Crimes Against the Humanities

As often happens, the pieces of “Assault & Reverie” — my latest Tai & Trey story — came together during a long car ride while I listened to NPR (shout out to WSVH, my hometown station!). Intrigued by what I was hearing, I couldn’t resist concocting a plot that included these fascinating elements. The result was a work of fiction, with some true-life happenings grounding it in possibility, if not reality.

Warning: Spoilers Below!

The idea of a snatched violin was inspired by the real-life assault and robbery of violinist and concertmaster Frank Almond, who shared his story on The Moth Radio Hour, a radio show from PRX. There are a few similarities between my fictional version and his actual one—Almond was accosted by a TASER-wielding assailant, and the eventual identification of the thief was cinched through the use of AFIDs (and the fact that the robber left his driver’s license in the case with the stolen violin). There are many differences, however. Recovering Almond’s violin took almost two weeks, and the crime was solved through leather-on-pavement policing, not deus ex flying machina.

However, the aerial data Trey uses to solve the crime—and the airplane that provided it—are not fictional. A similar airplane is a keystone of Persistent Surveillance System’s Community Support Program, and the photographs it provides have been used to solve crimes from burglary to murder (and yes, one theft was solved in less than thirty minutes). I learned about it on RadioLab, a show from WNYC Studios, which discussed not only the effectiveness of the surveillance, but the surrounding privacy issues, something Trey and Tai possess very different ideas about. Having them bring their different perspectives to the issue was an interesting way for me to work through my own conflicted feelings, as I believe very much in both law and order and individual privacy. My literary use of such a plane in Atlanta, however, was entirely fictional, as was the idea that someone in the security loop might have let crucial information out of the bag (there is zero evidence that such a thing has ever happened in real life). Luckily, you can visit the company’s website to learn about their real crime-fighting missions, including their privacy statement, and leave my problematic fictional plane heading for a fictional horizon.

While researching this story, I also learned a great deal about Stradivari violins. The Brancaccio Strad featured in this story, alas, really was lost during an air raid in Berlin. I resurrected it as an act of hope, as a way to let this magnificent instrument live once again, and was heartened to see that a piece of it may have been recently recovered and identified. Even if it will never again make music, I hope it will remind us of the great evil that was overcome by the Allied powers at such profound cost, and of the beauty that somehow survived, broken but lovely, in those ashes. May we never forget those horrors, so that we may never repeat them. May we always remember the service of the Allied women and men, so that we may always honor them.

To hear Frank Almond’s story in his own words, go here: https://themoth.org/stories/a-violins-life

To learn more about the Brancaccio Stradivarius, go here: https://timothyjuddviolin.com/tag/brancaccio-stradivarius/

To see the (possible) piece of that violin that may have been recovered, go here: https://maestronet.com/forum/index.php?/topic/333195-could-this-be-a-stradivari-neck/

To listen to the show “Eye in the Sky” about aerial surveillance, go here: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/eye-sky

To visit the Persistent Surveillance Systems website, go here:

And to get your very own copy of Assault & Reverie and Other Stories, click HERE.

A Walk Through Savannah's Bonaventure Cemetery

I love strolling in old cemeteries. I suppose this shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone – I am, after all, a mystery writer, and I write a character who used to be a tour guide in Savannah graveyards – but my appreciation is occasionally met with a shudder from others.

Those are places of the dead, they say.

Well, yes . . . and no. Places of the dead certainly, but for the living without a doubt. Graveyards are the collective scrapbook of a community – a family, a church, a town – and Savannah’s Bonaventure Cemetery is an especially gorgeous and intricate one.

First a plantation, Bonaventure began welcoming the dead into its marshy arms in the early 1800s. Situated at the bend of the Wilmington River, Bonaventure blends the manmade and the natural in a shifting intermingle, as tidal as the waters that run along its Eastern borders. The landscape is mostly silent – bird calls, rustling leaves, a high soft breeze winding through the Spanish moss and live oak branches – but occasionally the whine of an outboard motor will piece the quiet. Or a tour bus will rumble through. Or even – because this is still a working cemetery – a line of cars with their headlights on, laying a loved one to rest, adding another soul and another story to the Bonaventure fold.

