Cheryl Honigford| Page 7

Halloween Costumes – 1938 Style

October 11, 2016 by Cheryl Honigford Leave a Comment

The action in THE DARKNESS KNOWS takes place October 27 – 31, 1938. That’s prime Halloween time; so of course, I had to include a masquerade scene. It was a lot of fun to write, but it took some thought to find costumes for the characters that wouldn’t be anachronistic to the time.

Charlie and Vivian’s last minute cowboy attire was borrowed from the “costume closet” at WCHI and more specifically from the Country Cavalcade (a fictional country music program based on WLS’s popular Barn Dance). I got the idea from this photo of Jack Benny and a bunch of lovelies from a Radio Stars magazine article.

Vivian’s friend Imogene is dressed as Maid Marion from the 1938 movie version of Robin Hood (played by Olivia de Havilland).

Imogene’s boyfriend George and Graham (much to George’s chagrin) are both dressed as Robin Hood himself (as played by Errol Flynn).

Head of the radio station, Mr. Hart, is dressed as another famous Errol Flynn role – the pirate, Captain Blood.

Speaking of movies, Frances Barrow is dressed as Snow White (the Disney film was a smash hit in 1937-38). (Frances would have also make a fabulous Scarlett O’Hara, but alas, the movie version of that didn’t come out until the end of 1939.)

Station Engineer, Morty Nickerson, is dressed as Prince Charming from Snow White.

Announcer, Bill Purdy, is The Lone Ranger – a radio hit since 1933 and appearing in movie serials starting in 1938.

Fellow actor, Dave Chapman, is Superman. Superman debuted in Action Comics #1 in June 1938, so he was a brand new at the time of the masquerade. Weird to think that there was a time Superman didn’t exist, isn’t it?

Another actor, Little Sammy Evans, is a court jester. (The photo below is from the 1955 Danny Kaye movie, but imagine the same sort of costume.)

Other various and sundry characters you’ll find at the WCHI Halloween Masquerade of 1938 are Little Orphan Annie, Cleopatra, Queen Victoria, Henry VIII, and The Red Baron.

Victorian Funeral Fun

October 5, 2016 by Cheryl Honigford Leave a Comment

In case you haven’t noticed I am a huge history nerd. I also love a good ghost story (and to actually “hunt” ghosts, but that’s another post). So my eyes lit up when I spied this event from the Wisconsin Historical Society: When Angels Carried them Away: Death and Mourning in the Victorian Era.

That’s right. I spent last Saturday evening learning about Victorian funeral customs. The day cooperated by being delightfully dreary. The misty rain stopped long enough for us to disembark from the tour boat at Black Point Estate to hear an interesting presentation on Victorian death and funerals (It’s presented only 3 Saturdays in October. There are 2 left if you’re in the area).

I was surprised about how much I already knew – that’s probably because I read books like “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War” and “Wisconsin Death Trip” for fun. Pre-WWI, most wakes and funerals were held in the deceased’s home, and the body was prepared for burial by the family. It’s a bit ghoulish to modern sensibilities, I suppose, to imagine having a dead body in the house for days – even if it was a beloved relative. But death was a common occurrence then. It came at you from all sides – communicable disease being the main culprit. Sanitation wasn’t great, and antibiotics wouldn’t become widely used until the end of WWII. A simple cut could lead to an infection that could then lead to sepsis and death lightening quick. The death rate for infants was almost 20%. It was a rare mother that didn’t lose at least one child to disease before its first birthday, and most women lost more than one.

According to this presentation, embalming came into being with the development of formaldehyde in the 1860s and was first practiced on a large scale during the American Civil War to allow soldiers’ bodies to be sent home from the battlefield to their families for burial. The man presenting was a retired funeral director and he had a vintage collection of fascinating (and pretty morbid) embalming and burial implements. The metal clamp for keeping a body’s mouth closed until rigor mortis could set in was especially shiver inducing – as well as a metal and glass contraption for collecting fluids from a body while it was being transported in pre-embalming days. (Here’s a word for you to ruminate on – “putrefaction”. You’re welcome.)

The presentation also touched on a particular Victorian past-time: post-mortem photography. Yes, people had photos taken of deceased loved ones for keepsakes. There is some evidence, though, that the popularity of that been overblown in today’s popular culture. Maybe Victorians weren’t quite as ghoulish as we’ve been lead to believe. Still, it’s a nice creepy thing to think about – if you’re inclined to think about nice creepy things – as I am. Google it, if you dare.

I half expected the house to have been set up like an actual Victorian wake was in process and the tour group to be lead in as mourners. It wasn’t, but still, it was a very interesting evening.

