Trish MacEnulty | Updates

The Delafield & Malloy Investigations Series

Trish MacEnulty — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 19:14:41 -0500

A society writer and a former lady’s maid join forces to expose the dark side of the rich and powerful in the 1910s while also searching for love and success in their own lives.

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Memoirs and Standalone Fiction

Trish MacEnulty — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 19:13:46 -0500

Trishi' Literary Work Aside from her historical thrillers.

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Getting Personal Post #1

Trish MacEnulty — Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My daughter might decide not to have children. In her mid-thirties she has a successful career as the Chief Advocacy Officer for a thriving criminal justice organization, she has a fabulous group of friends with whom she travels the world, and she has a dog. Domestic bliss isn't currently a priority.

I'm okay with that. Her father and I had had a difficult (and that’s an understatement) marriage, and while motherhood has been the most meaningful experience of my life, I understand why she might not want to embark on that adventure. Children are expensive and exhausting. The uncertainty alone can kill you. So, I'm fine with whatever she decides. After all, it's her life and her choice.

However, I would love to be a grandmother. I listen in rapt attention to my friends talking about their grandkids. I ooh and ahh over pictures of babies, toddlers, and teenagers. I keep thinking there should be a way to adopt grandkids. Blood isn’t that important. After all, my mother used to disdainfully point out that grandparents have only contributed one quarter of any child’s genetic make up and it only gets more diluted after that.

But I had no idea how to “adopt” a grandchild. On a few occasions a student of mine would get pregnant, and I would be on hand to offer encouragement and support, no matter what choice she made. I thought I might be that person who came into help when the baby was born, but that never turned out to be the case. If they chose to have the baby, there was plenty of family support back home, where they immediately moved.

So there I was with all these grandmotherly feelings and nowhere to put them. Then the universe came along and said, “You want a grandchild? How about eight?”

I took a deep breath and said, “well, okay.”

So now there are eight children, ages 4 to 15, in whom I am invested. I cannot post pictures, names or any identifying information about them because the situation in our country right now is what it is. So instead I've posted a picture of my dog. I'm going to leave it at that.

But I can share stories of this journey I've embarked upon. I hope you'll follow along.

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The Furies of Winter Scene One

Trish MacEnulty — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Snowflakes swirled outside the window of the silk shop. Louisa checked her watch: almost closing time. She’d been working every afternoon for two weeks now and still no sign of the thieves. She closed the magazine she’d been reading, got up, and meandered among the bolts of silk stacked on tables in the center of the cavernous room, losing herself in the piles of cloth — the bright jewel tones, the brocades, the gold-threaded flower patterns. Running her fingers over a turquoise silk, she pictured a dress, swirling around her ankles as she and Francis danced at the Paradise Club. Or better yet, the two of them sitting across from each other at a table in a rooftop restaurant. She imagined Francis taking her hand, his lips forming a question, and stopped short, the silk dangling from her fingertip. She realized she was envisioning a marriage proposal. The silk slid off her finger.

The idea wasn’t completely far-fetched. Francis had told her he loved her. But did she love him? There was the real question. She wasn’t sure. She looked into a full-length mirror against the wall as if the answer might be in her reflection.
“Hello, I am Mrs. Holland,” she said, trying on the name to see how it fit.
The bell above the door tinkled as a blast of cold air barged in, raising goosebumps on her neck. She turned to see a stout middle-aged woman bundled in a dark wool coat and a black rolled-brim hat, snow dusting her shoulders, with a boy about six years old at her side. The woman smiled at Louisa as she came forward. She was missing a front tooth.
“May I help you?” Louisa asked.
“I believe you have a package of silk thread for me.”
“Your name?” Louisa walked to the counter where the packages were kept.
“Mrs. Lampkin,” she said.
Louisa looked through the small packages under the counter. “Ah, yes, here it is.” She brought the package to the counter.
“They say this has been the coldest January on record,” the woman commented.
“Indeed, and it’s not over yet,” Louisa said. “That will be one dollar and forty-five cents.”
The woman handed her an envelope. “Keep the change, dear,” she said. Louisa peered inside the envelope, swallowed when she saw the sum, and then looked up at the woman. This kind-looking woman and child were the thieves? Her heart rate suddenly accelerated.
“And would you mind looking after the boy for me? Just for a while?” The woman nodded at the child, a sullen-faced boy in knickers and a jacket with a tweed cap on his head.
“The boy? You want to leave him here?” Louisa asked, dumbfounded.
Even though there was no one else in the shop, the woman leaned forward and said in a tight whisper, “That’s the way it works, dearie.”
“I see.” Louisa eyed the child once more.
The boy came around the counter, and Louisa handed him a peppermint candy from the jar they kept for children. She didn’t think it a good idea for children to have candy in a silk house, but mothers knew that what their children damaged they must buy, so sticky accidents rarely happened.
“You be good for the nice lady,” the woman said to the boy. She left, and the boy hunkered down on a crate behind the counter.
“Do try not to touch any silk,” Louisa whispered.
The boy ignored her. He propped his elbow on his knee and put his chin on his elbow, posed like the statue of The Thinker. He was awfully young to be a criminal.
At five o’clock, Louisa locked up the shop and left. The boy hadn’t move from the crate where he sat. It was an ingenious plan. Train a child to hide in the store and then unlock the door when the thieves arrive later that night