Bonaventure is most famous perhaps for the iconic Bird Girl statue, which after it graced the cover of John Beredt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil became too valuable to rest unattended and which was spirited away to a downtown museum. But there are other famous grave sites, and art, still available for the viewing.

There’s the resting place of Gracie Watson, marked with tenderly carved sculpture of the little girl who died at age seven. Her grave is protected by a wrought iron fence, saving the stone from the further erosion of human hands. Rain and the salt air have had their way, and so I imagine the features are not as sharply defined as they once were. I think it’s beautiful this way, worked upon by the slow hand of time, which is as tender and delicate as an artist’s touch.

There’s also the gravesite of Conrad Aiken, a one of the finest American poets and a lover of Savannah. His grave is a bench—the legend goes, he wanted to provide a place for visitors to stop, rest and have a martini with him – engraved with two telling phrases: “GIVE MY LOVE TO THE WORLD” and “COSMOS MARINER DESTINATION UNKNOWN.”

Bonaventure is – and perhaps this is why I love all cemeteries so – a place of stories. Some are long and raveling. Some read “The End” all too soon. Some are mysteries, marked only by a stone that says “Mother” or “Baby Boy.” But all invite us to participate in the telling. All ask us, the living, to continue the tale.

PS: If you’d like to visit Bonaventure with Tai as your tour guide, grab a copy of Trouble Like a Freight Train Coming, the Derringer-nominated prequel to the series. You can find more info HERE.

Kennesaw Unconquered — Where The Past Isn't Even Past

It’s always an odd feeling, when fiction and real life meet.

It’s a crossroads moment — to the left, the world I created, with characters as I know as intimately as my own head. To the right, the world flowing under its own steam, with people of flesh and bone, events I cannot foresee or control. And then behind me history, as veiled as Scheherazade, and possessing just as many tales as that fabled spinner of stories.

I write a series featuring a woman who owns a Confederate-themed gun shop. Tai deals with Civil War re-enactors of both blue and gray, so she deals with the history of that period in American history, both the people who lived it then, and the people who re-live it now.

It was that history that brought me to the top of Kennesaw Mountain last weekend, during the swelter of a summer heat wave. My last visit had been six months previous, during one of the South’s more brutal cold snaps. It’s hard to remember such cold in this season of sweat and humidity, but once upon a time there was winter, and we had it here in Georgia. Would that I could have bottled some and saved it for now. I could make a fortune selling it on the parched sidewalks.

Kennesaw Mountain is a part of Kennesaw Mountain Battlefield National Park. During the summer, it’s a crowded place, full of picnickers and shady glens, leafy spots of shadow where somebody could get up to something nefarious. That day in January, I had the summit pretty much to myself, which made it an odd place to ponder its usefulness as a fictional murder site. My solitude felt too real, too precarious.

They say in space no one can hear you scream. I suspect the same is true at the top of an empty mountain.

The ranger told me that during the winter, with the trees bare, I could see the ruts of the old road, that my view would be very much exactly like that the Confederates saw 150 years ago, as they waited for General Sherman to launch his next assault against their fortifications. The boys in gray suffered a rainy winter and an equally wet spring. Diaries from the time mention the mud and the bugs and the mud and the misery and the mud.

At the top, I saw a different Atlanta in the distance than Sherman did, however. That great Southern city had been in the distance then too, the gem in the Confederate crown, but in the twenty-first century, Atlanta was a shimmery mirage of steel and smoked glass, crisscrossed by Peachtree Road and Peachtree Lane and Peachtree Industrial Boulevard. Over seventy different streets with Peachtree in the title.

Sherman would eventually capture Atlanta, but not by capturing Kennesaw Mountain. He never would get to the top of this particular summit. And it felt unconquered, it really did. Like the ghosts were watching me all the way down the mountain, making sure my trespass was a short one.