Mystery series set in post-War New England - the Double V Mysteries

 

Looking for Christmas gifts for the historical mystery lover -- who also happens to love New England?  

My "Double V Mysteries" series is set in New England, beginning in the spring of 1949.  The two main characters -- who will become partners -- are introduced in CADMIUM YELLOW, BLOOD RED.  She is an administrator at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, who has just discovered her husband's infidelity.

He is an ex-con, recently released from the state penitentiary in Wethersfield, Connecticut.  His wife has passed away and his daughter is kidnapped, but the gang who has her assures him she will be returned if he helps them with his particular specialty. He must break into the Wadsworth.  She meets him on his practice run as he literally drops into her office, the same night her husband is found murdered.

They are both suspects.  They have nobody to rely on but each other.  And each has a mystery to solve.

The book is available in paperback through Amazon, but the eBook version is FREE and available through a variety of online shops:

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Apple

And a variety of other online shops here.

Give it a try and perhaps you'll like to continue the adventures with Juliet Van Allen and Elmer Vartanian -- the "Double V" duo -- in the rest of the (so far) five-book series:

SPEAK OUT BEFORE YOU DIE (in which a murder occurs in a snowbound mansion in Hartford on New Year's Eve, 1949)

Here at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online shops.

DISMOUNT AND MURDER (Nasty doings at the Litchfield, Connecticut, horse show, summer of 1950.  Maine recovers from the year before in the "Summer Maine Burned," Oh, and a murder.)

Here at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online shops.

WHITEWASH IN THE BERKSHIRES (Juliet is blacklisted during the Communist witch hunts. Intrigue and kidnapping in an underground bunker in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts in the winter of 1951.  Oh, and a murder.)

Here at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online shops.

MURDER AT THE SUMMER THEATER (Juliet must join the cast to help ferret out clues in backstage shenanigans in the summer of 1951 on the Connecticut shore when the lead actress goes missing. Possibly murdered.)

Here at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online shops.

Follow the adventure, follow the clues, and watch this blog for the next novel in the series coming in late 2022!

Upcoming Zoom talk on BESIDE THE STILL WATERS - Quabbin Reservoir towns, Massachusetts

 

Zoom presentation on
BESIDE THE STILL WATERS - the "lost towns" of the Quabbin Reservoir

I will be giving an online Zoom presentation for the Amherst (Massachusetts) Historical Society on the historical background for my novel, Beside the Still Waters, about the towns that were demolished to create the Quabbin Reservoir in central Massachusetts.

 
The story is about community and the loss of community, and how our hometowns make up a big part of our family heritage and our personal identities. 
 
Photos and map images will accompany the talk, which will be part of the Society’s “History Bites Lunchtime Lecture Series”, Friday, December 3, 2021 from 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. 
 
Join the Zoom presentation through this link:
 
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84485731584#success

See you there! 

Beside the Still Waters is available in eBook or print at these online shops:
 
Amazon
 
Barnes & Noble
 
Try this universal link for Apple, Baker & Taylor, SCRBD, Tolino, and more!

Lizzie Borden and George D. Robinson - the Trial of the Century - upcoming talk - Chicopee, Massachusetts

The infamous Lizzie Borden, who was said in the children's rhyme to have "took an axe and gave her mother 40 whacks...etc.," was defended at her trial by Chicopee's own George D. Robinson, former Governor of Massachusetts. I'll be presenting a talk for the Chicopee Historical Society on Lizzie Borden and George D. Robinson in the very first "Trial of the Century" on Wednesday, October 20, 2021 at 6:30 p.m., in the Community Room of the Chicopee Public Library, 449 Front Street, Chicopee. The event is free and open to the public. Please note: masks are required.

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Comedy and Tragedy on the Mountain: 70 Years of Summer Theatre on Mt. Tom, Holyoke, Massachusetts; States of Mind: New England (collected essays from this blog); The Ames Manufacturing Company of Chicopee, Massachusetts; and Beside the Still Waters - a novel on the construction of the Quabbin Reservoir.

Hampton Ponds, Westfield, Massachusetts

 

Hampton Ponds, Westfield, Massachusetts, from a postcard published in the early 1900s.  Today, the Hampton Ponds State Park now borders the southern shore.  

Do you have memories of spending summers at Hampton Ponds?

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Comedy and Tragedy on the Mountain: 70 Years of Summer Theatre on Mt. Tom, Holyoke, Massachusetts; States of Mind: New England (collected essays from this blog); The Ames Manufacturing Company of Chicopee, Massachusetts; and Beside the Still Waters - a novel on the construction of the Quabbin Reservoir.