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Woman Power

Trish MacEnulty — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

From the Drawing Room to the Streets

The 1910s are a fascinating period in women’s history. For upper class women, the Gilded Age was getting rusty, and many women gleefully discarded the societal rules which had previously governed every aspect of their lives. For lower class women, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 galvanzied action to unionize and organize. Remember how horrified we were by the fall of the Twin Towers? Witnesses to this horror must have felt much the same way. One hundred forty six workers died in this fire, most of them, women and girls.

In between the rich women and the poor were the intellectuals, the artists, the activists, and the professional women, all striving for equality in a world where they weren’t even allowed to vote.

One of the aspects of women’s changing roles that I incorporated into The Whispering Women, the first book of my series, is the push for suffrage, especially by women of privilege. In this effort, they were joined by women of all classes. In Gilded Suffragists, Johanna Neuman documents the role of New York socialites in employing their wealth and leveraging “their social celebrity for the right to vote, seeking the political power of their class that was denied them because of the gender.”

This push for suffrage resulted in the Women’s March of 1913 in Washington D.C., two days before Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration when 5,000 women confronted about a quarter of a million spectators. Police stood by as the crowd of mostly men jeered at the women and even physically attacked them. The sympathetic press the suffragists received as a result of this abuse only helped their cause.

In researching the Women’s March of 1913, I came across two novels on the topic: The Accidental Suffragist by Galia Gichon (Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing) and The Women's March: A Novel Of The 1913 Women Suffrage Procession by Jennifer Chiaverini (HarperCollins). The first is about a woman from the tenements who gets swept up in the cause of suffrage after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.

The second book focuses on three historic figures in the fight for women’s suffrage: Alice Paul, Ida Wells Barnett, and Maud Malone.

Although they are written as novels, both books provide a wealth of information about the women who conceived of and organized the 1913 march as well as plenty of historical details to give you a real sense of what it was like to be fighting for the right to vote, all while being beaten, groped, and mocked.

A great source for background on the suffrage movement is the Hilary Swank movie, Iron-Jawed Angels, which is more about the horrors perpetrated on the women hunger strikers when they were thrown in jail for protesting, but it gives a vivid sense of these women and their passion for suffrage.

I also read quite a few nonfiction accounts on the Internet, but what really gave me a sense for the feel of the march was participating in the Women’s March on Washington in 2017. There’s nothing quite like that feeling of being surrounded by a huge number of people — all so different, different ages, different ethnicities, different genders and sexual preferences — all voicing a demand for peace, for respect, and for recognition.

The Women’s March of 1913 was not so large and perhaps not so diverse, and yet those marchers also came from different classes, different educational and work backgrounds, and different religious belief systems. There were Black women and White women, society women and domestic workers, marching together — if not always side by side. Regardless of their origins and their backgrounds, a shared passion united the marchers.

As always, feel free to email me with any questions or comments.

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Researching The Butterfly Cage

Trish MacEnulty — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I love research. I can’t resist going down an Internet rabbit hole to find contemporaneous accounts of a particular event — like NYC Mayor Gaynor’s funeral in 1913. How crazy is it that there was an attempted assassination on his life in 1910, and then he died three years later from the bullet, which was lodged in his throat. Here’s a picture of him immediately after he was shot!

And few things are as delightful as reading books from the past, such as Washington Irving’s 1832 A Tour on the Prairies: Thirty Days in Deep Indian Company and coming across sentences like this: “The rear-guard remained under the trees in the lower part of the dell, some on horseback, with their rifles on their shoulders; others seated by the fire or lying on the ground, gossiping in a low, lazy tone of voice, their horses unsaddled, standing and dozing around, while one of the rangers, profiting by this interval of leisure, was shaving himself before a pocket mirror stuck against the trunk of a tree.” So visual, so lyrical.