By the way, I overheard a tour guide assuring someone that they haven’t had any reports of ghostly activity in that particular old house. Too bad… it would be a fantastic place for a ghost hunt.

How would the characters in “The Darkness Knows” have sounded?

September 28, 2016 by Cheryl Honigford Leave a Comment

You may have seen movies from the 30s and 40s and thought that everyone of that time spoke at a rapid clip and either like a gangster (“Why I aughtta…”) or a high society matron caught somewhere between New York and London. Their way of speaking sounds impossibly old fashioned, and that’s because it is. It’s also not an organic American accent and never was.

My maternal grandparents were almost the exact age of Viv and Charlie. They were born and raised in rural Ohio instead of Chicago, but I can tell you that they spoke nothing like any of the characters in old movies. They sounded… well, like normal Midwestern people. They didn’t speak hyper fast or with strange accents halfway between American and British English. What you hear in those old movies is something called the Transatlantic or Mid-Atlantic accent – because it’s halfway between British and Eastern Seaboard American English – i.e. completely made up.

This short video from How Stuff Works explains it perfectly.

This was a learned accent and was mainly taught in boarding schools on the east coast through WWII. Boarding schools exactly like the one Vivian’s mother attended. In fact, Vivian mimics her mother’s affected mid-Atlantic speech to Charlie in the beginning of the The Darkness Knows. She mimics it because it sounds so silly and posh to Vivian’s Midwestern ears even in 1938. If you don’t think this accent was something strange and exotic to the average person even then, check out this Merrie Melodies cartoon from 1938. The chicken playing Juliet, clasping her hands together and saying “Raaally I do”, is a parody of Hollywood actresses of the time – Katharine Hepburn, in particular.*

Vivian, on the other hand, has not gone to boarding schools on the East Coast. Her accent is the flat Midwestern of wealthy Northside Chicago. She doesn’t pronounce potato as “po-tah-toe” and pronounces double t’s as d’s – “cludder” not “cluh-tuh”, for example.

The Transatlantic accent was highly used in movies, theater, and radio productions of the day though. Why? Likely just because it sounded so posh and high society, and because it was hard to place. It gave a sense of worldliness to a production. This all died out after WWII. The accent stopped being taught in boarding schools and stopped being used in theatrical productions – unless, of course, it’s a production mimicking 1930s and 40s theatrical speech.

So the answer is Julia Witchell sounded a lot like Katherine Hepburn (or the Juliet chicken in that cartoon), but her daughter, Vivian, sounded just like a girl from Chicago – rather like me I suppose. Charlie, sadly, doesn’t sound like Edward G. Robinson or Jimmy Cagney. He grew up in a more working class part of the city, so he’s probably a little rougher on the grammar and diction than Vivian, but their accents and way of speaking would be similar to each other and to the people of Chicago today. (And nothing like the characters they would have watched in the movies).

*Cary Grant’s much parodied accent is probably the paragon of Transatlantic examples. It’s a result of his trying to Americanize his natural lower-class British accent. He wound up with a peculiar mix of both accents quite specific to him, as you can hear.

Research Rabbit Hole – Eloping in Chicago

September 21, 2016 by Cheryl Honigford Leave a Comment

Welcome to what may become a semi-regular feature here. Often I find myself getting hung up on a tiny historical detail that pops up while I’m writing. I go to Google thinking I’ll find a quick answer… then 2 hours later I’ll look up and realize a huge chunk of time has been lost researching something I didn’t really need to research in the first place. The problem then is that I find myself with all of this interesting knowledge that doesn’t really fit in any of my books, and I just have to share it with somebody. So that’s you, lucky reader! For example, I found myself with a burning desire to know about marriage laws and the logistics of how an amorous couple from Chicago would go about eloping in 1939. (This relates to two sentences in book 3, by the way, and it’s taken hours of research to find the answer I was looking for. And no, I don’t think sharing that tidbit with you is a spoiler – in case you’re worried.)

If any of you read Regency romances you’re probably familiar with the oft-used trope of a couple running off to Gretna Green, Scotland to elope. (For those of you not familiar, Scotland had very lax marriage laws in the late 18^th to mid 19^th centuries and Gretna Green was right over the border. So English couples could dash off and be married quickly – not like in England where there were stricter laws in place.) And I think we’ve all seen the old movies or TV shows where a couple hauls a justice of the peace out off bed in the middle of the night to marry them… I don’t know about you, but I’ve always wondered if that actually happened. (Amazingly, it could have.)

