Strong Women by Mary Jane Maffini

Lapsed librarian and  former mystery bookseller Mary Jane Maffini rides herd on three series: Charlotte Adams is a professional organizer in upstate New York; lawyer Camilla MacPhee snoops around Canada's capital; and Fiona Silk is the most reluctant sleuth in West Quebec.  She’s now collaborating with her daughter on a book collector series from Berkley Prime Crime (2012), writing as Victoria Abbott.  She’s also turned out nearly two dozen short stories, including the Agatha nominated “So Much in Common” from Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.  You can read the entire story on the website at www.themysteryplace.com/eqmm/excerpts/excerpt4.aspx

MJ lives and plots in Ottawa with her long-suffering husband and two princessy dachshunds.  You can also find her at www.maryjanemaffini.com or blogging regularly at www.killercharacters.com, www.mysteryloverskitchen.com and www.mysterymavencdn.blogspot.com
 

She’s really excited that The Busy Woman’s Guide to Murder, the fifth Charlotte Adams book will hit the shelves Tuesday, April 5th!

 

STRONG WOMEN

by Mary Jane Maffini

Mystery fiction is populated by strong, determined women. Oh sure, there’s the occasional bubble-head, but really, female protagonists tend to be the kind of women you can count on in a crunch, say if someone you love is staring down the wrong end of the barrel of a gun. I’m talking about women who do what needs to be done to solve a crime, save a life, bring a villain to justice. The whole shebang. Women who remind us readers that we are, as individuals, often much more powerful than we realize.

Where do these fictional women come from? What do we writers draw on when they come up with the somewhat larger than life (but still usually slender) female characters who live in our favorite books?

Sometimes we model characters on our friends, women who are passionate about their jobs and committed to their families, but still always there for us in a crunch. Sometimes, we look to public figures who are worth watching. Recently, there have been a few heroic women who’ve stepped into terrifying situations to whack at mass murderers with their handbags. Now that takes guts. Other times, a courageous protagonist may represent the person we wish we were. But often our heroic characters are based on early influences. I know that’s true in my case.

Our family legend has it that my grandmother, the splendid Louise Ferguson, walked twenty-five miles, mostly uphill, on Sunday to teach in her small school in a mountain village. At the end of the week, she walked down that mountain road and home.  It was 1900 in rural Quebec. Stranger things happened. Was it true? Who knows. It certainly may have been and her grandchildren wanted it to be.

Louise Ferguson loved poetry and telling stories. She was tall and slender and had great dignity. She could rattle off a dozen stanzas of any Tennyson poem faster than a speeding train. It shouldn’t have been a surprise that she was courted by and married the very handsome William Ryan who was doing well with his logging business.  Louise kept her figure despite eleven babies in fourteen years. When William died after a logging accident, Louise was left on her own with nine children under fourteen, including year-old twins and another on the way. She lived with her in-laws in the Ryan homestead.  This was not such a happy situation with William gone. And Louise wasn’t one to let people tell her how to live her life, it seemed. She liked to run her own show. She knew who she was. She had a spine of steel. Soon she was on her own looking for a new place to live.

 

Louise’s brothers built her a farmhouse on a hill overlooking her beloved Restigouche River and she raised the children on her own. They were a tight knit family, all attractive and not without their dramatic moments. As far as I could tell, they all inherited her sense of humor.

I remember her best in her eighties, with great posture, dignity and a wicked sense of humor. Although she was always busy knitting, writing letters or reading, I never spotted her doing a tap of housework. I planned to emulate that lifestyle when I grew up. Once, when I was moping about some boy, she took me aside and whispered, “Men are like buses. There’s always another one coming along shortly.”   I made sure this made it into my fiction!

I loved her for many reasons, but especially her spellbinding ability to tell stories. In her stories tiny rabbits, sneaky foxes, bewildered woodchucks and larcenous squirrels lived lives full of romantic escapades, dark forest politics and daily dangers. We would hold our breath as small children. Would Daisy Rabbit escape the clutches of Reddy Fox?  Would that chattering squirrel lead to more trouble for the chucks?  Would all the trees be cut down, ruining the habitat? And where was Peter?  Had something happened to him? The suspense practically did us in.

She never ran out of stories or spirit or her sense of mischief.  She valued her friendships all her life. It amused her to suggest to her tall, elegant daughters that she was contemplating a walk to her friend Mina’s house. As Mina Adams lived three miles along the highway, the ensuring dramatics always made good watching, maybe because Louise was eighty-four and the highway was full of hairpin turns and careening logging trucks.  Shortly after, she’d be chauffeured up the road to Mina’s in style. Of course, she could have merely asked any family member to drive her, but where would be the fun in that?

I owe her a debt for humor, loving to read, seeing the healing value of a story and for hitting her eighties with her humor and intelligence as sharp as ever. I am absolutely certain that she would have been level-headed, brave, clever and resourceful if she’d come face to face with a villain with nothing but a handbag, a knitting needle or a volume of poetry.