I also devour contemporary books about the past like this book I found in a Wyoming bookstore: Upstairs Girls: Prostitution in the American West by Michael Rutter. The book contains a wealth of information on everything from madams with hearts of gold and knuckles of brass to Asian “girl slaves” and the working girls who followed miners from town to town. This wasn’t the most pleasant trip to the past, but it was interesting.

While Internet and book research are incredibly valuable, there’s nothing quite like being in the place where your characters would have actually been and exploring their world. My experiential research has entailed many visits to New York including one time when Joe and I stayed in a Harlem Airbnb with a shared bathroom on the second floor. That house became the blueprint for the townhouse where Louisa Delafield lives.

My second book spurred me to revisit my old stomping grounds of St. Augustine to learn about Lincolnville, which was founded in 1866 by former slaves and to spend hours in the historical research library, located in a building built in the 1770s.

The Butterfly Cage, the latest installment of the Delafield & Malloy Investigations inspired a trip to Wyoming — a place I had never been to before. Joe and I flew to Denver, rented a car and then went up through Fort Collins, Colorado to Casper, Wyoming over to Douglas, Wyoming to visit the Interactive Railroad Museum…

…and then on to Cody where we spent an afternoon traipsing through the Buffalo Bill Center of the West Museum and a night at the Irma Hotel, established in 1902 by Buffalo Bill himself and named after his youngest daughter. I told you about some of these visits in an earlier newsletter, but I didn't mention the part where I felt the hand of one of my characters guiding me.

The next day we went to the Old Trail Town, a collection of old buildings from the early days of the west.

The buildings contained furniture and objects from the era as well as pictures and stories of famous Cody residents, including Cassie Waters, the highly respected town madam!

It was in search of Cassie Waters where the magic happened. At first she was just a name I had read somewhere in association with a brothel in Cody. But she grew as a character in my book. And eventually she gave a gun to Louisa. What kind of gun would she give her, I wondered. So I researched small guns (which would fit in a purse) of the time period on the Internet but nothing seemed right.

It just so happens that the Center of the West has a whole museum devoted to guns. So I scoured the museum for small guns and found quite a few derringers and pistols and then just about when we were done scoping out the place, what did I come upon but Cassie Waters’ very own gun!!

“Joe!” I called out. “It’s her gun!” I’m sure everyone in the place thought I was crazy.

And what a beauty it is: gold plated with a pearl handle, inscribed to Cassie Waters: “Every Inch a Lady”.

It's moments like this that make researching feel like I might have stepped into the Twilight Zone. But I'm not complaining.

Please feel free to email me with comments or questions.

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Trish MacEnulty — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Divine Inspiration, Rare and Awesome

If I waited for inspiration, I would never write anything. I think most working writers feel that way. That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy my daily writing, but the will to sit and write does not come from an outside source. It probably comes from the desire as a child to be heard as well as the pleasure of spending lots of time in other worlds.

And yet, every once in a while, the universe drops me a line and tells me to keep going.

The first book of my historical novel trilogy, The Whispering Women, took several years of trial and error to complete. It started out as a pilot for a TV show that I wrote for a UCLA extension class. It placed as a finalist in several contests, and so I figured I had the outline for a good novel. This turned out to be a little more difficult than I expected.

I still don’t think I got it quite right but it was as good as I could get it when we finally published it. Yes, I created my own imprint with my husband and we published it ourselves. But before that, I tried vainly to get representation. After about a hundred rejections and several “almost but not quite”s, I was utterly despondent. I’d had six books published by smaller and mid-level publishers, but I was getting nowhere with this new venture into historical fiction.

This was during the pandemic which psychically and spiritually was absolutely weird. I’m sure I’m not the only one who experienced it that way. A couple of times I woke up with full poems in my head. One dream I had after the umpteenth rejection of my book showed me reviving a beautiful whale. I woke up with the knowledge that I would keep going and that if I wound up publishing the book under my own imprint that wouldn’t be the worst thing to happen. In fact, it has been just the opposite. I have learned so much about publishing and marketing, and I’ve enjoyed a supportive community of other authors who are also forging their own paths.

Not long after the whale dream, I woke up one morning with the sure and certain sense that I needed to write about the sinking of an enormous ship. The first one that came to me was the Lusitania. I’m embarrassed to admit I knew almost nothing about it. But after a little bit of research I knew that was the boat. From that dream I began the book which later became Secrets and Spies and which turned out to be the third book in the series. I actually wrote book two, The Burning Bride, after the third book was almost completed.

Those second and third books in the series came easily and were completed and published within a year. Then I thought I would take a break and write a stand-alone book, but as soon as I started doing research for that book I realized I didn’t have the love for the idea that I thought I had. Fortunately I had some material that got tossed out of the first book which I really wanted to explore. So I started on a new book in the series, one that chronologically fit between Book One and Book Two.

