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ABOUT THE BOOK

What the Fly Saw

By Frankie Y. Bailey

Minotaur Books

ISBN: 9781250048301

Hardback, 336 pages

$25.99 / $29.99 Can.

Amazon

Albany, New York, January 2020
The morning after a blizzard that shut down the city, funeral director Kevin Novak is found dead in the basement of his funeral home. The arrow sticking out of his chest came from his own hunting bow. A loving husband and father and an active member of a local megachurch, Novak had no known enemies. His family and friends say he had been depressed because his best friend died suddenly of a heart attack and Novak blamed himself. But what does his guilt have to do with his death? Maybe nothing, maybe a lot. The minister of the megachurch, the psychiatrist who provides counseling to church members, or the folksy Southern medium who irritates both men—one of these people may know why Novak was murdered.  Detective Hannah McCabe and her partner, Mike Baxter, sort through lies and evasions to find the person who killed their “Cock Robin,” But McCabe is distracted by a political controversy involving her family, unanswered  questions from another high-profile case, and her own guilt when a young woman dies after McCabe fails to act.

GUEST POST BY THE AUTHOR

How a Nice Southern Girl Ended Up Writing about a UFO

Although being a criminal justice professor and a mystery writer might seem to go together like peanut butter and strawberry jam, I occasionally have to explain why I write mysteries to people who don’t read crime fiction. Mystery readers “get it” – but those readers who have been following my Lizzie Stuart series may be wondering about my new series. Lizzie Stuart is a crime historian. When I first started to write the series, I drew on my own research. I still do, but now Lizzie has taken on a life of her own. Fourteen years after the first book, she is the director of the Institute for the Study of Southern Crime and Culture. In my short story in the July 2014 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, she receives a 1930s black velvet coat with a claret hood from an anonymous donor. I came across the real-life image of that coat when I was doing research for a nonfiction book about dress, appearance, and criminal justice. Lizzie is African American. Hannah McCabe, my protagonist in my second series, is biracial. McCabe is a police detective in Albany, New York.  But this new series has a twist. The Red Queen Dies opens in October 2019 with a news anchor reminding viewers of the approaching anniversary of the UFO sighting that occurred in 2012.

Mentally, I found it a leap through time and space from Lizzie, who is still back in 2004, to Hannah, who in her second book, What the Fly Saw, is in the year 2020. I asked myself why I sailed right past the present into the future. I pulled the idea for my new series out of the air after a conversation with Marcia Markland (now my editor at St. Martin’s). Actually, Sean Connery deserves some of the credit. I was thinking about his movie, Outland, in which he plays a marshal – High Noon on a space station. In the e-mail I sent to Marcia, the third series idea on my list was “near-future police procedural set in Albany, New York”. That was the idea Marcia loved. I thought it might be fun to try. But to write the series, I not only had characters to create, I had a world to build.

As I pondered, I glanced up and saw my copy of Alice in Wonderland on a bookshelf. And I realized I could have a Broadway actress who had played Alice as a child and the Red Queen as an adult come to Albany to work on a play. Her play would be based on the true story of Henrietta Irving – the young actress who tried to kill John Wilkes Booth during a drunken lovers’ quarrel while they were performing in Albany. I decided my fictional actress, British-born Vivian Jessup, would become the third victim of a possible serial killer. Suddenly, I was writing a police procedural with an Alice in Wonderland theme, set in the near future, but drawing on Albany’s history and the several chilling coincidences that forever link the city to the Lincoln assassination.

As I envisioned that first book and the series, I knew I wanted to be far enough in the future so that the social, political, and environmental issues we are dealing with now would have assumed greater urgency. Yet, I didn’t want to be so future-forward that I would be writing science fiction rather than a mystery novel. But after reading some comments from near-future writers, I began to understand the pitfalls of setting a series so close to the present. The present becomes the future more quickly than writers can write and publish. Things happen. The things that happen can be especially problematic if you are writing about a real place. Several writers argued the wisdom of adding a “twist” that would establish the fact that the series exists in a “parallel” or “alternate” universe. That was how I came to open The Red Queen Dies with a news anchor updating viewers on the plans underway in Las Vegas for the annual celebration of the sighting of a black boomerang-shaped UFO that sent NORAD fighter jets scrambling. The UFO disappeared in a burst of light and has never been seen again, but the effects of that sighting can still be felt. Some people celebrate the anniversary; others anticipate it with dread. And people go on about their daily lives.

