We are delighted to welcome author Triss Stein to Omnimystery News today.
Triss's third mystery to feature amateur sleuth Erica Donato is Brooklyn Secrets (Poisoned Pen Press; December 2015 hardcover, trade paperback and ebook formats) and we recently had the opportunity to spend some time with her talking about the series.
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Omnimystery News: Into which genre would you put the books in this series?
Photo provided courtesy of
Triss Stein
Triss Stein: My goal is to write mysteries set in Brooklyn neighborhoods, halfway between too cozy and too hard-boiled, a domestic style background that includes real emotions and real conflicts.
I made up a category: Urban Cozy. Or, Soft-Boiled. I thought there was something missing from the mystery world, something about ordinary life in a city setting. The usual urban landscape, those mean streets, does not have a home for characters (or readers!) who are not Philip Marlowe. Or Harry Bosch. Or Matt Scudder. Who do not even know anyone like Matt Scudder.
That would be me, and my friends and millions of other readers who live rather ordinary lives but do it in a big (bad?) city like New York. The life I see around me is mostly about work and family and home, neighborhood issues, schools. Sound familiar? Not very different from the traditional mystery setting of a smaller community. And anyone who believes there is not enough drama there to sustain a mystery series is not paying attention. Kill over real estate? Art? Reputation? Winning and losing? In a New York minute.
OMN: How much of your own personal or professional experience have you included in your books?
TS: I have lived in Brooklyn for many decades now. Long ago I worked for the public library system. They liked to move us around and what I observed was that the different neighborhoods were a lot like small towns. Each one had its own atmosphere, history, quirks, and fears. My settings are real and the plots are often inspired by real incidents, adapted to suit my own purposes. I've never deliberately based a character on someone I know, but some of Erica comes from a few real Brooklyn girls I have known who, like Erica, have traveled a long way from their roots. And some of her is me, too.
Because I wanted to write about being a mother, she is one. Because I wanted to write about Brooklyn's varied, fascinating and often mythologized past, she is a historian whose work takes her into some dark stories, both old and new.
OMN: How do you go about researching the plot points of your stories?
TS: I love to do research. I did it in the business world for many years, but now I get to follow my own quirky interests in the odd corners of history. Much more fun. The challenge is knowing when to stop and write a story with a plot, using the history to support the story not the other way around.
Each book has been a little different, but for Brooklyn Secrets and the work-in-progress I went old school and walked myself into the Brooklyn history room at the Brooklyn Public Library's central building (a system separate from NYPL) At this point, I am looking for the sources that will be most useful for my criminal pursuits. I ask for the clipping files too, and walk through the news of the decades, just looking for what pops out at me. Then, I hop on Internet used book sites, such as ABE, and see if I can order up some of the books. Usually they are "used" books, not "antique" books, and are priced accordingly, often for less than the mailing costs. For Brooklyn Secrets, I ended up with, among others, an academic study of girls growing up in Brownsville, a naive but thorough early history from 1969, and a volume from the photographic series, Images of America, calledNew York City Gangland. Those mug shots were most inspiring! Now I have them handy to peruse, refer to, write in. Lots of Post-Its will be sacrificed to the cause.
After awhile, themes emerge and important or charming or illuminating details are noted. Of course I do online research too, spot-checking facts and — as one does on the 'Net- pursuing threads down unexpected path, well past the point of common sense. It's a lovely way to procrastinate. For Brooklyn Secrets, I stumbled across an interview with the grandson of a famous Mob leader. He talked about his grandpa's favorite film depictions of himself! Now that was a very odd disconnect between his mind and what most people call "reality". And right there, in that gap, is where a story starts. Did I jump on that article? With a thank you to the Writing Goddess? You will find him, transformed by my imagination, in the pages of Brooklyn Secrets.
OMN: How true are you to the actual settings?
TS: My whole series is set in a very real place, Brooklyn, NY, big enough to be its own city (it would be the 4th largest in the US) and yet, a collection of extremely diverse neighborhoods. All of the books are inspired by both the current life in a neighborhood and the history behind it. So, yes, a real place and the foundation of the series. Erica is who she is because she grew up in Brooklyn, and the crimes that take place come from the place that they happen. Brooklyn Bones, the first in the series, was easy. I just looked outside my front door. Park Slope, where I live, is a lively and beautiful corner of Brooklyn which has gone through a couple of decades of steady gentrification, for good or ill. However, it was not always the center of chic it has become (Seriously! They think this in Paris!) And I was here just as it was changing. It was not hard to find a story from that darker time.