It’ll be so easy, I thought, I have all this material. We went ahead and put a cover and a publishing date on Amazon and I got started. The thing about putting a date on Amazon is that then people can pre-order the book and you are locked in. And then it happened. I got stuck, my wheels spinning mud all over the place. The words fell like lead balloons. The material I had felt suddenly stale. Everything I sent to my writers group got ripped apart.

After weeks of getting nowhere I got really caffeinated and decided I would wrestle the angel until she blessed me. I skipped my yoga class that day, the dogs didn’t get their daily walk, and lunch was some walnuts and a smoothie. I wrote conversations with my characters, asking them about their lives, their motivations. I learned that one of my characters — a young woman who loved dogs wanted to be a small pet veterinarian. In 1913! I learned that my antagonist had been trafficked as a young boy. And finally, somehow a story I actually wanted to write began to emerge. By late afternoon, I was ready for a new start.

So the next morning I got up and began writing and researching along the way. My earlier books had so many historical events that they practically wrote themselves. So I was curious: what did happen in the summer of 1913. I googled “summer of 1913” — it was a pretty carefree time in many parts of the world. The Great War had not yet begun, and people in New York felt optimistic. I came across a painting titled Nubes de verano — Clouds of summer — by Emil Nolde painted in 1913. Wait a minute, I thought! I got up and went to my kitchen where hanging on the refrigerator was a postcard sent to me by a friend who had been traveling in Spain of the exact same painting: Clouds of summer!

That was all the sign I needed. I was finally on the right track.

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Remembering Harry

Trish MacEnulty — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On the day I wrote this blog I was in Jacksonville, Florida, the city where I grew up. I am here because I was invited to go to my old high school, Robert E. Lee, and speak to students who have been reading my novel, Picara. I had just finished breakfast and I picked up a copy of the Florida Times Union. As I glanced over it on the elevator on the way up to my room, my heart lurched. One of the teasers on the front page of Section C said that Harry Crews had died. My literary father was gone.

I’m sure most writers have a literary father or mother or both. My literary mother is the artist and short story writer examplar, Lynda Schor. She was the teacher who gave me permission to use my voice and to own my writing. We are still friends to this day. I still feel supported by her, encouraged by her to eschew the mundane, and reminded by her about what makes the writer’s life worth living.

Harry Crews was my literary father. I will never forget my first fiction writing workshop with him. We were all undergraduates, and he was drunk for nearly every class. Most of the other students were terrified. Having grown up around alcoholics, I was right at home. The first story I turned in was about a girl who works in a liquor store and decides to run off with a guy who comes in to rob the place. He accused me of playing fast and loose with point of view and he spent an inordinate amount of time talking about the sex scene which he called “the rut,” but he took the work seriously, and that made a difference. It was the first time in my life I had been taken seriously as a writer.

When I went in to have a conference with him about my next story, he pulled a tall boy out of the bottom drawer of his desk and asked me, “Ms. MacEnulty, did you really write this story?” I told him that I had. It was based on my experience at the prison farm where I had been housed a few years earlier after an unpleasant run-in with the law. I guess I didn’t look like someone who would be able to write about that topic. But then he said, “Well, it was so good I thought you might have stole it.” And let me tell you -- that was the highest compliment I’ve ever had in my life.

Harry Crews schooled me in the basics. He excoriated me for putting a comma before a prepositional phrase. He made me adhere to the rules for point of view, which I still religiously obey, and he exhorted me to let fiction be fictional, an idea to which I have not been so faithful. I took as many classes as I could take with Harry. I got drunk with him just once. When I reached for a glass of water that turned out to be vodka, I realized I'd never keep up with him.

But it wasn’t in the classroom or even in the barroom where I learned the most important lessons that Harry had to impart. That lesson I learned from his writing. I recently re-read a few sections of his autobiography that were publishedin the Georgia Review, in which he talked about a time during his childhood spent in the (at that time) gritty Northside area of Jacksonville in a rooming house on Main Street. From his writing and from his take-no-prisoners style of teaching, I learned the first tenet of transformative writing: brutal, naked honesty.

“If you’re gonna write, for God in heaven’s sake, try to get naked. Try to write the truth. Try to get underneath all the sham, all the excuses, all the lies that you’ve been told,” he told one interviewer.

“To not blink, to not be embarrassed by it or ashamed of it. Strip it down and let’s get to where the blood is, where the bone is,” he told another.

