past can haunt Val and/or Roddy—or free each of them in the present and for the future.
How do you think the reader will connect with Val Mackle DeVere in this book?
Val is a strong woman! Like many women of her time—and ours—she finds herself in unforeseen life circumstances that demand resourcefulness even as they sometimes feel crushing. She pays a price for who she is, but Valentine Mackle DeVere is dauntless!
How did you balance the research with writing the story? Did you get to do any interesting interviews for your research?
For Death in a Gilded Frame, I “interviewed” via memoirs, biographies, and art histories. Period-piece accuracy is a must, and the Gilded novels are backstopped by my sizable library of volumes on American history and culture, including vintage cocktail recipe books, so crucial for the drinks that Roddy DeVere mixes and which appear in the novels from time to time.
I also shelve a dozen etiquette books from the late 1800s, all specifying proper ladies’ conduct from sipping tea to riding sidesaddle. At times, Val’s violation of etiquette is purposeful and deliberate, as when she chooses the U.S. Army’s cavalry saddle and straddles her horse for the bridle paths of Central Park.
You have written ten fiction and nonfiction books on various topics, including Gilded Age America. What are you working on now? Is it connected to this one or your other work in any way?
The Val and Roddy DeVere series has me in its tight grip (in process: A Gilded Rosewood Coffin). I am also intrigued by three Americans who established soup kitchens in the 1930s Depression and am convinced their trio of outreach ought to be known. They are:
– Marjorie Merriweather Post (rich post-cereal heiress on the East Coast)
– Aimee Semple McPherson (Famed Christan evangelist preaching in southern California)
– Al Capone (kingpin mobster in Chicago).
Perhaps a reader of this interview will write about them!
As Professor of English and American Studies Emerita at Vanderbilt University and lecturer, how have your life experiences been incorporated with or assisted you in your writing?
Most professors of English grew up in literary households, but I grew up learning vocabulary from comic books, especially Little Lulu, who was her neighborhood boss—a proto-feminist. Sadly, academic prose in English can almost need translation, but my goal is clear writing, good pacing, a page-turner of a storyline, and frequent little gifts to readers as paragraphs proceed—smart turns of phrase, surprising words, vibrant images.
Every author has their own publishing journey. Tell me about yours.
Like many writers, I have needed reminding that “rejection” can be temporary, not a permanent dismissal and exile. For every author whose first historical novel becomes a runaway bestseller, many of us “plug away” at our keyboards or in our notebooks, long-haulers one and all. The best advice to me along the way was to adopt a good salesperson’s mantra: a refusal is one step closer to success! If you need to write, write!
What advice would you give to other aspiring historical writers?
Immerse yourself in the period that summons you, then bring your readers into that historical era—always with a good balance between data and story. Be careful not to “drown” your reader with everything in your own head.
What is the last great book you read? Why?
Top of my list: Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver. Regrettably, the title harkens to Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, but Kingsolver’s story is all-American. The best-known orphan boy in U.S. literature, Huckleberry Finn, is revived for this era in the life of Demon (Damon). Unlike Twain, Kingsolver sends Demon from boyhood into adolescence and young manhood with all the perils of life in America’s vast underclass. I predict that long after acclaimed bestsellers have their day, this Pulitzer-winning novel will be read, discussed, and bookmarked in the minds of 21st century readers.