I have always assumed Lizzie Stuart exists in my world – or, at least, in a fictional version of my world, in the recent past. But if Lizzie should ever meet Hannah, Lizzie will have crossed over into Hannah’s parallel world, which is much like our own but has its own historical timeline. When I started thinking about fictional time and space, my worlds collided and I understood what I have been doing. Without giving it a great deal of thought, I have been building a universe inside my head that links all my fiction. My two protagonists are linked in ways of which neither is aware. They may never meet. But I know the story, and I hope that will make my story-telling richer.

So that’s how a nice Southern girl – who was all about history – ended up writing a near-future police procedural series. In the next book in the series, What the Fly Saw (due out in March), a funeral director is killed with his own bow and arrow. McCabe not only has an unusual murder to solve and a political minefield to navigate – she still needs to find a name for the family’s rescue dog (who arrived in The Red Queen Dies).

Here’s a photo of “The Egg,” the Center for Performing Arts at the Empire State Plaza here in Albany. Driving toward the Plaza one day, I looked up and thought as I always do that it looks more like a moored spaceship than an egg. And that was how the idea of a UFO appearing over the Mojave was born.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Frankie Y. Bailey

Frankie Y. Bailey is a professor in the School of Criminal Justice, University at Albany (SUNY).  Her areas of research are crime history, and crime and mass media/popular culture. She is the author of the Edgar-nominated Out of the Woodpile: Black Characters in Crime and Detective Fiction (Greenwood, 1991).  She is the co-editor (with Donna C. Hale) of Popular Culture, Crime, and Justice (Wadsworth, 1998).  She is the co-author (with Alice P. Green) of “Law Never Here”: A Social History of African American Responses to Issues of Crime and Justice (Praeger, 1999).  With Steven Chermak and Michelle Brown, she co-edited Media Representations of September 11 (Praeger, 2003).  She and Donna C. Hale are the co-authors of Blood on Her Hands: The Social Construction of Women, Sexuality, and Murder (Wadsworth, 2004).  She and Steven Chermak are the series editors of the five-volume set, Famous American Crimes and Trials (Praeger, 2004). They also co-edited the two-volume set Crimes of the Century (2007).

Frankie’s most recent non-fiction books are African American Mystery Writers: A Historical and Thematic Study (McFarland, 2008), nominated for Edgar, Anthony, and Agatha awards, winner of a Macavity award. She is the recipient of the George N. Dove Award (2010). With Alice P. Green, she is the author of Wicked Albany:  Lawlessness & Liquor in the Prohibition Era (The History Press, 2009) and Wicked Danville: Liquor and Lawlessness in a Southside Virginia City (The History Press, 2011).

Frankie’s mystery series features Southern criminal justice professor/crime historian Lizzie Stuart includes Death’s Favorite Child (Silver Dagger, 2000), A Dead Man’s Honor (Silver Dagger, 2001), Old Murders (Silver Dagger, 2003), You Should Have Died on Monday (Silver Dagger, 2007), and Forty Acres and a Soggy Grave (2011). A short story, “Since You Went Away” appears in the mystery anthology, Shades of Black (2004), edited by Eleanor Taylor Bland.  The Red Queen Dies (Minotaur Books/Thomas Dunne), the first book in Frankie’s near future police procedural series set in Albany, New York, featuring police detective Hannah McCabe, will be released in September 2013.

Frankie is a member of Sisters in Crime (SinC), Romance Writers of America (RWA), and Mystery Writers of America (MWA).  She served as the 2009-2010 Executive Vice President of MWA and as the 2011-2012 President of Sisters in Crime (SinC).

Website:  www.frankieybailey.com

Twitter:  @FrankieYBailey