with Frances McNamara
We are delighted to welcome author Frances McNamara to Omnimystery News.
Frances's fifth mystery in her historical series featuring amateur sleuth Emily Cabot is Death at Chinatown (Allium Press of Chicago; August 2014 trade paperback and ebook formats) and she titles her guest post for us today, "Surprises in History".
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Photo provided courtesy of
Frances McNamara
I write the Emily Cabot mystery series, which is set in 1890s Chicago, during the Gilded Age. My protagonist is a graduate researcher at the University of Chicago, who works with a fictional police detective. The detective is roughly based on a real historical figure, Clifton Wooldridge, who wrote several books about his experiences. The two of them solve fictional murders, which happen against the backdrop of real historical events, such as the World's Columbian Exposition and the Pullman Strike. As I do research, in preparation for writing the books, I am forever discovering facts about the past that completely surprise me. When that happens, I want to find a way to include them in the mystery I'm working on.
My latest book, Death at Chinatown, which is the fifth in the series, began with the discovery that there were two young women from China who came to the U.S. and earned medical degrees in 1896. It wasn't common for women, especially Chinese women, to become doctors at that time. When I learned that they had spent the summer of 1896 in Chicago, before returning to China, I thought they were just the sort of women Emily Cabot would want to meet.
Their story also gave me the opportunity to portray something of the medical community in Chicago at that time, a topic I had not covered in the previous Emily Cabot mysteries. Medical education of that era was not yet regulated and there was a certain amount of animosity between the practitioners of homeopathic medicine and the more orthodox surgeons and physicians. This led to some interesting conflicts within the plot.
What really surprised me was the fact that X-ray technology, which was discovered in Europe in 1895, had already spread as far as Chicago by the summer of 1896. Emil Grubbé, a young medical student in Chicago, opened clinics providing treatments using X-rays and went on to become one of the most famous radiologists of the twentieth century. Of course, as a novelist, when I find out such historical details it leads me to wonder what it would have been like to be a young man working with such a new technology.
Historical fiction allows you to get down to the day-to-day details of a time period. You try to put the reader into the time and minds of people of the time. Today we take technologies, such as the X-ray, for granted. But what was it like when they were new?
To understand the details, I read materials written by the people involved — Grubbé himself wrote a book about how radiology developed — along with newspaper and journal articles of the time. That can lead to exciting discoveries that help to make the connection to the past. While researching Grubbé, I discovered the International Museum of Surgical Science, right here in Chicago. Within it I was fascinated to find a room full of equipment from Grubbé's laboratories.
But Grubbé is just one example of the fascinating historical characters I discovered while researching Death at Chinatown. The Chinese women doctors Shih Meiyu and Kang Cheng, the early Chinese American activist Wong Chin Foo, and the very real Moy family (who were prominent in Chicago's Chinatown at that time and whose descendants still live in Chicago), were all intriguing discoveries and I hope their presence makes the book engaging.
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Frances McNamara grew up in Boston where her father served as Police Commissioner for ten years. She has degrees from Mount Holyoke and Simmons Colleges, and is now a librarian at the University of Chicago. When not working or writing she can be found sailing on Lake Michigan.
For more information about the author, please visit her website or her author page on Goodreads.
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Death at Chinatown
Frances McNamara
An Emily Cabot Mystery
In the summer of 1896, amateur sleuth Emily Cabot meets two young Chinese women who have recently received medical degrees. She is inspired to make an important decision about her own life when she learns about the difficult choices they have made in order to pursue their careers.
When one of the women is accused of poisoning a Chinese herbalist, Emily once again finds herself in the midst of a murder investigation. But, before the case can be solved, she must first settle a serious quarrel with her husband, help quell a political uprising, and overcome threats against her family.
