A Timeless Celebration (Century Cottage Cozy Mysteries)
Cozy Mystery
1st in Series
Self Published (October 25, 2018)
Print Length: 245 pages

Synopsis

A small town, a big party, a stolen gift. When an artefact from the Titanic is stolen before her town’s 150th anniversary celebration, it’s up to Lois Stone to catch the thief.

Middle-aged widow Lois has moved from bustling Toronto to tranquil Fenwater and is settling into her new life away from the dangers of the city. Then two events happen that shatter her serenity: her house is burgled and an antique watch belonging to a Titanic survivor is stolen from the local museum. Her best friend, Marge, was responsible for the watch’s safekeeping until its official presentation to the museum at the town’s 150th anniversary party, and its disappearance will jeopardise her job and the museum’s future. Lois won’t let her friend take the blame and the consequences for the theft. She’s determined to find the watch in time to save her best friend’s job, the museum’s future and the town’s 150th anniversary celebration.

And so begins a week of new friends, apple and cinnamon muffins, calico cats, midnight intruders, shadowy caprine companions and more than one person with a reason to steal the watch, set against the backdrop of century houses on leafy residential streets, the swirling melodies of bagpipes, a shimmering heat haze and the burble of cool water.

Guest Post

Why does it matter?

People often ask writers where the ideas for their stories come from. I don’t know exactly where the idea for A Timeless Celebration came from, but one day a quirky idea for where a stolen item could be hidden popped into my head and this got my imagination racing. I worked back from that idea to decide what the item was, why it was important, where it was stolen from, and how and why my main character, Lois Stone, would search for it and get it back. The plot for A Timeless Celebration evolved from that one random thought about where it might be possible to hide a stolen item.

As I constructed the plot, two of the most important things I had to figure out were what the stolen item was and why it was important. I wanted the item to be something historic and titbits of information that I uncovered during my background research convinced me that the item should be a watch that had survived the sinking of the Titanic. The idea began to take shape as I browsed online through the artifacts collection of the local museum in the place that inspired my fictional town, Fenwater, hoping to find an item that would be suitable for the stolen item in the story.

I was excited to stumble across a pocket watch that was labeled as a possession of a Titanic survivor. But I felt a quick let down when I read the detailed description of the item and discovered that the survivor had owned the watch later in life and it had not been aboard the ill-fated ship. The watch lost its significance for me. But, although this item did not have the historical significance I had hoped for, it got me thinking and I knew that the stolen item in my story should be an artifact from the Titanic.

Although it’s more than a century since the sinking of the Titanic in April 1912, people are still fascinated by the tragedy and artifacts that have been recovered from the ship are prized.

My research revealed that since the Titanic’s resting place was discovered in 1985, several salvage operations have retrieved a huge number of artifacts from the seabed around the wreck. In fact, so much has been amassed that Guernsey’s Auctioneers & Brokers in New York, in a controversial auction, sold more than 5000 items estimated to be worth $190 million in a single lot in 2012. Included in the sale were watches, jewelry, clothing, a cook’s hat, binoculars, tableware and much more. The lack of light and air on the ocean floor, as well as the fact that goods were made to be durable a century ago, goes a long way to explain why so many of these items have survived in the depths of the ocean for so long.

A Timeless Celebration is set in 1983, before the Titanic’s resting place had been discovered, so there were fewer artifacts in existence at the time and they were rare and valuable.

But why did I choose a watch as the stolen item? When A Timeless Celebration is set, the artifacts in existence were items retrieved from the water near the wreckage when the ship sank, the personal possessions of survivors, and personal items found on the recovered bodies of victims. Of the many types of items that have survived the shipwreck, I think one of the most poignant is the pocket watch, a personal item that was often engraved and spanned the social classes. They were recovered from many bodies, including a wealthy businessman, John J Astor; second class passenger and Cornwall native John Chapman, who was traveling to America to start a new life with his bride, and third class passenger Mary Mangan from Addergoole parish, Ireland.

Pocket watches consist of many tiny components which can easily be damaged by rough use and the oil that greased the internal mechanism was prone to freeze at very low temperatures. So many of these watches stopped when their owners were thrown into the ocean as the ship sank. When the watches were recovered their hands still displayed the time they stopped, providing a chilling reminder of the tragedy.

After reading about some of the individual tragedies associated with these items, a pocket watch that had survived the sinking of the Titanic seemed the right choice for the artifact that would be central to my novel’s plot. It’s small and easy to conceal, which would make its theft practicable and it’s an item that has huge emotional significance. So an antique lady’s pocket watch became the starting point for A Timeless Celebration.

About the Author

Dianne Ascroft is a Torontonian who has settled in rural Northern Ireland. She and her husband live on a small farm with an assortment of strong-willed animals.

A Timeless Celebration is the first novel in the Century Cottage Cozy Mysteries series.

Her previous fiction works include The Yankee Years series of novels and short reads, set in Northern Ireland during the Second World War; An Unbidden Visitor (a tale inspired by Fermanagh’s famous Coonian ghost); Dancing Shadows, Tramping Hooves: A Collection of Short Stories (contemporary tales), and an historical novel, Hitler and Mars Bars, which explores Operation Shamrock, a little known Irish Red Cross humanitarian endeavour.

Dianne writes both fiction and non-fiction. Her articles and short stories have been printed in Canadian and Irish magazines and newspapers. When she’s not writing, she enjoys walks in the countryside, evenings in front of her open fireplace and folk and traditional music.

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