The Past Has Long Arms

Please welcome my very first guest, author Donis Casey.  She's giving away a book too.

I’m amused at how some people seem to think that whatever is going on this minute is unique in human history. Hardly! Even our modern technology is just a detail. People never change. They are us! They just didn’t have cell phones. That’s why I write a historical mystery series. As William Faulkner said, “The past isn’t dead. The past isn’t even past.”

My sleuth, Alafair Tucker, lives with her husband Shaw and their ten children on a prosperous farm outside of Boynton, Oklahoma, in the 1910s. She never sets out to solve murders, but all those pesky kids keep getting themselves into trouble, and need their mother to get them out. Fortunately for me, Alafair is the kind of woman who will do anything, legal or not, for her kids. Alafair is an homage to my foremothers, tough as nails and just as loving, who did whatever needed to be done, whether they were supposed to or not.

Crying Blood is the fifth installment in my Alafair Tucker series. Alafair figures large in the story, but this time the mystery revolves around her husband, Shaw.

It’s the fall of 1915, and Shaw, his brother James, and their sons are on their annual quail-hunting trip, when his dog turns up a shallow grave and evidence of a long ago dastardly deed. Shaw finds himself faced with what seems to be the very real ghost of a murdered Indian who is looking for justice, or as the Muskogee Creeks say, “he’s Crying Blood.”

As Shaw discovers, the past has long arms.

I live in Arizona, 1200 miles away from Boynton. Both of my parents were raised in Boynton, and I spent a lot of time there in my childhood. My grandmother owned Mrs. Casey’s Cafe on the main street for over fifty years.

Boynton was quite the thriving community back in Alafair’s time. It had two banks, five churches, a newspaper, a brick plant, an oil refinery, four general stores, two hardware houses, a furniture store, a farm implement store, and a big cotton gin. The 1916 Directory of Boynton states, “Altogether Boynton is one of the most progressive cities in the state, and its future is full of brilliant promise.”

It didn’t quite turn out that way. The Great Depression did it in, like it did so many Oklahoma farming communities. When I write about the Boynton that Alafair Tucker and her family inhabit, I might as well be writing about Atlantis – a place that only exists now in the racial memory of its descendants. And yet I am who I am because of it.

Read the first chapter of each novel on my website, www.doniscasey.com, I blog about writing at www.typem4murder.blogspot.com, and about food in mysteries at http://www.fatalfoodies.blogspot.com/.

 

Donis Casey is the author of five Alafair Tucker Mysteries,The Old Buzzard Had It Coming, Hornswoggled, The Drop Edge of Yonder, The Sky Took Him, and Crying Blood. Donis lives in Tempe, AZ, with her husband, poet Donald Koozer.

Donis will send a signed copy of the original ARC to a name drawn at random from all who comment. This offer ends on Friday, March 4. But you must leave your email address for me to contact you. Write it this way--ellis at ellisvidler dot com--to defeat the trolls.