I only saw Harry a couple of times after I graduated. I always wanted to go back and find him, get him to sign a book for me because I was too stupid to do that while I was a student. But I didn’t. Yesterday, for some reason I was singing an old James Taylor song with a lyric that goes like this, “I always thought I’d see you one more time again.”

That day I did my power of voice exercise with the students at Lee. You never know what’s going to come out. That’s why I like these exercises. What you need to say arrives just like that. Today I started writing about my “Down Home Jacksonville Self”:“Me, driving the highways for hours, going through the grime, soaking in the overwhelming sadness, the stagnation, and how you captured it so well when you wrote about living on Main Street. You opened it up like a ripe cantaloupe and the seeds spilled and the meat was sweet and full of juice. This is my mourning self, my sad self. Sad that I didn’t come back to you or say thank you over and over again or let you know every word I write is a love letter to you.”

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Books I Read in the 1970s

Trish MacEnulty — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

These are a few of the books that my friends and I read when we were teenagers in the late 1960s and early 1970s. We also read a lot of science fiction and fantasy as teenagers still do. My favorite SF book was Dune by Frank Herbert. And like the old fart that I am, I have zero use for the film adaptations.

The title of Go Ask Alice (1971) comes from the song by Jefferson Airplane, “Don’t you want somebody to love?” The book, written in the form of a diary, is about a teenage girl who ingests LSD and descends into a downward spiral of self-destruction. I read it when I was fourteen or fifteen. Did it warn me off drugs? No, it felt more predictive than cautionary. It turns out Go Ask Alice was not a teenage girl’s actual diary. The thing that made it powerful, however, was not that it was true, but that it could have been true. The story does capture the drug culture in an authentic way, and we all believed it was true. For some people the drug culture of the 1970s completely derailed the social and political progress we were aiming for. That culture was then criminalized by Nixon and his buddies who were looking for ways to incarcerate as many Black people as possible as well as White activists. The take-away from this book is to be careful of despair. Every day brings more news of the destruction of democracy. Don’t self-destruct. We can’t win if we obliterate ourselves.

Speaking of psychedelics, Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is one of my favorite books of all time. While Go Ask Alice is framed as a dour cautionary tale, Electric Kool-Aid Test brings to light a group of zany freaks called the Merry Pranksters who make tripping (both literal and figurative) fun. They travel around the country in a bus called “Further,” having LSD parties. The book is written in the New Journalism or Gonzo style — meaning it’s a nonfiction book written like a novel. Did the book glorify drug use? Well, yeah. And it also depicted the ultimate failures of the hippie movement. Still, if you want get a sense of what drew millions of kids to hippie culture, this book is an essential read. Remember this was a period of racism, riots, assassinations, and war. And people were still trying to shake off the repression of the 1950s. The counterculture offered young people community and fun. It may not always have lived up to it professed values of peace, love, brotherhood and sisterhood, but it brought people together even if only for a while. Lessons for today? Form communities, be playful, and spread joy when you can. Be a prankster!

To be honest, I couldn’t remember why we all loved the book Trout Fishing in America (1967) by Richard Brautigan, but every cool person I knew had a copy of it. Brautigan was a poet and short story writer and novelist. He killed himself at the age of 49. According to his biography, he didn’t even like hippies, but the hippies and the hipsters and the counterculture loved him. The book isn’t really a novel. There’s no narrative to speak of. In a word, the writing is fanciful. It’s a trip through a madman’s imagination. Is it worth reading? Sure. Anything that alters your perspective without giving you a hangover is worth reading. Are there lessons for those of us in 2025 and beyond? Two things: One, let your imagination go wild. Two, don’t kill yourself.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1967) as told to Alex Haley was incredibly eye-opening to me, as a young white woman from the south. The book was published the year after Malcolm X was assassinated. If you don’t understand the Black Lives Matter movement or the concept of “white privilege,” this brilliant and painful book will make it abundantly clear that there are historical roots to our current problems. It’s also a really good story. A hero’s journey, if you will. Malcolm X, born Malcolm Little, was born in poverty. His only path out of that poverty was through crime, which eventually landed him in prison. And that’s where he had a spiritual awakening and joined the Nation of Islam, becoming first a leader but then rejecting the Nation of Islam teachings in order to become a Sunni Muslim. You can read the basic biographical information on Wikipedia. But if you read the book, you get to know the man as well as develop an understanding of the enormous toll that racism has taken on this country. Malcolm X’s autobiography demonstrates the power of a spiritual foundation when fighting injustice. And that’s just one take away for 2025.