Brooklyn Graves was directly inspired by a place, beautiful and historic Green-Wood Cemetery, and a series of news stories about priceless stained glass windows being stolen from now neglected, but once affluent, churches and mausoleums. I think any mystery writer, especially one of with a taste for history, would clip those articles and save them. And ponder. It also includes some scenes in a neighborhood that changed greatly with a flood of Russian immigration, and some of the tensions that go with that.
Brooklyn Secrets takes place in Brownsville, one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city, and with one of the highest crime rates. I worked there many years ago, but the challenges were to make sure my knowledge was current and to write about such a complex place with fairness and accuracy.
OMN: What is the best advice you've received as an author?
TS: I've seen this attributed to a few people, but William Faulkner seems the likeliest: I only write when I am inspired. Fortunately, I become inspired every morning at 9:00. That kind of says it all. The most important piece of advice can be summarized in the least elegant way: BICHOK. Butt In Chair, Hands On Keyboard. There is only one way books get written, and that is not by daydreaming about them. musing, researching, outlining, or — the fatal trap — wasting time on digital media. They get written by putting words on paper (or screen, of course). You cannot revise or improve what you have not written. Blunt but true. Any number of writers has said this in any number of ways: Philip Pullman says, "Plumbers don't get plumbers block." He goes on to say, "Putting it another way: a professional writer is someone who writes just as well when they're not inspired as when they are." Barbara Kingsolver says, "Chain that muse to your desk and get the job done."
Finally, because I learn what I think by writing it, I live by E.L. Doctorow's "Writing a book is like taking a long car trip at night. You can only see as far as the headlights, but you can make the whole journey that way."
OMN: What kinds of books did you read when you were young?
TS: I sometimes think I am the only woman mystery writer who was not a Nancy Drew fan. That might be an embarrassing confession. Before I read Nancy Drew, I had read greater books, notably Little Women, and I didn't become interested in mysteries until I was old enough for Agatha Christie. What I did like was books about little girls like me who lived a long time ago. Very much a bookworm, I not only read all of Alcott I could get my hands on, but all of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, all of the Betsy-Tacy books, plus books about colonial girls, Quaker girls, Biblical girls, Highland rebellion girls and some wonderful non-fiction books about history provided by a librarian aunt. There are two themes here: series about girls who grew up to become writers (at least 3!), and books about history. It’s not an accident that I write mysteries now with a history background.
OMN: What's next for you?
TS: The next book will be set against the background of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. A true engine of victory during World War ii — it employed 70,000 workers at it’s peak and the battleship Missouri was built there — it suffered a long, slow death and then an interesting current revival. In a story that involves patriotism, unions, the Department of Defense, corruption, local politics, valuable property and idealism, there is lots of room for conflict and drama of all kinds. Erica witnesses a murder, discovers some family connections and uncovers a tragic mid-century love story, too.
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Triss Stein is a small-town girl who has spent most of her adult life living and working in New York City. This gives her the useful double vision of a stranger and a resident which she uses to write mysteries about Brooklyn, her ever-fascinating, ever-changing, ever-challenging adopted home.
For more information about the author, please visit her website at TrissStein.com or find her on Facebook.
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Brooklyn Secrets by Triss Stein
An Erica Donato Mystery
Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press
Erica Donato, Brooklyn girl, urban history grad student, and single mom, is researching the 1930s when Brownsville was the home of the notorious organized criminals the newspapers called Murder Inc. She quickly learns that even in rapidly changing Brooklyn, Brownsville remains much as it was. It is still poor, it is still tough, and it still breeds fighters and gangs.
Doing field research, Erica stops in at the landmark local library and meets Savanna, a young woman who is the pride of her mother and her bosses, and is headed for an elite college and a future. A few days later, she is found beaten and left for dead. Her anguished mother is everywhere, insisting someone knows something. After a massive, angry demonstration, a young girlfriend of Savanna's is found dead too. Is there a connection? Did perfect Savanna have a few secrets?
Erica is curious. But she's focused on the 1930s and has located a few women who are happy to share memories. Two are childhood friends who disagree on much, but guard secrets too — ones kept for a lifetime. Never one to resist looking deeper than her research requires, Erica keeps encountering an apparent derelict white man, a vengeful rejected girlfriend, the role of boxing as a way out of poverty, and fading evidence of long-ago crimes.
— Brooklyn Secrets by Triss Stein
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