Time, Place & Frame Story: A few notes on setting in a historical series

BookScapes 17 December, 2024

Readers and friends: Last month in BookScapes, I wrote about creating and developing a character ensemble in a mystery series and how that ensemble can work as a structural element, not just in one book but in a series. I used the characters in the Pecan Springs series as an example. This month, I’m writing about the time setting of a historical series, with a focus on the Darling Dahlias, which is set in the early-mid 1930s. And for supporting subscribers, I’ve added a few notes on how we read historicals—and about Guerrilla Readers, our 2025 Substack reading project, which opens on January 2.

Thyme, Place & Story includes several different monthly publications. This one isn’t your cuppa? You can choose. Go here to select what you receive from me.

I first became seriously interested in the 1930s when I was doing the research for the project that became A Wilder Rose—the story of the Depression-erea mother-daughter writing team (Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane) that created the Little House books. Since that novel was fact-based and heavily biographical, I had a lot of time-and-place reading to do about the 1929 Crash, the Depression and the New Deal (vehemently opposed by both Rose and Laura). For me, this is the exciting phase of a project: working with a stack of potential sources, figuring out what’s out there, what’s useful, most interesting, most related.

One thing leads to another. A Wilder Rose became the first in the Hidden Women series and fueled a broader interest in the 1930s that led me to write Loving Eleanor, about Eleanor Roosevelt’s intimate friendship with journalist Lorena Hickok, which began in 1928. That book took me even more deeply into the years between the wars, with a focus on how politics affected Eleanor and Hick’s friendship, especially through 1935. And that led to the Darling Dahlias, the 10-book series about a Southern garden club.

Resources

For all of these projects, I used broad-brush histories of the era as well as detail-rich books about people’s ordinary lives—Frederick Allen’s Since Yesterday: The Nineteen-Thirties in America and Daily Life in the United States, 1920-1940 by David Kyvig. I also used Newspapers.com’s valuable archive for specific dates, locations, and people, where I found even more timely detail (including grocery prices—bread: 9 cents a loaf)—and interesting odds and ends. (Do you know when bras first appeared with cup sizes? And tampons? You can find that tantalizing bit in Chapter 14 in The Darling Dahlias and the Poinsettia Puzzle.) And of course, the big Sears catalogs, like the ones I grew up with, were a storehouse of up-to-the-minute fashions, tools, cookware, and household furnishings—as well as the prices for things. The usual resources for somebody writing about early-mid 20th-century life for 21st-century readers.

But what proved surprisingly helpful were the various timelines of historical events, like this one in Wikipedia, for the year 1933. And this one, which lists pop music—what people were listening to on their radios. Movies in the 1930s, pre- and post-code. Radio programming, too. (Did you know that “The Lone Ranger” rode Silver into history in 1933? The same year that FDR launched his “Fireside Chats,” Oxydol’s soap opera star Ma Perkins opened a lumberyard, and the National Barn Dance was picked up by NBC.) From these timelines, I could learn what was on people’s minds in a given year: national and international affairs, American politics, technology, entertainment.

Story Structure

Boiling it down, I can say that most of the books in the Dahlias series have a three-level story structure.

• These are mysteries, so we absolutely have to have a whodunnit plot—right? I look for a crime that’s particularly topical, like the Al Capone connection in The DDs and the Naked Ladies or one that enables law enforcement to work with 1930s forensic technology, like the ballistics in The DDs and the Poinsettia Puzzle (a Christmas mystery).

• There are also the personal narratives featuring one or more of the members of the town’s garden club: Liz, Verna, Ophelia, Myra May, Bessie, Beulah. These may center around love, family tangles, friendships, living and working arrangements—each with its share of topical crises, complications, and resolutions. Usually, there are several of these intersecting stories in each book, since there are several well-defined character ensembles that regularly gather at various locations: the Dahlias’ clubhouse, Beulah’s Beauty Bower, the Magnolia Manor boarding house, the Diner, the newspaper, the courthouse.

• And then there is the wrap-around historical frame story—that is, the real-life events in the real world outside (and sometimes intruding into) the little town of Darling. While these are more important in some books than in others, they add depth and realism to the fictional town.

The Three-level Structure at Work

Let’s look at an example of how this three-level structure (or three-ring circus, if you prefer) works in the book The DDs and the Silver Dollar Bush (Book 5 in the series), set in May, 1933. The historical frame story for the book is the real-world banking crisis that rocked the nation in the last two years of Hoover’s administration and the first year of FDR’s and which led to the creation of the FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation)—under threat in the incoming Trump administration.