Some really important books by White and Black feminist authors came out around 1970: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, The Female Eunuch By Gloria Steinem, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, Sexual Politics by Kate Millet, and many others, but I didn’t read those books until I got a little older. In 1970, my friends and I were devouring the thriller, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, and Valley of the Dolls. Especially Valley of the Dolls! What a big, sprawling, melodramatic and oh-so-soapy narrative Jacqueline Susann delivered to us. The setting is the 1940s, 50s and into the 60s. And the themes run the gamut from addiction to pills (or “dolls”) to self-harm and suicide. Even though it was set in an earlier time period, the story of Valley of the Dolls sets the stage for the feminist revolution of the 60s and 70s. There was no greater illustration of the need for sisterhood and liberation than the messy, unfulfilled lives of the characters in that book. Then, of course, the gruesome murder of Sharon Tate, who starred in the movie adaptation, seared the story into our minds and hearts forever.

Other faves from the Era: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; Steal this Book; Black Like Me; The Handmaid’s Tale; Fear of Flying; The Happy Hooker.

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The More Things Change....

Trish MacEnulty — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I stood among the crowd of a couple thousand protestors in front of the Old Florida Capitol, a charming historic building with a gray-ish dome and striped awnings — the effect marred by the huge phallic structure right behind it. Looking around, I saw a lot of young women and men, but the majority of the people were my age or older. These boomers were perfectly at home, waving their “no kings” signs, smiling and singing or just stopping to chat with each other. They were in their element. Most had already done this more than a half a century ago. Now, here we are in 2025, and it’s time to take to the streets again – to stop and look what’s going down.

In 2023, when my coming-of-age novel Cinnamon Girl about a teenage girl in 1970 was released, I had no idea that in just two years the story would suddenly be more relevant than ever. In the book, the main character’s father is an anti-war activist and an FM radio disc jockey, who uses the airwaves to transmit information relevant to the countercultural: the location of protests and demonstrations, shelters for runaways, and even coded information for fugitives along with some amazing music. It was a lot like the constant stream on my Instagram feed — only the music was better.

The decade of the 1960s saw political assassinations and the shooting of unarmed college students by the National Guard, peaceful protests and violent riots, bombings of Vietnamese children by the U.S. military and bombings of buildings by leftist radicals — steeped in a stew of hatred among ordinary citizens. In some ways the turmoil of the period reenacted the Civil War with those clinging to the status quo pitted against those demanding change. That turmoil was fueled by a senseless war against people “who don’t look like us” and who could therefore be dehumanized by the American war machine and its media handmaidens.

The protests of the late 1960s and early 70s attracted so many young people because for us, the fight was existential. Old men in their comfortable offices were sending young men, boys even, off to fight a war for reasons that didn’t make sense. A little country on the other side of the world was somehow a threat? How? The domino theory of communism was as leaky as an overflowing diaper and just as full of crap. Young men were coming home in body bags, and those young men were the brothers, lovers and friends of young women.

Then as now, the protests were not monolithic. It wasn’t just about a monstrously stupid war. It was also about the wars right here — the wars against people of color and our indigenous population, against women, and against youth culture in general.

In 1970, our military dropped napalm bombs on Vietnamese civilians and soldiers indiscriminately. They got away with it for a long time because those people didn’t look like “White America.” Today men in military gear, their faces hidden, attack another group of people who don’t look like “White America.” Only now they are doing it in our own country

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A Writer's Thread

Trish MacEnulty — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A Writer’s Thread

I’m often reading for research, so I don’t get as much time to enjoy historical novels as I would like. However, there’s one author whose books I always make time for: Madeline Martin. I know whenever I pick up a book by Martin, I will be entertained, educated, and emotionally engaged. One reason I’m drawn to her books is the passion her characters possess for the act of reading itself.

I first became aware of Martin a few years ago when I interviewed her for the Historical Novel Review with the release of her gripping World War II novel, The Librarian Spy. The historical research for this page-turning book was fascinating, providing information about aspects of the war of which I had been unaware.

The other thing that impressed me about Martin was her generosity toward other writers. Every Friday she posts a “Friday Reads,” a review of new historical novels on social media. She even offered me, a newbie to historical fiction at the time, reams of advice on marketing and promotion. I may be two decades older than Martin, but she has served as an exemplary mentor. Last year she helped me craft the query letter that landed a publisher for my forthcoming novel.

When the organizers of Word of South, a literary and music festival in my home city of Tallahassee, offered me a slot in the schedule to bring in a historical fiction author, I thought of Martin, who lives on the other side of the state. She graciously accepted the invitation and drove over for the day.

Martin enjoys sharing her writing and researching process with readers. In our session held in a local beer garden, she described to a rapt crowd how she spends months researching her stories, traveling to locales such as Warsaw, Lyon, London, and Lisbon. She also talked about how she developed her love of reading as a child whose parents moved often, which is why the romance of books and the written word figures so often in her stories.

