Category Archives: Casey Daniels

Stones and Bones

by Casey Daniels

I don’t remember when I first realized how much I love cemeteries. It may have been back when I was a kid and walked to my piano lessons every week. There was no piano teacher in my immediate neighborhood and I walked about thirty minutes to get to my lessons. At the time (and no, I won’t say when it was!), no one worried about a kid out on city streets alone.

My route took me by a city cemetery, and I remember looking through the iron fencing around it and thinking how peaceful the place seemed. I never ventured inside, not because I was frightened, but because I didn’t know anyone who was buried there.

I did visit other cemeteries, of course. One of my grandmothers dragged (and I use that word appropriately) us with her once in a while to clean up the graves of long-gone ancestors. I remember walking to that cemetery, too, and packing a lunch to take along. Food was probably the one way she knew she could keep us quiet and bribe us to help her work!

What I do remember very clearly is when this vague interest in burial grounds blossomed into a full-blown obsession. It was 11 years ago this past Halloween. It was a Sunday, and somehow, I found out that a local trolley company was doing a day-long tour called “Stones and Bones.”

Yup, a cemetery tour.

I was fascinated by the history of the cemeteries we visited, and grateful to finally have a chance to stop in at some city cemeteries that are not safe to travel in alone. I loved hearing about the art and the architecture, about the symbolism found in headstone carvings and the hints of family history that can be found in the names and dates etched for all eternity into the stone.

In the last 11 years, I’ve made good use of my cemetery interest. My Pepper Martin mysteries involve a cemetery tour guide and over the years, I’ve gotten to know the volunteers in a couple of the local foundations that work to preserve local cemeteries. Recently, it all came full circle. You see a couple weeks ago, I hosted a tour in a historic cemetery.

It was called Killer Cleveland and on the tour, I took groups of visitors around to “meet” the victims and perpetrators of some local (and very old) homicides. It was a gray and gloomy afternoon (how appropriate) but our intrepid tourists showed up anyway and hiked along with me through the battered headstones. At some of the graves, I told the stories of the macabre murders. At others, re-enactors took over and played the roles of victims–and murderers.

It was a great day, and I know we helped spark an interest in local history. I also know that somehow, the Universe has been pushing me all these years, nudging me to this place where I am more involved in something I find fascinating.

As for that cemetery I used to pass as a child, it’s still there and I’ve visited a time or two. These days, I actually go inside!

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A Cemetery Tour

by Casey Daniels

I don’t remember when I first realized how much I love cemeteries. It may have been back when I was a kid and walked to my piano lessons every week. There was no piano teacher in my immediate neighborhood and I walked about thirty minutes to get to my lessons. At the time (and no, I won’t say when it was!), no one worried about a kid out on city streets alone.

My route took me by a city cemetery, and I remember looking through the iron fencing around it and thinking how peaceful the place seemed. I never ventured inside, not because I was frightened, but because I didn’t know anyone who was buried there.

I did visit other cemeteries, of course. One of my grandmothers dragged (and I use that word appropriately) us with her once in a while to clean up the graves of long-gone ancestors. I remember walking to that cemetery, too, and packing a lunch to take along. Food was probably the one way she knew she could keep us quiet and bribe us to help her work!

What I do remember very clearly is when this vague interest in burial grounds blossomed into a full-blown obsession. It will be 11 years this coming Halloween. It was a Sunday, and somehow, I found out that a local trolley company was doing a day-long tour called “Stones and Bones.”

Yup, a cemetery tour.

I was fascinated by the history of the cemeteries we visited, and grateful to finally have a chance to stop in at some city cemeteries that are not safe to travel in alone. I loved hearing about the art and the architecture, about the symbolism found in headstone carvings and the hints of family history that can be found in the names and dates etched for all eternity into the stone.

In the last 11 years, I’ve made good use of my cemetery interest. My Pepper Martin mysteries involve a cemetery tour guide and over the years, I’ve gotten to know a couple of the local foundations that work to preserve local cemeteries. Recently, it all came full circle. You see a couple weeks ago, I hosted a tour in a historic cemetery.

It was called Killer Cleveland and on the tour, I took groups of visitors around to “meet” the victims and perpetrators of some local (and very old) homicides. It was a gray and gloomy afternoon (how appropriate) but our intrepid tourists showed up anyway and hiked along with me through the battered headstones. At some of the graves, I told the stories of the macabre murders. At others, re-enactors took over and played the roles of victims–and murderers.

It was a great day, and I know we helped spark an interest in local history. I also know that somehow, the Universe has been pushing me all these years, nudging me to this place where I am more involved in something I find fascinating.

As for that cemetery I used to pass as a child, it’s still there and I’ve visited a time or two. These days, I actually go inside!

