My latest book – or series of books – is The Driver Trilogy. It takes place mainly in San Francisco, in the late 19th Century. I have here a few thoughts about how the series came to be, and perhaps about historical fiction in general. I’ll start with The Driver, first book in the… Read More »The Driver Trilogy and Other Thoughts by Steve Bartholomew
When I started doing the research for Lethal Remedies, the seventh book in my Victorian San Francisco mystery series, all I knew was that I wanted this book to feature women in the medical professions in San Francisco (the books in this series each look at different occupations by women… Read More »The Nineteenth Century: When Many Remedies were Lethal by M. Louisa Locke
When I started research on Scholarly Pursuits, the sixth novel in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series, my only agenda was to take some of my series characters across the San Francisco Bay to solve a crime on the University of California campus at Berkeley. I was primarily curious about… Read More »When Men will be Boys: Masculinity and Late 19th Century Fraternities by M. Louisa Locke
Finding Silver is the third book of a trilogy, which I call “The Ira Beard stories.” They are three stand-alone tales, the only things in common being the main characters, Ira Beard and his wife Octavia de LaLuz. Ira is a former New York City police officer who came to… Read More »About Finding Silver by Steve Bartholomew
I am currently planning a talk I will be giving for a panel at the Pacific Northwest Writers Association Conference in Seattle in September, entitled: “Putting the History in Mystery.” This has led me to ponder the question of what comes first when I write my Victorian San Francisco mysteries—the… Read More »Writing Historical Mysteries: What comes first, research or plot?