The saving power of reading in times of trouble is the thread running through Martin’s historical novels. Her most recent novel, The Secret Book Society, published in the summer of 2025, provides a perfect example. The novel tells the story of some society women in Victorian England who are brought together by a mysterious countess to read books — against the wishes of their families and of society. “Women who had been repressed, who had been trapped, abandoned to their fates by the ones they loved.” Through the travails of these women, we get different perspectives about what it must have been like to be an upper-class woman in that hyper-patriarchal era.

Martin draws her fictional stories directly from the struggles of real people, and this one is no exception. In The Secret Book Society, she shows what can happen to women deemed to be “dangerous” because of their intelligence as well as by any efforts to educate themselves. The book is a timely reminder of what women lose when we are not free to pursue a life of the mind.

A perusal of her other titles conveys the continuing theme of the power of reading books: The Last Bookshop in London, The Librarian Spy, The Keeper of Hidden Books, and The Booklover’s Library. I believe Martin’s generous support of other writers is directly linked to her commitment to serve as a champion of books.

Martin’s work has inspired me to look for the threads in other writers’ books. For example, Renee Rosen writes about powerful, driven women like Caroline Astor, Estee Lauder and Ruth Handler (the creator of Barbie) who make a significant mark in society or in the business world. Kate Quinn’s characters tend to live double-lives and dive into danger at the first opportunity.

In my own work, the thread of women’s friendship runs through the stories, probably because my friendships with women are so important in my own life. The two characters in my Delafield & Malloy historical mystery series come from differing backgrounds – one is the Barnard-educated daughter of blue-blood society and the other is the immigrant daughter of a fisherman and his illiterate wife. Their friendship enriches their lives and enables them to grow in ways they would not otherwise. In my forthcoming novel, The Woman with the Wicked Face, inspired by the life of the silent film star, Theda Bara, the protagonist’s mother, sister and her maid play as important a role as the men she loves.

Writers are weavers, and in order to create our tapestries we use various threads. Some of those threads might find their way into only one book, but others may show up time and again. The thread leads both the writer and the reader through the story and then, perhaps, on to the next one. These threads can also bind us, one to another, reader to writer as we plumb our passions and obsessions and discover what makes our lives meaningful.

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Eureka Moments in Research

Trish MacEnulty — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The moment I uncovered the identity of silent film star Theda Bara’s secret lover, I leapt off my couch and danced around the room. Early in my research process, I had watched a biographical documentary on Bara’s life, The Woman with the Hungry Eyes. The documentarian mentioned that Bara had referred to a time in her life when she was “in that twilight called love” during a brief sojourn in Paris. But she never revealed who her lover was.

The one reference to this mystery man was a mention of a “famous cinema vamp” in a biography of Isadora Duncan in which Duncan’s friend and biographer Mary Desti claimed the vamp had a love affair with one of Isadora’s relatives (an artist) and that Duncan had incurred the young woman’s wrath by sending away the man she loved. Mary Desti was a notoriously unreliable narrator, yet I believed there had to be a kernel of truth to the story. The writer’s son, film director Preston Sturges, confirmed the presence of a “cinema vamp” in Paris at the time in his own memoirs.

So I researched visual artists in Duncan’s circle and perused Duncan’s autobiography for any references to relatives. I soon realized I had to broaden my own idea of relative and artist. At first I was looking for cousins or distant cousins. However, a relative can be anyone related by blood, and Isadora had two brothers. And an artist can refer to any number of fields, including the performing arts.

One writer theorized that the unknown lover could have been Isadora’s brother, the dancer Raymond Duncan. He was married but not strict about his vows. However, a little digging showed he was on tour in America at the time. Then I discovered in Duncan’s autobiography that she had brought her other brother, Augustin, and his daughter over to France the same year that Theda Bara was in Paris. By a process of elimination I had found the culprit: the handsome Augustin Duncan.

Of course, I could be wrong but I believe the evidence is strongly in Augustin’s favor. He was separated from a wife who was not well liked by the rest of his family. And he was in Paris at the Champs-Élysées Hotel. Later, after the episode with Bara would have happened, he wound up in Germany where he found a new wife. He was also an actor (or performing artist) so he and Bara would have had something in common.

Discoveries such as this provide one of the great pleasures of writing historical fiction — those eureka moments when we find the answer to a perplexing riddle. They also send a whallop of a dopamine hit to the brain. It must be similar to how a detective feels when she’s solved a crime.

