I realized – and I’m not sure why it took me so long – that although I have blogged about many many topics, I have not discussed Maine. My detective, Will Rees, is a Mainer and many of my books are set in this state.
At the time the books are set, Maine is not yet a state of its own. Originally populated by tribes of the Algonquin Nation, whose names remain in names like Androscoggin, Passamaquoddy, Penobscot and more, Maine was considered part of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. It was officially called the District of Maine. Maine was brought into statehood as part of the Missouri Compromise of 1820. (Maine came in as a ‘free’ state. The following year, Missouri came in as a slave holding state, thereby keeping the balance between free and slave.)
Maine is called The Pine Tree State for obvious reasons.
Maine has a long, and rocky coastline.
Although part of the temperate climate, and frequently warm and humid in the summers, it also has a long cold and snowy winter. I have seen it snow the last week of April, and not a dusting either but several inches.
The heyday of the American Circus occurred in the early 1900s. Hundreds of circuses, both small and large, toured the United States, performing for audiences of a few hundred or several thousands. Trains took the circuses all over the country and by then the circus was the circus we think of. Canvas tents had been invented and adopted in the mid-nineteenth century and exotic animal acts became a feature of the performances. The trapeze, invented in France, was added to the line-up.
But in 1800, when the circus came to Durham, Maine, it was far different. As discussed in previous blogs, there were no tents; the circus constructed a small roofless amphitheater. Instead of elephant and lion acts, the animals were dogs and pigs. The trapeze, adapted from the tightrope, had not been invented. And trains did not carry the circus across the country,
Horse drawn wagons would have been the vehicle used.
As my model for the wagons used in A Circle of Dead Girls,
I used the Burton wagon. It is the oldest example of a wagon used as a home in Great Britain.
The history of the wagon, however, is older. By the late 17th century, most of the roads in Europe were paved. It is thought that the first wagons used as living quarters appeared in France and were designed for the actors of the circus. They were large, horse drawn caravans. By the middle of the 18th centuries, the carriages became smaller and only needed one or two horses to pull them.
The Burton wagons had small wheels placed under the body of the carriage itself and were undecorated. These wagons evolved into the elaborately embellished wagons, with large wheels necessary for going off-road, used by the Romani. According to Wikipedia and other sources, they began using such wagons about 1850 called a vardo.
Since John Asher, the circus owner, is from England and has traveled through Europe, I imagined that he would have seen such living wagons in France and other places and used them for the models of his own horse-drawn circus wagons. These living wagons would be a practical solution to traveling from town to town.
The decorated wagons did not disappear when the circus began touring via train. They evolved into parade wagons, the brightly painted and gilded wagons that paraded through town to advertise the circus. The circus museum in Sarasota, Florida has some fine examples of these wagons.
Although there was no canvas tent (not invented for another twenty+ years), no exotic animals (the first circuses used pigs, horses and dogs) or trapeze artists, there were clowns.
The ancient Greeks used figures of fun, which were rustic fools. The English word for clown also meant rustic fool originally. These characters are plentiful in Shakespeare’s plays.
At the same time, the Italian Commedia del’arte used a number of stock characters that includes clown-like figures: Pierot and Harlequin.
Clowns have certain evolved since then.
The clown in the American circus is a direct outgrowth of Philip Astley, who restarted the circus in England in 1768. His circus was originally an equestrian show and clowns were used as the breaks between the trick riding.
In The Circle of Dead Girls, my latest Will Rees mystery, the circus comes to this small Maine town. It is hard to believe, but the American circus was still in its infancy in 1799.
Although the circus has a long history – the Egyptians are commonly credited with inventing acrobatics – all forms of entertainment including the jugglers and the acrobats were banned during the Puritan era. It was not recreated in England until Sergeant-Major Philip Astley began exhibiting his equestrian prowess on the outskirts of London in 1768. He performed in a circle (a ‘circus’ in Latin).
In 1770 he decided to expand the appeal of his show by adding acrobats, ropedancers (or wire walkers) and jugglers. (The trapeze, which evolved from the high wire acts, had not yet been invented.) He finished the production with a pantomime, a farcical play that included characters from the Commedia del Arte: Harlequin, Columbine and Clown. His new circus was a huge success.
