The Right Season for Amy Ephron’s Unseasonably Cold

BY TRISH MACENULTY

When Amy Ephron started out to write her noir-ish 1939 mystery, Unseasonably Cold, (The Sager Group, 2026) she did not expect the process to be interrupted by other writing projects. She started writing the book a few years ago. In the meantime, she had sketched out the plot of a children’s book, The Castle in the Mist, (Penguin, 2018).

“The Castle in the Mist is a modern-day mash-up of an old-fashioned children’s book,” she said. “I was definitely influenced by Frances Hodgson Burnett’s books, A Wrinkle in Time, The Phantom Tollbooth, and wanted to try my hand at it,” she said.

Penguin/Philomel asked for two more books in the Other Side series. Between writing these two books, which she describes as an absolute pleasure, and going on a schoolbook tour, work on Unseasonably Cold got put aside for a while.

However, the delays worked out in her favor. “Somehow it all feels perfect,” she said, “because our own time evolved so that 1939 looks a lot like now. So, it seems a relatable time to me.”

The year 1939 was a pivotal year in history, marking the end of the Great Depression and the start of the deadliest war in history.

“The longer the writing took, the more the period of 1939 seemed to mirror today. The division of wealth, the threat of a possible world war. Religious divides. External placidness veiling fear and grief often constantly felt,” she said.

Ephron notes that the underlying placidness and fear she describes mirror the plot of her book, in which a well-known heiress (Jane) disappears without a trace and nobody knows what happened to her. The story is narrated by Jane’s best friend and others, many of whom exhibit a studied level of calm, obscuring their sense of loss, grief, and fear.

The year 1939 was also an inspirational period in the arts. Against the backdrop of impending war, the Modernism movement emerged in art and literature. The 1939 World’s Fair was held in Queens, New York. Broadway was booming, and the surrealist artist Salvador Dali even designed a show.

For Ephron, character is not only defined by geo-political events, although she says that those events are important. “A character is defined by what they wear: what they choose to order or imbibe; the decoration of a house or garden.” For example, the character Liza is fond of making vodka gimlets and cosmopolitans. And in the opening scene she’s remembering eating perfect egg salad sandwiches with the crusts removed at a tea shop in the West Village.

“It was fun bringing all of those attributes into play,” she said.

author Amy Ephron

This was also a time of secret love affairs. Ephron researched tabloid scandals from the period in order to understand how the public would be affected by the disappearance of a famous heiress.

“In my novel, the disappearance of Jane is front page news. As is the police investigation. And the reporter who seems to know everything almost before anyone else, knew Jane’s best friend Liza when they were kids,” she said.

To give readers context, she tried to pick locations from the past that are still in existence today such as Gallagher’s Steakhouse and the Manhattan police station, which looks much the same it did back in 1939.

While the inciting incident of a woman’s disappearance is not based on an actual historical figure, Ephron says that she has lost a couple of friends, only to discover there was much she had not known about them until after their deaths – similar to her character’s discoveries.

“In both cases, we were good friends, and there was a lot I hadn’t known about each of their states of mind and/or habits,” she said. “Secrets, lies, betrayals, and possible drug use.”

She noted that an unexpected loss, particularly when we are young, brings with it an intense level of pain and grief.

Unseasonably Cold has been described as a noir mystery. The noir plot hinges on a police investigation; the multiple family ties; romantic entanglements, hidden and not so hidden relationships.

“I am not sure I knew much when I started, except that Jane had disappeared and her best friend Liza, whose POV begins the book, had lunch with her that day.”

Ephron doesn’t make extensive outlines, and she said she isn’t sure that she knew how the book would end when she started.

“The book takes a left turn at a certain point as everyone has secrets, lies. And as they unfold, the story lines interlap,” she said. “It was fun to see it evolve that way, and at a certain point, it got so dark, I started to laugh, sort of the way you could at a Quentin Tarantino movie. And it took some turns I didn’t expect it to make.

“But it’s also a love story,” she added.

About the contributor: Author of the Delafield & Malloy Investigations series, the historical coming-of-age novel, Cinnamon Girl (Livingston Press, Sept. 2023), and more, Trish MacEnulty is currently working on a play about silent film star, Theda Bara. More info at her website.