Apparently, Kenosha, WI (very near where I currently live) was the Gretna Green for Chicago in the late 19^th century or at least in 1894, according to this newspaper article below. Then Wisconsin added a residency requirement for a marriage certificate. Good-bye, quickie Wisconsin weddings.

kenosha_gretnagreen1894

Waukegan, IL seemed to be lobbying to become the Gretna Green for Chicago residents after this. No offense, Waukeganites, but I can’t imagine anyone wanting to honeymoon there like this article asserts. But things were different in 1899, I suppose.

During Prohibition many states passed “gin marriage” laws to install a waiting period after obtaining the marriage license before the ceremony itself could go ahead – presumably so the participants had time to sober up and think about whether marriage was really the best idea. A “hygienic marriage law” was also passed in many states, including Illinois in 1937, meaning that couples needed to prove they didn’t have venereal disease (syphilis, in particular) to obtain a marriage license. No surprise that applications for marriage licenses plummeted in Cook County shortly thereafter. That’s because couples were flocking the roughly 40 miles east to Crown Point, IN* to elope since Indiana was one of the few neighboring states that still had very relaxed marriage laws (The only law in force there at the time was that you could not be a minor and obtain a marriage license. I guess everything else was fair game?)

The verdict? After all of this research, I found that the answer to my original question was, sadly, no. A couple from Chicago would not likely have run off to a local Gretna Green to get married on the spur of the moment in 1939. It seems Crown Point had quite a booming business in elopements for most of the first part of the 20^th century – until January 1938, that is, when Indiana stopped issuing marriage licenses to women who did not reside in the Indiana county in question. Indiana’s own hygienic marriage law soon went into effect shutting down the “marriage mills” for good. This article from January 1909 is an interesting read about the quickie marriage business there when it was still booming.

There were other places a Chicago couple in love could have gone to get hitched quickly in 1939 – Missouri, for example, but that was quite a drive over bumpy and unreliable roads. Might as well get your blood test and go through the waiting period and not have to travel across the entire state suffering potholes, am I right?

Ah, romance.

P.S. After I did all of this research I came upon this Post-Tribune article from June of this year that uses almost exactly the same source info. Good thing I didn’t find it first. That would have ruined all my fun. 🙂

*Incidentally, Crown Point, IN is the home of the “escape proof” Lake County Jail that John Dillinger broke out of in 1934 using a hand-carved wooden gun blackened with shoe polish. But to go into that would be a rabbit hole within a rabbit hole, wouldn’t it… ?

A Taste of Book 2 – Disturb Not the Dead

September 18, 2016 by Cheryl Honigford 1 Comment

I thought I’d share a little about Book 2 in the Viv and Charlie Mystery Series, since I’ve been asked about it a lot recently. (It’s great to hear that people are excited for #2, by the way!). DISTURB NOT THE DEAD, comes out in October 2017. It’s set about two months after the events of the first book – at Christmastime 1938. Vivian stumbles upon something that flips everything she thought she knew about her beloved (and now deceased) father on its head. Expect more radio station intrigue (especially with Vivian’s star on the rise) and more historic Chicago detail woven throughout. And of course, Charlie is roped in to help Vivian get to the bottom of everything.

I was just told last week that Sourcebooks is working on the cover for #2 as we speak (using the same fabulous artist that created the cover for THE DARKNESS KNOWS, Coco Masuda). I can’t wait to see it! (And as soon as I see it I’ll be sure to share it here with all of you!)

The first chapter of DISTURB NOT THE DEAD actually appears at the end of THE DARKNESS KNOWS and opens on Vivian lackadaisically decorating the Christmas tree with her younger brother, Everett. Check there for a teaser of what’s in store for Vivian (and Charlie and Graham and everyone else)… and here’s the first paragraph of the book’s synopsis. (To share any more of it would give the story away, and I wouldn’t want to do that!)

Rising radio star, VIVIAN WITCHELL, finds an envelope of cash and a threatening note in her dead father’s desk during the family Christmas party. Arthur Witchell, once a prominent Chicago attorney, has been dead for almost eight years. But something tells Vivian there’s something to this discovery and more to her father than she’d thought possible – especially when the money and the note disappear from the locked desk drawer. Someone had been threatening her father’s life shortly before he died, and someone wants to stop Vivian from finding out about that threat now.

You can follow my Pinterest board for DISTURB NOT THE DEAD if you’d like a little peak into the inspiration behind the story including 30s fashions, vintage Chicago photos, and popular music of the period. It was so fun “visiting” Chicago at Christmas in 1938. I also have a relatively new Instagram account where I’ve started sharing ephemera from my (alarming large) collection of vintage magazines.