Pecousic Villa - Springfield, Massachusetts

The home of inventor and industrialist Everett Hosmer Barney (1835-1916) - probably most famous for two things: inventing the clamp-on ice skate, and for the donation of 178 acres of his extensive estate to be added to Forest Park in the city of Springfield, Massachusetts.

This Victorian mansion was built in 1890 and had a commanding view of the Connecticut River Valley.  It was called Pecousic Villa.  It was razed during the construction of I-91.  The carriage house, now a restaurant and banquet hall, and the family mausoleum, remain.

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Comedy and Tragedy on the Mountain: 70 Years of Summer Theatre on Mt. Tom, Holyoke, Massachusetts; States of Mind: New England (collected essays from this blog); The Ames Manufacturing Company of Chicopee, Massachusetts; and Beside the Still Waters - a novel on the construction of the Quabbin Reservoir.

 

Link to recorded Zoom talk on BESIDE THE STILL WATERS - a novel of the Quabbin Reservoir

 

Here is a link to my recorded Zoom talk  earlier this month on the historical background of my novel Beside the Still Waters for the Holyoke Public Library of Holyoke, Massachusetts, for those of you who were unable to join us.

The novel, a family saga, is about the four towns that were demolished to create the Quabbin Reservoir in central Massachusetts in the 1920s and 1930s.  The story is about community and the loss of community, and how our hometowns make up a big part of our family heritage and our personal identities.  Photos and map images accompany the talk. 

Here's the link:

Author Talk-Beside the Still Waters - Zoom

I hope you enjoy it.   For more of my books on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple iTunes, Kobo, and a variety of other online shops, please see my website here:  www.JacquelineTLynch.com.

Thanks for reading...

Jacqueline T. Lynch

BESIDE THE STILL WATERS - A Novel of the Quabbin Reservoir - Zoom Presentation June 8, 2021

Zoom presentation on BESIDE THE STILL WATERS: Tuesday, June 8, 2021, 7 p.m.

I'll be discussing the historical background of my novel about the four towns that were demolished to create the Quabbin Reservoir in Massachusetts. The story is about community and how the loss of community affects our family heritage and our personal identities. Photos and maps will be part of the presentation hosted by the Holyoke Public Library, Holyoke, Massachusetts.

Please email mbaron@holyokelibrary.org for the link to join us. See you there!

Hal Holbrook on Mt. Tom, Holyoke, Massachusetts

Beloved memories and tributes pour forth as we note the recent passing of actor Hal Holbrook, perhaps most famous for the one-man show he created: “Mark Twain Tonight!”  He first achieved his actor’s union Equity card working for a noted summer theater on top of Mt. Tom, in Holyoke, Massachusetts in the early 1950s.  The ramshackle wooden playhouse was called, grandly, “The Casino.”  The resident troupe was The Valley Players.

Though their name paid tribute to the region of the Pioneer Valley, that broad swath of history and dinosaur tracks that comprise that section of the Connecticut River valley, the playhouse was actually on the grounds of an amusement park…on the top of a mountain…at the edge of a factory town.  No scenic shoreline summer barn, but a working, vibrant company in a glorified shack in as unlikely a place for traditional New England summer theatre as one might find. 
 
Holbrook and his first wife, Ruby were members of the company for a few years in the early 1950s.  In 1957 he returned as a guest to open the season with his show on Mark Twain, performing it in its full-length version for the first time.
 
The following passages are from my book, Comedy and Tragedy on the Mountain: 70 Years of Summer Theatre on Mt. Tom, Holyoke, Massachusetts.
 
We begin with Holbrook’s own recollections from his memoir:
 
While The Firebrand was playing eight performances, Monday through Saturday, we were also rehearsing Goodbye My Fancy to open the following Monday.  While Fancy played its eight performance schedule we’d rehearse the next play, and so on down the twelve-week summer season.  We rehearsed five hours a day, but only two hours on matinee days, Wednesdays and Saturdays, and we learned the lines at night after the evening’s performance.  Jean and Carlton’s rambling old home became our clubhouse, where there was close companionship and plenty of beer on ice.  We cued each other over and over until we had nailed those pages of lines into our brains.  Sleep was the only thing that was rationed.
 
In an on-camera interview for the locally produced television documentary, Mountain Park Memories, Mr. Holbrook recalled,
 
You had to learn all new lines.  A new play…I can’t even believe  today what  we  did.   You’d stay up till 2 o’clock working real hard on your lines.  You’d go back, you’re trying to get six, seven hours sleep.  Get up, rehearse all day, do the show again at night, then learn the lines in the middle of the night for the next.  And you do that every night, every day, week after week.  And it took spirit…
 
Mr. Holbrook’s chapter in his memoir, Harold, on The Valley Players is filled with delightful reminiscences of specific plays.  He would receive his first featured role for The Valley Players in Candlelight in late August.
 
