The Secret in the Wall: A Novel (Silver Rush Mysteries)
Historical Mystery
8th in Series
Poisoned Pen Press (February 15, 2022)
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 400 pages

Synopsis

Sometimes you can’t keep your gown out of the gutter…

 

Inez Stannert has reinvented herself—again. Fleeing the comfort and wealth of her East Coast upbringing, she became a saloon owner and card sharp in the rough silver boomtown of Leadville, Colorado, always favoring the unconventional path—a difficult road for a woman in the late 1800s.

Then the teenaged daughter of a local prostitute is orphaned by her mother’s murder, and Inez steps up to raise the troubled girl as her own. Inez works hard to keep a respectable, loving home for Antonia, carefully crafting their new life in San Francisco. But risk is a seductive friend, difficult to resist. When a skeleton tumbles from the wall of her latest business investment, the police only seem interested in the bag of Civil War-era gold coins that fell out with it. With her trusty derringer tucked in the folds of her gown, Inez uses her street smarts and sheer will to unearth a secret that someone has already killed to keep buried. The more she digs, the muddier and more dangerous things become.

She enlists the help of Walter de Brujin, a local private investigator with whom she shares some history. Though she wants to trust him, she fears that his knowledge of her past, along with her growing attraction to him, may well blow her veneer of respectability to bits—that is, if her dogged pursuit of the truth doesn’t kill her first . . .

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Guest Post

Mapping out the past

When I settled in to create my Silver Rush historical mysteries, set in the 1880s “Victorian West,” I weighed whether to use fictional or real settings. I quickly realized that grounding my historical mysteries in real locations gave me a framework to build upon… and I’m very fond of structure (of all types, including buildings).

To get a better feel for the places I write about, I turn to historical newspapers, city directories, census data, and (my not-so-secret passion) maps!

With Leadville, Colorado, the primary setting for the first five books of my series, I was lucky. Much of the downtown and nearby streets of Leadville had not changed much from its long-ago days. But there were challenges.

For instance, I found many newspaper references to a thoroughfare called “The Boulevard,” in early Leadville articles and descriptions—in fact, it’s mentioned several times in an 1880 Leadville Daily Chronicle article, quoted here. (You can also view a great photo of The Boulevard by photographer William Henry Jackson on my Pinterest site, here.) However, by the time I went looking for it for the second book in my series, IRON TIES, it seemed to have fallen off the map. Honestly, how could a wide, macadam road described as “so smooth that it had nary a straw to impede the wheels of a carriage” disappear so completely? Finally, in an early-2000s version of a Google Maps satellite image, I spotted the faintest track heading out of town in the right direction through a wooded area.

When I tried to find The Boulevard on a research trip, it was almost invisible: more an overgrown, rubble-strewn trail than a road. I would have never found even that, if not for Google Maps.

For IRON TIES, I also had to invent a fictional gulch since one did not actually exist exactly where I needed it to. I named it “Disappointment Gulch” and confessed all in the Author’s Note. However, that particular agony had a silver lining: A Leadville expert, who I had exchanged increasingly desperate email about nearby real gulches and the various distances, etc., from town, gifted me with a large, plastic, three-dimensional topographical map of Leadville and its environs.

When my protagonist, Inez Stannert, decided to pick up and move to San Francisco, I sure wished I’d had such a 3D map of the “Paris of the West,”  to help me chart the ups and downs of the hilly city. However, Google maps had much improved at this point, and with its “street view,” I could trudge (virtually) all over, from the east-facing waterfront on San Francisco Bay to the Cliff House overlooking the Pacific Ocean on the west. Also, there is a wealth of San-Francisco historical maps available online. Two map-related sites I often turn to are the David Rumsey Map Collection and OldSF.

On the David Rumsey site, one of my favorite maps is Bancroft’s 1881 map of San Francisco. This map is very high resolution and, like all maps on this site, can be downloaded for free. To get my bearings for the first San Francisco book, A DYING NOTE, I took this map and zoomed in on the area that includes the intersection of Pine and Kearney streets, where Inez now works in a music store. To get a better sense of this area, I printed that section out and plotted where various historical buildings and businesses were, using the map’s “reference list” and the 1882 city directory. After doing so, I realized the building holding the music store and the apartment above—where Inez lives with her young ward, Antonia Gizzi— is encircled by houses of worship. The sounds of bells would have been deafening at certain times of day, a fact I incorporated into my fiction.

OldSF combines a map of current-day San Francisco, a database of historical photos, and a variable timeline. You can widen or narrow the timeframe, choosing any period from 1850 to 2000, and view photos at various locations from those times. For instance, choosing 1850–1898 provided two very nice images of the Montgomery Building on the corner of Montgomery and Washington Streets—the perfect location for one of my fictional lawyers in THE SECRET IN THE WALL to have his office.

In THE SECRET IN THE WALL, I also needed a map of Alcatraz Island so I could better envision what my characters would see there in 1882. From 1853 onward, the military outpost was in constant transformation, with structures and fortifications built, expanded, repurposed, and destroyed at a rapid pace. I searched long and hard but never could find a map specific to my timeframe. However, my brother dug up a 1910 Alcatraz map online. With many thanks for his sleuthing, I gleefully printed it out and, working from 1880s written descriptions, marked it up to get a sense of what it looked like in 1882 (or thereabouts).

About the Author

Ann Parker is a science writer by day and a fiction writer by night. Her award-winning Silver Rush Mysteries series, published by Poisoned Pen Press, a Sourcebooks imprint, is set primarily in 1880s Leadville, Colorado, and more recently in San Francisco, California, the “Paris of the West.” The series was named a Booksellers Favorite by the Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Association, and Ann is listed in the Colorado Authors’ Hall of Fame. The Secret in the Wall is the eighth and newest entry in the series.

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