My first book event (or I read my book aloud (and didn’t die))

September 12, 2016 by Cheryl Honigford Leave a Comment

I had a wonderful time talking Chicago historical mysteries with D.M. Pirrone and J. Bard-Collins at Anderson’s Bookshop in Naperville, IL last Friday. (Thanks to Anderson’s and thanks to Emily Clark Victorson of Allium Press for moderating!)

If you’re anywhere near Naperville, IL grab yourself a signed copy of The Darkness Knows!

Sometimes It’s Hard to be a Woman*

August 30, 2016 by Cheryl Honigford Leave a Comment

I love the era my books are set in – the fashions, the music, the movies, etc. I love it, but I also think that, though the 1930s are a lovely place to visit, I most definitely wouldn’t want to live there. I’ve been doing research on Book #3 in the Viv and Charlie Mystery Series, and I found all of the following ads in ONE magazine from June 1939. It was tough to be a woman then (and especially a woman of any color/creed other than generic WASP). Basically, a woman’s sole goal then boiled down to get a man and keep him happy. And keeping him happy was, apparently, the hard part.

If you don’t have a husband it’s probably because you stink.

Maybe you’re lucky enough to have snagged a man… But then why has your husband giving you the bums rush lately? And why are the neighborhood ladies snickering behind their hands when you walk by? Well, it’s because you stink and you’re dirty, of course.

(If you’re having trouble decoding that Lysol ad, here’s what women were expected to do with Lysol back then. Yes, that’s the very same Lysol you spray on your toilet today as a disinfectant.)

Or perhaps your husband is unhappy and is about to leave you because not only are you dirty and you stink, but you are underweight and moody (probably from all that laundry you’ve been doing).

Women are still told through ads that we aren’t good enough, of course. But I’d like to think it’s done today in a subtler and less man-centric way. Or maybe I’m just kidding myself…

*Apologies to Tammy Wynette. And you reader, because now you have that song stuck in your head.

Library Love

August 24, 2016 by Cheryl Honigford Leave a Comment

I’m not the first to think that writing is an isolating occupation. I sit alone, usually with earbuds in, typing out a story that exists only my head. I now have a book out there in the world, and presumably people are reading it. I can see the book’s sales on Amazon (I still haven’t decided whether that’s good or bad to know such things.) But what I get the biggest kick out of is checking the OCLC – World Library Catalog to see what libraries in the US have my book on their shelves. I can even click on each location to see how many copies they have and whether they’re checked out (I let out a little squee of excitement when I find holds placed on it).

I heart libraries. I always have. I’ve had and used a library card every place I’ve ever lived. I have very fond memories of begging my mom to take me to the tiny Ottoville Public Library on Wednesday nights (Wednesdays because that’s the only day they stayed open later than 5 PM). It’s still located in the same building, by the way, but it looks like late hours are now on Mondays. (I’m not sure if my book’s there. Can someone local check for me?)

So it thrills me a little that people all over the country are happening upon a book I’ve written on the New Arrivals shelf, picking it, and checking it out – just like I’ve done countless times over the years.

I Will Learn Scrivener. I Will.

August 19, 2016 by Cheryl Honigford Leave a Comment

Everything I’ve ever written has just been typed straight into Word. I have a Google Drive folder for each book/story and they each have sub-folders for research, photos, drafts, etc… And I was okay with that.

Then I saw Scrivener. It’s so bright and shiny and can do So. Many. Things. Too many things perhaps? I’m determined to use it to write Book #3, but the learning curve is HUGE. I love the research section. I can just stick photos and webpages right in there and they show up in the corkboard view like a real corkboard. But I feel like there are so many cool things I’m not using because I just don’t know they exist.

I’m taking the Learn Scrivener Fast lessons online (I sprung for the Ninja level), but I’m still struggling. I suspect that as the deadline looms closer and closer and crunch time hits that I’ll go back to the tried and true – typing directly into my old pal Word. We’ll see.

Psst… If you look closely at the photo above you’ll get a tiny glimpse into Book #3.

In Case You Missed Them

August 12, 2016 by Cheryl Honigford Leave a Comment

I’ve recently guested on some lovely blogs and thought I’d share those links here.

I wrote about “Writing a Woman Sleuth” on the History From a Woman’s Perspective blog.

I discussed research and “Writing an Authentic Historical Mystery” for the Recipe for Murder blog.

And finally, I related a favorite anecdote from my travels and The Magic of Coincidence (or Avoiding Jail Time in Rome) on the Dear Reader blog.

And here’s a bonus photo of THE DARKNESS KNOWS awaiting prospective readers on the New Arrivals table at my local Barnes & Noble (just because). Doesn’t it look pretty?