The bank failures were a huge crisis and every town in America had to face the desperate question that kicks off this story: What are we going to do for money now that the bank has closed? Nobody gets paid, nobody has any money to spend at the grocery, and when Hancock’s Grocery or Snow’s Feed Store or the Darling Diner run out of inventory, they can’t buy any more. A town without a bank is a dead town.

In Darling, the answer turns out to lie in the hands of the new banker, Alvin Duffy, who (in cahoots with Charlie Dickens, the owner/editor of the town newspaper) comes up with a plan to print money.

But printing money is counterfeiting, and counterfeiting is a crime. Isn’t it? At least, that’s what Myra May (owner of the Diner) thinks when she overhears Duffy and Dickens conspiring. Her fears are aroused: Just who is this so-called banker and why did he show up in Darling and what does he intend to do? Rob all the money out of the vault before the bank can reopen? Myra May confides her fears to Verna, who reads all those true crime magazines and knows how to deal with con artists. Verna undertakes a surreptitious investigation into Mr. Duffy’s checkered past.

But what she finds out changes her view of the banker. And the “counterfeit” money turns out to be something else entirely. It’s legitimate scrip, like the kind of paper money that’s being printed all across America, just to get people through the crisis.

In this book, the whodunnit plot has to do first with the creation of the scrip and then with a big theft. The personal plot involves Verna’s detective work into the banker’s past life and her continuing relationship with him. The historical plot is the wrap-around national story of how people managed with their money disappeared.

The run on the East New York Savings Bank, Nov. 24, 1933, with an example of a local scrip (Photo: Bettmann/Bettmann/Getty Images

The Historical Frame Story

I love to read—and write—books with a strong historical frame. In this series, my favorite is, The DDs and the Red Hot Poker, where the historical frame is the story of Huey P. Long, the populist governor/senator from Louisiana, a Trumpian-style politician who created a wildly enthusiastic, cult-like following with his “Share Our Wealth Society” and a promise to make “every man a king.” (Long is a major actor in Rachel Maddow’s Prequel, likely one of our 2025 Guerrilla Readers books). He would have challenged FDR for the White House in 1936 (and might very well have won), but died in a hail of bullets in early September, 1935, a few days after his fictional visit to Darling.

No fan of Long, FDR once called him “one of the two most dangerous men in America.” (The other was Douglas MacArthur, who commanded the attack on the 1932 Veterans Bonus Army). In one scene in Red Hot Poker, the president has this to say about the man who planned to be his opponent.

FDR’s voice was suddenly and uncharacteristically sharp. “Long is undisciplined, perpetually angry, and narcissistic. He’s like a kid with a red-hot poker, jabbing at everybody, trying to get them all fired up and mad about something, anything.”

He smacked the flat of his hand on the table. “Worse, he’s a pathological liar who knows full well he can never implement that phony ‘make America wealthy again’ scheme he’s ginned up to win votes. A corrupt politician who uses his elected position for his personal gain. And a rabble-rouser who manipulates people’s emotions, particularly those who are less well-educated and uninformed. They’ll follow him like lemmings, right off the edge of a cliff.”

As a writer I’m especially interested in historical events that foreshadow current affairs, as are commentator/historians Rachel Maddow and Heather Cox Richardson. If you suspect me of drawing an analogy in this book with a contemporary political player, you would be right.

And like many of you, I especially appreciate historical novels that pull actual historical people and events into the book’s story. This not only entertains me but satisfies my curiosity about the world—the who, what, where, how, and why of it all. And curiosity is what compels most of us to read, isn’t it?

Looking ahead

In 2025, Guerrilla Readers will stand in for BookScapes on the third Monday of every month. In next month’s BookScapes slot (Jan. 20), we’ll begin our discussion (in the comment space) of the first book on our list, Heather Cox Richardson’s Democracy Awakening. I’ll be sending an introductory post on that book on Jan. 2, with some reflections and a few questions for your consideration as you read (or reread).

In the meantime, look for me next Monday, December 23, with the Capricorn Season post and workbook in my Growing Green with the Zodiac series.

Supporting subscribers, please hang around here for some additional thoughts and a few questions about historical fiction and (of course!) the December Book Bundle drawing. On Saturday, December 21, I’ll choose the winner (randomly) from everybody who comments on this post. Congratulations to Judy Linton, who won the November drawing and received signed copies of Forget Me Never (Pecan Springs), Wormwood (Pecan Springs), and Someone Always Nearby (Georgia O’Keeffe/Maria Chabot, Hidden Women).

A few more thoughts about historical fiction

Every historical fiction writer has at least one embarrassing blooper to confess to. I have two (that I know of. If you’ve noticed others, feel free to point them out in the comments. I can take it. 😎) Oddly enough, both of my anachronistic bungles involve bridges.