Like many parts of American culture, this new version of the circus came to the United States from England. As Europe prepared for war, one of the many between England and France, a pupil of the English equestrian tradition, John Bill Ricketts, brought the circus across the Atlantic. He set up a riding school in Philadelphia in 1792 and established the first circus the following year. It was not a traveling circus but was, like the Astley entertainment, housed in a wooden amphitheater.
From the first, despite the social and cultural mores that repressed women, they performed in the circus. They were career women before the term was invented. And they were frequently the stars. In 1772 Astley’s circus featured two equestriennes. The wives of Astley and another trick rider J. Griffin were so popular and famous they were invited to perform before the royal families of England and France. Following their lead Ricketts included a woman in his circus who not only worked as an equestrienne but also doubled as actress and dancer.
Many of the women who performed in circuses were the wives and daughters of male owners or performers. In Europe there was already a culture in which the children raised by circus parents became performers in their turn. A famous ropedancer, familiarly called Bambola, was one such in Italy. I borrowed the name for a character in A Circle of Dead Girls.
The circus allowed women to exhibit their bodies and their physical strength in public. The equestriennes certainly could not do tricks on the backs of galloping horses in long trailing skirts so, horrors!, they wore knee-length skirts that clearly showed the shape of their legs. To modern eyes, this reveal would look remarkably tame. But in the eighteenth century this was titillating. Women of that time were tightly corseted and completely covered. It was not proper for them to attend the circus, which was on a par with Burlesque. Until the Civil War (1861 – 1865) the audience of the American circus was predominantly male. The female performers, like actresses, to whom they were compared, were suspect, considered little better than harlots. But unlike the actresses, who only had to be pretty and seductive, the women in the circuses had to have talent and be willing to undergo the grueling training required for the acts. They, like their male counterparts, had to be unusually healthy and fit.
The circus proved extremely popular in the United States and Ricketts expanded to include New York and Boston and even cities in Canada. To reach more people, the circuses began to travel, building and then tearing down the wooden arenas as necessary. In 1825, Joshua Purdy Brown decided to present his show under a canvas tent instead of the temporary wooden structures. The modern circus was born.
Although there is no record of traveling circuses before the 1800’s, I suspect some enterprising fellows would set up their own small companies. Outside of the few big cities at that time, (which were primarily New York, Philadelphia and Boston, most of the U.S. was rural. Picture how exciting the arrival of such entertainment would be. And how exotic the performers would appear to the farmers and small shopkeepers who came to see them. And imagine how seductive such a beautiful ropedancer would be in a tiny town in Maine . . .
In my Will Rees mysteries, he meets people who are ill with tuberculosis several times. The frequency of deaths from this disease in my fiction in not an accident. It was an epidemic and still has not been eradicated. In 2017, there were more than 10 million cases of active TB which resulted in 1.6 million deaths; it is therefore the number one cause of death from an infectious disease. Most of these deaths, and most of the new infections, occur in the developing world.
I was mostly familiar with TB as ‘consumption’, a disease that afflicted Victorian poets. Although TB was common in both the poets, the upper classes and the slum-dwellers, it was not a new disease during Victorian times. It has been around for millennia. Bison remains from 17,000 years ago display the effects of the disease. (No one is sure if TB jumped to humans from the bovine like smallpox or whether it developed independently.) TB scars have been found on Neolithic skeletons and on the spines of Egyptian mummies.
So, it has been around a very long time. Despite that, it was not identified as a single disease until 1820 and the bacillus that caused it was not discovered until 1882 (by Robert Koch. He received the Nobel prize but failed to recognize that one of the transmissions of TB was via infected milk.)
Before the advent of antibiotics, and even with the best care in the sanatoriums set up for this purpose, 50% of the patients died within five years. In 1815, one in four died of the illness in England.
Antibiotics beat back the disease, but new drug resistant strains raise the possibility of a new epidemic. Even now, in modern times, about one quarter of the world’s population is infected with TB.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, a quote ascribed to writer and philosopher George Santayana. Variations have been popularized by different speakers.