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Multiple Personalities

by Casey Daniels/Kylie Logan

Not everyone is lucky enough to not only have more than one personality, but to be able to celebrate it. That’s what I’m doing today because last week, a new alter ego of mine made her first official appearance.

She’s Kylie Logan, author of the Button Box mystery series. Book #1, “Button Holed,” hit store and virtual shelves last Tuesday.

It’s been an interesting road to publication for Kylie and it all started, quite simply, because I like buttons. As Josie Giancola, the heroine of the new series comments, buttons are little bits of history, and tiny works of art. They say something about a person’s style, and that person’s social class. Many antique buttons display incredible workmanship, dazzling jewels and even say something about a wearer’s love life; back in the nineteenth century, it was fashionable for young ladies to have a photograph of their beau put on their coat buttons!

Still, I never thought about actually writing a mystery series about buttons until a couple years ago when I visited Ann Arbor, Michigan. I’d just finished lunch at a charming coffee shop and I was alone on the front porch, sipping coffee and knitting, when a couple sat down at the table next to me. There are a couple operative words in that last sentence, namely, alone and next to. You see, they decided to pick that very moment to break up.

I listened to it for ten minutes or so and honestly, I expected them to apologize. After all, there was no doubt I could hear everything they were saying. They didn’t. Instead, they went on and on and I’d had enough. I gathered up my knitting and went next door to an antique shop.

What I didn’t know until I opened the door was that it was an antique shop that specialized in buttons.

Thousands and thousands of buttons.

I was in heaven, and the nice lady who owned the place was only too happy to tell me stories and answer my questions.

It was that encounter that gave me the idea for the Button Box mysteries. Josie owns an antique button shop, too, though hers is in a Chicago brownstone. It’s there that she meets a famous actress who’s come to Josie for the buttons she’ll put on her wedding gown when she marries a European prince. And it’s that actress who is murdered in the shop. When Josie’s cleaning up, she finds an unusual button–one she knows didn’t come from her collection.

As for those multiple personalities of mine . . . readers who enjoy the Pepper Martin mysteries by Casey Daniels can expect much the same light and airy reading experience and (hopefully!) the same sort of humor and intricate plotting. However, there are no paranormal elements in Kylie’s books as there are in Casey’s.

Because Kylie is a new person, she has her own, new blog. You can find her at:

https://kylielogan.blogspot.com

or on Facebook.

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Hats

by Casey Daniels

Writers wear a whole lot of hats, and lately, I’ve been getting a chance to try on every one of them.

Recently, it was the editing hat. I got the copy edits for “Wild, Wild Death,” book #8 in the Pepper Martin mystery series. My editor at Berkley Prime Crime had already been over the manuscript. Once he was done, a copy editor (usually a freelancer) got the manuscript.

Theoretically, a copy editor doesn’t make changes, and luckily, it was true this time. It’s not always so. I’ve run into a whole bunch of copy editors who want to be writers and who take the opportunity of going over my manuscript to make it sound the way they would if it was their manuscript.

But I digress.

Good or bad, thorough or too-thorough, edits are still edits, and for reading the copy edits, a writer needs one special hat. It’s the one that helps us thing logically–and dispassionately. I may love the sound of a sentence or an image I’ve come up with. But if a reader doesn’t understand it, if it’s muddy or unclear or serves as filler rather than moving the plot along, it needs to go. A good copy editor will find those things. A good writer will be willing to argue keeping them in when it’s necessary–and cut them when it’s not.

When I was done with that project, I changed hats and got back to outlining Pepper Martin mystery #9. I’ve got a November deadline for this book, and no time to waste. This is the part of the creative process where my brain can run free. I can explore all options, no matter how outlandish, try different things, create characters and situations and solutions. Oh yeah, it’s all about imagination and for this, I need my thinking cap.

That done, I put on my writing hat and started into the story. By the way, the book needs a title and I’d like to include the word “super” in it if possible. I welcome all your suggestions!

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Pepper Martin has gone international!

by Casey Daniels

Pepper Martin has gone international! The first three books of the series, “Don of the Dead,” “The Chick and the Dead,” and “Tombs of Endearment” have been published in Germany, both as paperback books and on audio.

How about this cover for book #1, “Don of the Dead”? Or the title: Tote Paten Kussen Besser, which as far as I can tell from a Babel Fish translation means Dead Godfather’s Kiss Better.

Oh yeah, that would get me to buy the book!

Curious, I managed to find the German publisher’s website. Here’s the blurb for book #1 (again, courtesy of Babel Fish):

Welcome in the world Pepper Martin, but are warned you: Here is nothing more, as it was. Peppers enrich father, a beauty surgeon, sits because of account fraud with the health insurance company in the prison. Its fiancé, a good-looking broker, lets Pepper fall like a hot potato, when the call of her Mr. Papa the brook down-goes. As much to their plans to become a married lady of the better society and worry only about their back hand and an even Braune.

