The Past Holds Many Secrets

Today we welcome Susan Wittig Albert to the blog. The latest in her Darling Dahlias cozy mystery series was just released and she joins us to tell about it.

One of the pleasures of writing a series of novels is the delight in discovering something new about the continuing characters: buried things, secret things, things the characters themselves don’t know (or won’t tell you). That’s why I’m hooked on series books. I’ll bet you are, too.

For those of you who haven’t yet met the Darling Dahlias, let me introduce them. The Dahlias are members of a garden club (named for Mrs. Dahlia Blackstone) in the small southern Alabama town of Darling during the early 1930s. The town is fictional, but it’s modeled after the town of Monroeville AL, which  in turn served as the model for Harper Lee’s town of Maycomb in To Kill a Mockingbird. In fact, the courthouse in Darling is a twin of the courthouse in Maycomb/Monroeville. Isn’t that a coincidence? (And can’t you just see Gregory Peck striding up the steps?)

The first book, The Darling Dahlias and the Cucumber Tree, introduces the club and its history—a long history that goes back to what happened in Darling during the War Between the States.

The second book, The Darling Dahlias and the Naked Ladies involves a murderous secret in the life of Bessie Bloodworth, who owns the Magnolia Manor, a boarding house for genteel older ladies. I like to play with plant names in the titles of this series: the cucumber tree is a species of magnolia, and naked ladies look something like this:

The third book, just published by Berkley Prime Crime, also features a plant: a Confederate rose, a species of hibiscus (Hibiscus mutablis, as the town’s librarian, Miss Dorothy Rogers, would say) with blooms that “mutate” or change, starting off white, fading to pink, and finally to red. The shrub was often planted in Southern cemeteries, symbolizing the blood sacrifices of Confederate soldiers. But as I began to look deeper, I discovered that the Confederate Rose was also the name given to Rose O’Neale Greenhow (1813-1864), a Washington society belle who doubled as a Confederate spy. She is often given the credit for the North’s defeat in the first battle of the Civil War. Rose was imprisoned by President Lincoln. But using a cipher to encrypt her messages, she employed young women couriers, friends, to carry important intelligence to the Southern generals.

How does this interesting bit of Civil War history connect with the 1930s? Why, through Miss Rogers, of course, whose family tree is much more interesting—and holds many more mysteries—than she ever guessed. And that’s as much as I’m going to tell you about that. You’ll have to read the book and find out how all these historical tangles get straightened out.

One of my main purposes in writing this series is to explore people’s small-town lives during the Depression. My mother remembered those difficult years as “hard times,” and as a child, I listened open-mouthed to her stories. But she lived through those days because she believed that better times were coming, as long as people had faith, worked hard and worked together, and respected and cared for one another. That’s the spirit I want to reflect in these books. I hope you find it as reassuring as I do.

There’s more about the Dahlias on their website: www.darlingdahlias.com

You can read the first chapter of The Darling Dahlias and the Confederate Rose here.



Thank you for stopping by, Susan. Readers, please leave a comment or question for the author if you wish.