Well, whoever created this saying was right.
I thought of this as I did research for my next book (after Death in the Great Dismal) which is tentatively titled Murder on Principle. I happened to come across a number of interesting factoids about the election in 1800; a contest between John Quincy Adams and Thomas Jefferson. (This was the fourth election but since George Washington basically ran unopposed in the first two, in actual fact it was the second contest.)
When George Washington had opted not to run again for a third term, both
Adams and Jefferson ran to replace him. Adams won, narrowly, in this third election. Since there were no parties, the candidate with the next highest number of votes became the vice president. So, while Adams became the President, Thomas Jefferson became his vice-president. (The chasm between the beliefs of these two men was deep; Think Trump as President and Hillary Clinton as his vice-president.) The two men faced off in the following election cycle -1800 – causing a constitutional crisis. To solve it, Adams ran as a Federalist and Jefferson as a Republican.
The Federalists were more akin to our current Republican party while Jefferson was like our modern day Democrats. (Just to illustrate the difference between them, Jefferson worried that without term limits the President could serve for a lifetime. Adams thought that was a fine idea.)
The Electoral College had been already formed. (I leave the discussion to whether it is still needed now to another day.) Jefferson and Adams won an equal number of votes, a result that threw the election into the hands of the House.
For people who believe our current politics are nasty, here are a few examples of what was happening then.
Alexander Hamilton claimed that if Adams was reelected, Virginians (like Jefferson) would resort to physical force to keep the Federalists out of office. Further, he tried to persuade John Jay to change the rules so that the legislature would not be able to choose the Jefferson electoral delegates, saying that it would ‘prevent an atheist in Religion and a fanatic in politics from getting possession of the helm of state.” Jay refused.
Adams, furthermore, as one of his last acts, chose John Marshall as Chief Justice, thereby giving control of the courts to the Federalists.
Jefferson, meanwhile, believed that Adams and the Federalists would seek to change the laws so that a President could serve for life.
In A Circle of Dead Girls, Will Rees meets a character who uses tarot cards for divination.
I’ve gotten a couple of questions about whether Tarot cards were even around then. Weren’t they all the rage in the sixties?
The cards were actually popularized (for the first time!) in the 1400s and were used as, well, playing cards. There were four suits. The ‘trump’ cards were added later. It is thought that tarot cards came from Egypt.
From the deck I used.
By the mid-eighteenth century, the tarot cards were being used for divination. The first deck specifically created for divination was produced in 1789. There have been successive waves of interest since then and yes, the late sixties saw saw a surge.
So it is perfectly possible that Rees would have seen a deck of tarot cards, especially from someone of Italian extraction.
Why did I choose to use the tarot and the more occult use of tarot? Will Rees, after all, is a character with his feet firmly rooted in the practical. Did I include a supernatural element to this mystery? After all, Rees is astonished by the accuracy of some of Bambola’s readings. Although I left the door open for that interpretation, I chose that mechanism to show something of Bambola’s character. She believes in the readings but ignores what they say to her.
Very excited to reveal the cover for my next Will Rees mystery: Death in the Great Dismal. It will be released early fall. In this book, Will and Lydia travel to the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia to rescue a free black woman, taken from Maine and enslaved, who has fled to the swamp. One of the other maroons is murdered – but Will and Lydia are on the case.
I have had many wonderful covers but this one is exceptional.
The bald cypress used to be one of the most common trees in the swamp but from logging and other causes the numbers diminished tone replaced by red maple and other deciduous trees.
Bald cypress is itself deciduous and drops its leaves/needles in the fall. They are a beautiful and vivid orange with a hint of purple. A concerted effort to re-establish the bald cypress in the swamp was begun. One of the most interesting and, for me, creepiest feature of the bald cypress is something called cypress knees. No one knows why they exist but the theory is that they help bring oxygen to the roots.
The orange surface is the dropped needles. All the small trunks are cypress knees.I found these knees totally creepy. There are hundreds and hundreds of them and to me it looks like an alien life form (the pod people or something) taking over.
eleanorkuhns 
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