with Aileen G. Baron
We are delighted to welcome mystery author Aileen G. Baron to Omnimystery News today, courtesy of Partners in Crime Tours, which is coordinating her current book tour. We encourage you to visit all of the participating host sites; you can find her schedule here.
Aileen introduced archaeology graduate student Lily Sampson in A Fly Has a Hundred Eyes, which was first published in 2002 and followed by two more entries in the series. Aileen has recently published an ebook format of the book.
Today Aileen introduces us to the setting of A Fly Has a Hundred Eyes, and pays tribute to a special person, who played an important role in her life.
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Photo provided courtesy of
Aileen G. Baron
When Jerusalem became part of the Ottoman Empire in 1516, Suleiman the Magnificent initiated a spate of construction. The water supply was augmented, pools and fountains were constructed and repaired, gates were rebuilt, city walls were refurbished and refortified. Eventually, the corruption and bribery of the provincial government took their toll, the city suffered, the roads deteriorated, the water system fell into disrepair, the population dwindled, and the neglected city became a tangle of narrow, ill-paved and dirty streets beset with filth, disease and banditry.
When the sanctity of Jerusalem became a source of revenue for the tottering Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century, the city revived. Concessions were granted for foreign missions and consulates. Schools, missions and hostels were built by the British, French, Germans, Americans, and Russians. and whole neighborhoods were constructed beyond the walls of the Old City, occupied by American idealists, French prelates, Swedish carpenters, and Jewish Zionists, returning to the land of their forefathers to escape Russian tyranny. Three of the landmark settlements stand out in my mind.
One of them is the Russian Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society built a mission, a hostel, and a hospital outside of the Old City where the Turkish Cavalry parade ground had been, on the self-same site that, in 700 BC, the Assyrian garrison camped, and Titus rallied the Roman troops in 70 AD in his siege of Jerusalem.
Another is the complex of buildings a little north of the Herod's Gate of the Old City and down the street from the American School that became the American Colony Hotel. It had been the home of Rabbah Daoud Amin Effendi al-Husseini and was bought by a group of religious Americans who established a utopian commune. They tried to develop a small farm with cows and pigs, a dairy and a bakery, and hostel for visitors. Amateurs at farming, they were on the verge of bankruptcy when a group of Swedish carpenters came to their rescue, moved in with them, and turned the American Colony into a thriving enterprise. In 1902, Baron Ustinov, the grandfather of actor Peter Ustinov, and a collector of Palestinian antiquities, took over the complex and established a hostel there for archaeologists and journalists where they could stay instead of the polluted confines of the Old City. The hostel eventually became the American Colony Hotel. In 1987, scenes from the film of Agatha Christie's Appointment with Death with Peter Ustinov were shot there. Until it was bought by a Swiss hotel chain in 1980, the hotel still gave special considerations and lower rates to archaeologists and journalists. Lawrence of Arabia stayed there, Leon Uris, Philip Roth, and John le Carre.
The third landmark is the old Shaare Zedek Hospital near the entrance to Jerusalem on Jaffa Road. Today, there is a new facility in the Bayit Vegan suburb of Jerusalem, but when my husband was director of the lab in the original Shaare Zedek Hospital, he said the building reminded him of something out of Dickens. Around the turn of the last century, Dr. Moshe Wallach came from Germany, determined to build a clean, up-to-the-minute hospital away from the unsanitary, disease-ridden Old City. With funding from European donors, he bought two and a half acres three kilometers west of the city walls, and built a forty-bed hospital. To insure the health of his patients, and cleanness of food entering the hospital he grew vegetables in the surrounding land, and kept cows and sheep for milk and meat. The electricity for the hospital was provided by a collection of batteries that filled several rooms in the basement, still there when my husband worked at the hospital in the 1960's.
But the most remarkable facility of the hospital was the diminutive Schwester Selma. An orphan from Hanover, Germany, she arrived at Shaare Zedek and imposed order on the primitive conditions of the hospital in 1916, in time to deal with a typhoid epidemic the following year. As the hospital grew, she initiated a training program for nurses, imposing new standards of sanitation, and emphasizing her particular brand of TLC. When distraught parents brought their children to the hospital during food shortages in World War I, Schwester Selma took care of them. She loved children. In her lifetime, she adopted 32 children, caring for them and seeing to their education. When General Allenby conquered Jerusalem in 1917 and entered the city on foot out of respect for the holiness of Jerusalem, Schwester Selma met him on the road with a cup of tea. Later, the treaty that ceded Jerusalem to the British was announced from a balcony of Shaare Zedek.
In 1975, Time magazine named her one of the world's living saints, along with Mother Theresa and three others.
When my youngest son contracted rheumatic fever, Schwester Selma sent someone every day to check on him. After he recovered enough to go back to school, for Purim, when children dress in costume, she gave him in one of her uniforms, and he went, disguised as Schwester Selma.
She was one of the most remarkable people that I ever met, and I will always be grateful that I knew her.
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Aileen G. Baron has spent her life unearthing the treasures and secrets left behind by previous civilizations. Her pursuit of the ancient has taken her to distant countries — Israel, Turkey, Jordan, Greece, Britain, China and the Yucatan — and to some surprising California destinations, like Newport Beach, California and the Mojave Desert.
She taught for twenty years in the Department of Anthropology at California State University, Fullerton, and has conducted many years of fieldwork in the Middle East, including a year at the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem as an NEH scholar and director of the overseas campus of California State Universities at the Hebrew University. She holds degrees from several universities, including the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Riverside.
For more information about the author and her work, please visit her website at AileenGBaron.com.
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A Fly Has a Hundred Eyes
Aileen G. Baron
A Lily Sampson Mystery
In the summer of 1938, Jerusalem is in chaos and the atmosphere teems with intrigue. Terrorists roam the countryside. The British are losing control of Palestine as Europe nervously teeters on the brink of World War II.
Against this backdrop of international tensions, Lily Sampson, an American graduate student, is involved in a dig — an important excavation directed by the eminent British archaeologist, Geoffrey Eastbourne, who is murdered on his way to the opening of the Rockefeller Museum. Artifacts from the dig are also missing, one of which is a beautiful blue glass amphoriskos (a vial about three and a half inches long) which Lily herself had excavated. Upset by this loss, she searches for the vial — enlisting the help of the military attaché of the American consulate.
But when she contacts the British police, they seem evasive and offputting — unable or unwilling either to find the murderer or to look into the theft of the amphoriskos. Lily realizes that she will get no help from them and sets out on her own to find the vial. When she finds the victim’s journal in her tent, she assumes he had left it for her because he feared for his life.
Lily’s adventurous search for information about the murder and the theft of the amphoriskos lead into a labyrinth of danger and intrigue.
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