Sometimes the discoveries are more personal. In researching my current novel, I came across a passport photo of my grandmother thanks to the help of a friend in geneology. I had never even seen a picture of my grandmother before that day. I stared at the screen in awe. This was my grandmother — and also a character in my book.

I emailed some of my fellow historical fiction authors about their own eureka moments and most had experienced some variation.

Gail Lehrman’s eureka moment inspired her current project. She wrote, “When I was working on my first novel, Across Seward Park, my research led me to Professor Annalise Orlick’s book Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women in Working-Class Politics. There I encountered ladies of the New York Women’s Trade Union League who were on the front lines of the struggle against sweat shops and the exploitation of working people. Cutting across class and cultural barriers, these women led bold, unorthodox live of political commitment and social service. When I finished Professor Orlick’s book I thought someone should write a novel about these women. And so, I am.”

Micah Thorpe, author of Aegolius Creek, said his eureka moments often come from maps. “One of the hardest things to do in researching a story is to define, or fictionalize a place, particularly in a historical context. I routinely look at maps and map overlays and old photographs to try and get a sense of where something is, or was. Landscapes change, particularly over time. Often I’ll use fictionalized places that are based on real ones - which means getting just close enough to make it seem real without it being so. Finding little bits of specific information, the architectural design of a building, the placement of a tree or the arch of a road makes perfect fictional realism,” he wrote.

Nonfiction writers, of course, build their books on research. Kerry Caithers, who is currently working on a book about crime scenes told me: “One piece of information which completely altered my view of crime scenes was the popularity of crime scenes. People travelled for miles, on foot, by horse/carriage, and later by public transport and cars just to view the scene of a murder. Not a few people, crowds of up to one hundred. My view was changed because suddenly, the crime scene was not a private police undertaking, but a social event and one the public and press could participate in.”

I remember as a university student thinking research was tedious. Now, I recognize the gift we receive as the past reveals itself and we capture a glimpse of the world in whose shadow we currently live. Each new book is an invitation to peel away layers of misconception and tease out slivers of truth. As readers we find immense satisfaction in a mystery solved; as writers we get that same the thrill ten-fold when we dive into the waters unknown and come back up with untold treasures.

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Gator Got Your Granny

Trish MacEnulty — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Do you remember the song, "Polk Salad Annie" by Tony Joe White? It was a big hit when I was a kid in Florida. We loved the line about the gator getting your granny. "Chomp! Chomp! Chomp!"

Last summer my daughter and I were kayaking in a spring-fed river in North Florida. We had paddled into one of the small inlets in search of a spring when my daughter stopped and pointed to something. I thought she was pointing to the origin of the spring and I turned my kayak around -- only to realize I was just a few feet away from a dark, seven-foot alligator! I started paddling so hard I looked like I was in a cartoon. I was terrified! My whole body pulsed with terror!

"Why didn't you tell me there was an alligator!" I asked (okay, maybe I yelled).

"I tried to," she said, paddling close behind me.

We got back into the main river as quickly as we could, and I kept a close eye on anything that looked like a floating snout after that. It took a good while for me to calm down. Talk about getting your cardio!

Alligators have cropped up in my historical fiction more than once. In The Burning Bride, Book 3 of the Delafield & Malloy Investigations, Louisa gets left in a Florida swamp where she's pretty much surrounded by gators. You might wonder how she survived because alligators can run upwards of 11 miles an hour. When they want to kill something, they snap their powerful jaws on their prey and take it below the surface where it drowns or dies of shock. The saving grace is that they don't eat that often, and their favorite food is apple snails.

The other time an alligator has appeared in my historical fiction is in my novel The Woman with the Wicked Face, inspired by the life of silent film star, Theda Bara. When she was in St. Augustine filming the silent movie Heart and Soul in 1916, her director decided to make use of the local fauna. He and some of his crew went to the Alligator Farm (established in 1893) and they managed to get a 500-year-old alligator (or so the proprietor claimed) onto the set. Never mind that the story was supposed to take place in Hawaii where they don't have alligators, he knew his audiences would thrill to the sight of terrifying gator.

So as Theda Bara was riding a horse down the road, she was supposed to come across the gator. Unfortunately, the horse (which was not stupid) freaked out when he saw the gator and reared up, spilling Theda onto the ground just a few feet away from the saurian beast. She leapt up and skedaddled out of there. All in a day's work for Theda Bara.

If you ever get a chance to visit St. Augustine, I recommend a trip to the Alligator Farm. Not only can you watch the alligators getting fed by one of the park employees, you can walk down the boardwalk to the rookery where thousands of storks, cranes, herons, and roseate spoonbills come to nest in the springtime. It's an amazing sight.

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