Cryptography in seventeenth-century England was not just the stuff of spies and traitors, a fact that became a major plot point in The Sign of the Gallows, my fifth Lucy Campion historical mystery. While ciphers had grown more complex between the 16th and 17th centuries with the development of new mathematics, the actual practice of…
ONE London November 1667 The north-western road to St Giles-in-the-Fields was darker and more desolate than Lucy Campion remembered. She shifted her peddler’s pack, full of True Accounts and Strange News, her shoulders aching under the familiar strain. She’d taken the longer path to avoid the outskirts of Covent Garden since it still teemed with…
On November 17, 1920, two Chicago-based actresses, Marie Ramey and Lillian Thompson, were killed and thrown from a car after they had allegedly “indulged in an automobile flirtation with four young men.” While two of the men turned themselves into the police shortly afterward, they couldn’t (or wouldn’t) identify their companions. The investigation stalled until…
Nineteen twenty-nine is a turbulent, troubled time in Chicago. The volatile stock market is showing signs of overheating. For nine months, Gina Ricci, the heroine of Murder Knocks Twice, has been a cigarette girl at Chicago’s premiere speakeasy. During the day she works at Mr. Rosenstein’s pharmacy while also lending at hand at her father’s…
CHAPTER 1 CHICAGO OCTOBER 1929 The black delivery truck pulled up to Mr. Rosenstein’s drugstore, its movements stealthy and smooth as it parked, not a squeaking brake or rattling screw to be heard. Its shadow from the dropping sun stretched across the sidewalk, just touching the store’s glass windows, which displayed mortars and pestles, vials,…
In 1929, there were two “Canary Murder” Cases. The first was a film starring Louise Brooks, William Powell, and Jean Arthur, released in February, which told the story of a showgirl (“The Canary”) who was strangled after a failed attempt at blackmail. The second “Canary Murder” occurred in Chicago towards the end of the year,…
Murder Knocks Twice by Susanna Calkins is the first mystery in a captivating new series that takes readers into the dark, dangerous, and glittering underworld of a 1920s Chicago speakeasy.
In 1963, Ellis Peters’ Death and the Joyful Woman was awarded the Edgar for Best Novel, edging out Dell Shannon’s Knave of Hearts, Mark McShane’s Séance, Shelley Smith’s The Ballad of the Running Man, Jean Potts’ The Evil Wish, and Ross Macdonald’s The Zebra-Striped Hearse. I’d never read any novels by Ellis Peters, one of…
The first mystery in Susanna Calkins’s captivating new series, Murder Knocks Twice takes readers into the dark, dangerous, and glittering underworld of a 1920’s Chicago speakeasy. Gina Ricci takes on a job as a cigarette girl to earn money for her ailing father—and to prove to herself that she can hold her own at Chicago’s most notorious…
It’s a funny thing to go to a mystery conference and discover that everyone on the streets outside is drunk at nine o’clock in the morning, while everyone inside the conference is stone-cold sober. But that’s what happens when a conference—the second annual Murder and Mayhem in Chicago—is held on St. Patrick’s Day in the…