Armed with a conclusion in history of art, which is wanted to actually never use seriously, Pepper must earn your living costs and gets themselves the most senseless of senseless job: She works as a Fremdenfuhrerin on a historical cemetery.

When Gus Scarpetti Pepper addresses there for the first time, she does not listen at all correctly. Finally the chap is already for thirty years dead. What can have to say to that already largely?

A with a wink Mysterythriller with a due shot romance for all, those already Sookie Stackhouse (temporarily dead) liked . . . in other words: Sex and the town center meets The Sixth scythe!

Let’s hope all that reads better in German than it does in English!

As for the cover, all I think as I look at Pepper in that long, flowy dress is what she’d say if she saw it . . . As if!

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Cemeteries

by Casey Daniels

It’s no secret that I love old cemeteries. After all, it was in a cemetery that I originally got the idea for my Pepper Martin mysteries. As to why I was in that cemetery in the first place . . . .well, like I said, I love ’em. I love the history that’s evident in every inch of an old cemetery. I love the art, and the architecture, and the stories that automatically start spinning in my brain when I read names and dates on a family monument, or see a single, small marker set off from the rest and begin to wonder who and what and why.

So if I tell you I spent one day of my Memorial Day weekend in a cemetery,
it should come as no surprise. But if I told you I have relatives who are
not as enamored of cemeteries as I am who came along for the ride, cheese
and crackers, long-dead ancestors, and oh yes, Bailey’s shots . . .

Ah, now we have a story!

It started last fall when some of my husband’s cousins, visiting from
Montana, talked about getting a family reunion together for 2012. Usually
not one to open my mouth without thinking, I opened my mouth without
thinking. (This might have had something to do with the quantities of wine
that were being consumed at the time.) “I,” I announced, “will research
family history.”

And research I did. What I discovered along the way is that I love digging
into family history, even a family that is mine only through marriage. So
far, I’ve uncovered (figuratively speaking, of course!) David’s family back
to the great-great grandparents who arrived from Germany in the 1840s. And
this Memorial Day, I convinced the family to go visit them.

There were seven of us on the adventure. Seven. That’s me, my husband who
tolerates my affinity for graveyards, and five others who (to coin a
phrase) wouldn’t usually be caught dead in a cemetery. We began by visiting
the cemetery where their grandfather, his first wife, and their
great-grandparents are buried. To help things go smoother, I prepared
family trees for everyone, and I was glad I did. It helped explain
relationships and kept who was who straight, especially when we ran into
(another turn of phrase, but since I write the Pepper Martin books, it’s
important to make that clear), great-great uncles, aunts and other assorted
relatives. We trimmed grass, left flags and potted marigolds, and drank a
wee Bailey’s toast to all of them.

Then it was on to visit one set of great-great grandparents at Riverside
Cemetery in Cleveland. Riverside is privately owned, a well-cared for and
beautiful burying ground full of gorgeous trees and pristine paths. I’d
called ahead and the nice lady at the office had a map all ready for us.
Fortunately, Charles (who, in 1890, was run over by a freight train-yikes!)
and Wilhemina Schwendeman were easy to find, buried close to a main
cemetery road. Unfortunately, though Charles’s headstone was fine, Minnie’s
(as the old family documents call her) had fallen over.

Enter my husband and his brother who managed to lift the old granite stone
and get it back into place. A small kindness to do for a woman who traveled
from Germany to Michigan in the 1850s, then came to Cleveland when her
daughter married Bernard, one of the men whose graves we’d visited at the
first cemetery. Another Bailey’s shot, more marigolds left at the graves,
and we were on to our last stop.

These great-great grandparents are the ones who brought my husband’s name
(and my children’s) to this country. They are buried at a city-owned
cemetery tucked at the back of a residential neighborhood. Odds are, most
of the people in the area don’t know the cemetery is even there. Too bad it
hasn’t escaped the vandals.

Headstones are toppled and broken, section and grave numbers are nearly
impossible to find. While the rest of my fellow explorers went off in one
direction, I headed in another and following the cemetery map (it’s not
very good), I found what we were looking for, the graves of Phillip and
Katharina. He was born in 1816 and lived until 1901. Think of the changes
he saw in his lifetime! Another toast, more flowers.

It was an amazing day, even those non-cemetery-lovers admitted it. Sure, we
had plenty of laughs, a chance to chat, and our little cheese-and-crackers
picnic. But we also had the opportunity to pay tribute to people who left
their families, their homes and their native languages behind so they could
come to this country and make new lives for themselves. That took a lot of
guts, and I hope those marigolds let them know how much we appreciate it.

Next year, we do the Irish side of the family. No doubt there will be more
Bailey’s involved!

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