Forty Dead Men is the story of Alafair Tucker’s eldest son George, known as Gee Dub, recently returned from the trenches of World War I. Everyone in the family thinks he is the same good-natured youth who left for France a year earlier. Except for his mother, who senses that something is terribly wrong with him.
Gee Dub had been an officer with a front line unit until he suffered a head wound during a bombardment. Yet only a few days after his concussion he was attached to a British unit, where he was assigned to act as a sharpshooter. What Gee Dub witnessed, and even more so, what he did while he was in France, haunts him after his return to the family farm in Oklahoma.
The restless veteran has taken to roaming the quiet hills around his family farm. One rainy day while out riding he spies a woman trudging along the country road, Holly Johnson reveals she’s forged her way from Maine to Oklahoma in hopes of finding the soldier she married before he shipped to France. At the war’s end, he disappeared without a trace. Gee Dub is glad to have a project and tries to help Holly, but ends up as the prime suspect when Holly’s husband turns up dead. Alafair will not let that stand. She will do anything she can, legal or not, to help Gee Dub when he is accused of murder.
There is nothing that irritates me more in a historical novel than a character who has modern sensibilities. So as best as I can make her, Alafair Tucker is a woman of her times. She is a farm wife with many children, and doesn’t have the freedom or the inclination to go about gathering forensic evidence. She leads a life that is so busy that it wouldn’t be realistic if she could easily drop everything on a whim and go off to gather clues. But like most people who are constrained by their place in society, she knows how to sneak around obstacles, how to go under the fence, how to make use of the rural grapevine in order to get information. She has her army of grown and half-grown children to snoop for her. She has a web of women who are willing to help her. Her information network is better than the sheriff’s.
The world used to be a much bigger place than it is now, and the author of an historical mystery has to be as familiar with the place where she sets her novel as with the time period she chooses. If a person gets himself murdered anywhere in the developed world today, it doesn’t matter so much where it happens when it comes to the techniques the law will use to solve the crime. Computers, cell phones, forensic science, and modern police techniques are similar in most places. But if the victim was murdered in 1919, where the crime occurred made a huge difference. If our victim was offed in London, the Detective Inspector might be able to lift fingerprints from the gun that shot him or the knife that stabbed him. Or the D.I. might have his stomach contents analyzed to determine what sort of poison the murderer put in the victim’s cup of tea.
But if the poor fellow met his demise in rural Oklahoma, that’s a different story altogether. There will be no fingerprint analysis.The crime will be solved by observation and by questioning his family and friends and enemies, who knew what sort of mischief the victim had been into that could have gotten him killed.
And if the investigator is someone like Alafair Tucker, she knows everybody in the county and doesn’t have a second thought about worming information out of anybody who crosses her path. She has a way of knowing things about people, almost like a sixth sense, that comes from having so many children. People will tell Alafair things that they wouldn’t tell the law. Maybe it’s because she’s not very threatening, or maybe she reminds them of their mothers. Or as one reviewer noted, “No one can resist her—at least, not for long.”
Donis Casey, March 26, 2018
Donis Casey, author of ten Alafair Tucker Mysteries from Poisoned Pen Press. Her award-winning historical mystery series, featuring the sleuthing mother of ten children who will do anything, legal or not, for her kids, is set in Oklahoma during the booming 1910s. While researching her own genealogy, Donis discovered so many ripping tales of murder, dastardly deeds, and general mayhem that she said to herself, “Donis, you should write a series.” Donis is a former teacher, academic librarian, and entrepreneur who lives in Tempe, AZ. For more information about her and to read the first chapter of each of her books, visit her web site. Follow her on Facebook and Goodreads.
