“I’m American, born to American parents,” a young girl announces in the opening scene of Ration of Lies, the eighth and most recent book in my Maggie Sullivan mystery series. Daisy Hashimoto is the fictional face of a little-known historical fact: Between 1943 and 1946, when most of America’s Japanese-American… Read More »During WWII: Working With Those Who Look Like The Enemy by M. Ruth Myers
In Uncivil Defense, latest book in the mystery series featuring 1940s private eye Maggie Sullivan, a woman wears a snood. It prompted one early reader to ask, “What’s a snood?” My first impulse was to say it’s sort of like a fancy hairnet. Half a second’s reflection, however, made me… Read More »Why Snoods Were Swell for 1940s Women by M. Ruth Myers
Yasser Arafat is notoriously credited with having said that a war about religion is like having a fight over who has got the best imaginary friend. As provocative as the statement is to people of faith, it cannot be denied that human beings have long been capable of intense personal… Read More »On Imaginary Friends by Sulari Gentill
The recent launch of The Gingerbread Spy, book 4 in my WW2 series about the German Resistance, took me back into the heart of the subject. In particular, I took another long look at the Allies’ preparations for D-Day and the critical role played by German double agents under the… Read More »The Black Orchestra – The Real Story by JJ Toner
Mothers working in factories to support America’s war effort while their children roamed the streets at night provides a minor plot thread and a stroke of historical color in Dames Fight Harder, the sixth Maggie Sullivan mystery. It’s grounded firmly in the reality of 1940s Dayton, Ohio, where the detective… Read More »Working Women and Latchkey Kids in WWII America by M. Ruth Myers