I know she lives on in the character of several of my characters, including Violet Parnell, from the Camilla MacPhee mysteries, who has just hit her eighties and has no plans to slow down.  But there’s something of Louise Ferguson Ryan in my younger female characters, like Charlotte Adams. Charlotte’s not a quitter either and in every book she must walk up the symbolic mountain in the pursuit of the mystery and then walk down again. Charlotte knows who she is, has a spine of steel and relies on her sense of humor and her friends. She had a great role model.

Thank you, Louise Ferguson Ryan, for everything. May you influence my mysteries for many years to come!
 

 

What was the secret in that mysterious battered box in my father's closet? by Mary Jane Maffini

Mary Jane Maffini is a lapsed librarian, a former mystery bookstore owner, a previous president of Crime Writers of Canada and a lifelong lover of mysteries. In addition to the four Charlotte Adams books, she is the author of the Camilla MacPhee series, the Fiona Silk adventures and nearly two dozen short stories. She has won two Arthur Ellis awards for best mystery short story as well as the Crime Writers of Canada Derrick Murdoch award. She is having fun with the fifth Charlotte Adams adventure: *The Busy Woman’s Guide to Murder* (Berkley Prime Crime 2011) and says she’s grateful for all the tips she gets from Charlotte. Mary Jane lives and plots in Ottawa, Ontario, along with her long-suffering husband and two princessy dachshunds. Visit her at www.maryjanemaffini.com

What was the secret in that mysterious battered box in my father’s closet? 
by Mary Jane Maffini 

  
Charlotte Adams is always trying to get us to clean out our closets. Usually we find too much clutter. But sometimes that closet yields a treasure worth keeping. After my father’s death, my brother and I discovered a small, battered cardboard box on a high shelf in his closet. Luckily it didn’t get tossed away in that distressing activity of clearing out. Inside the box, we found a collection of yellowed letters my father had written to my mother while they were courting from 1939 to 1941. People sure didn’t leap into marriage back in those days. They had weathered the Great Depression and were heading straight into World War II. After my parents met in New Brunswick, my father had returned to his home town of Sydney, Nova Scotia to help his father run the family retail business. My mother returned to her home town to manage the ladies’ wear

section of Eaton’s department store (A big deal if you are Canadian!). At that time, everyone wrote to keep in touch. Daily letters weren’t uncommon. People even wrote to make an appointment for a phone call.

A few years passed, before I could bring myself to sit and read those letters without unleashing more emotion than I could deal with. But when I did, I found insights into my parents as beautiful young people and also a treasure trove of heartwarming moments, and many chuckles. My dignified and elegant white-haired aunt -- mother of seven, grandmother of umpteen -- was portrayed by her brother as a spoiled and willful teenager. Abby, who would become my mother’s best friend, was then a vivacious young court reporter about to be surprised at a wedding shower held by my aunts. She bought a lot of hats too! My father was happy to announce all that. He regales my mother with details about the dances and parties he, his sisters and friends went to. The meals, the family skirmishes the parties, the outings and the trips to the beach. He asks about her family and friends, tantalizing tidbits for me after all these years. He talks about the movies:

I’ve been to see Rebecca, a very good movie. Have you had a chance to see it?

It was such an innocent time. Canada had entered the war, but no one had any idea of the tragedy and horror that lay ahead. In one letter Dad wrote: They’ve had to cancel the hockey tonight. That darn Hitler!  I never learned exactly how Hitler caused the game cancellation, but I am guessing a blackout.

My father had no idea of the terrible, tragic and incomprehensible times that lay ahead, that he would serve in the Royal Canadian Air Force and that his brothers would go overseas. While his brothers came back, cousins and friends and one brother-in-law didn’t. Other uncles languished in POW camps until 1945. Everyone’s lives changed.

This look into the daily doings of the surprisingly optimistic and cheerful young people in an era with no television and no computers had a big impact on me. I loved the mood and the surprising optimism. Later, I was able to mine those letters for *The Dead Don’t Get Out Much*, a Camilla MacPhee book set partly during World War II (where the vivacious Abby got a role as Hazel, and some nice hats)

I also learned that’s the thing about closets: you have to know what to toss and what to keep. Dad’s letters didn’t go back onto a high shelf. I gave that correspondence a new home in a beautiful new box. It has a place of pride in my office.

My dad was a quiet man, so the biggest surprise was getting to know him as a lively man about town. I learned how much he admired and respected his own father, how he was involved in his community, and more to the point, how much he missed that beautiful, elegant lady who would become his wife. Years later, they adopted me and later my brother, John David. Good news for us. We continue to thank them for the gift of history, laughter and the value of family and friends. 

 

Isobel Ryan and John Merchant were married 69 years ago today. Happy anniversary, Mum and Dad, wherever you are.