 The Valley Players managers noted of Holbrook in a program at the end of the 1953 season:
 
Admirable actor as he was from the outset in 1951, his work has broadened and deepened and humanized as season after season unfolded.  One of the greatest rewards of summer-theater management is to see a fine actor mature in ever-greater and greater achievements.  All that we can provide is the opportunity: the credit for making the most of it belongs to the actor.  Mr. Holbrook, we believe, will go far in the world of theater…
 
The local press had equally warm thoughts that summer towards the acting company:
 
The Valley Players have made this community a richer place in which to live during the summer season.  They’ve made for us a happy feeling that they belong to us…  The Valley Players themselves, as persons, make a happy factor in our community life.  A group with high standards as individuals, people you wish you might know better and still be able to invest them with the glamour that they lay upon us.  We could wish we might show ourselves as hosts eager to do them honor, we thank Carlton and Jean Guild for choosing to settle into our Holyoke life and for wanting to stay with us…
 
 In 1954 Hal Holbrook went to New York and had a regular job on the radio soap opera, The Brighter Day.  He did regional theatre, and appeared in clubs in New York with skits on some new material he had worked up himself – on the nineteenth century humorist Mark Twain.  It would be his making as an actor.  He performed his Mark Twain persona on The Ed Sullivan Show and The Tonight Show with Steve Allen on television, and by the end of the decade, would debut a full-length one-man show on Twain—at The Valley Players as a special guest performer in 1957.
 
Mr. Holbrook notes from his autobiography, Harold: 
 
On June 6, just before heading to Holyoke, I got another appearance on NBC’s Tonight Show with Jack Lescoulie as host.  Would that help me fill the big open-sided Mountain Park Casino in Holyoke?  I wondered.
 
Mark Twain Tonight!, presented at Holyoke in its first full-length version, was a career-making event for Hal Holbrook.  It opened The Valley Players’ sixteenth season.  The reviews were fabulous.
 
From Louise Mace of the Springfield Union:
 
“…a unique and rewarding program…in all life, so it seemed, there was Samuel Langhorne Clemens himself, complete with immaculate, comfortably wrinkled white suit, brisk red tie, drooping white mustache, ample white headpiece, and the inevitable cigar…a re-creation of a man and a mind in a deeply kneaded personification.”
 
From the Daily Hampshire Gazette:
 
His portrayal is both a science and an art. He has paid scrupulous attention to detail, from the shuffling walk to the twinkle in his eye.  Hal Holbrook never draws a breath on stage—it is Mark Twain even when he tells a story requiring the dialect and mannerisms of three or four additional characters.  A remarkable piece of showmanship, Mark Twain, Tonight at the Casino through Saturday merits your attendance.
 
The Holyoke Transcript-Telegram called it “a fascinating artistic masterpiece…the young Mr. Holbrook, remembered as the company’s handsome leading man a few year ago, is dropped from mind the instant Mark Twain enters the stage…”
 
 Barbara Bernard, who attended the opening night performance, remembers:
 
I thought: this is going to fall flat on its ear, or it’s going to be something so different.  Well, it was—and it was magnificent.  He came out in that rumpled white suit.  Oh, he was terrific.
 
William Guild recalls:
 
It took him two hours to put on that makeup.  You know, back then you had to use putty and all kinds of stuff that they can do so easily now.  But I mean he was late twenties or maybe thirty.  But I used to drive him up to the theater three hours before the performance for the week that he was doing it, and we would sit in the dressing room while he did makeup, and talk.  I have very fond memories of that.  He was kind of like an uncle in a way.
 
In less than two years, Holbrook’s one-man show would be a smash on Broadway.

(Note, the above photo is of Holbrook as Twain as he preformed it in 1957 on Mt. Tom.  Courtesy Holyoke Public Library History Room and Archives.)
 
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For your copy of Comedy and Tragedy on the Mountain: 70 Years of Summer Theatre on Mt. Tom, Holyoke, Massachusetts, please see this universal link for the eBook available at Barnes & Noble, Apple, and a variety of other online shops.

For the print book and also eBook, please see this link to Amazon.

I hope you enjoy it.  For more of my books on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple iTunes, Kobo, and a variety of other online shops, please see my website here:  www.JacquelineTLynch.com.