When I was asked by best selling mystery author, Toby Neal, to be in the launch of her Lei Crime Kindle World (mysteries set in Hawaii) in the spring of 2015, the first thing I had to do was look up the word count for a novella– 17,000 to 40,000 words. I hadn’t a clue. Once I knew that, I felt I would manage well enough. So I wrote Saddle Road, which was an area on the Big Island where my husband and I liked to hunt and hike. This first effort had no history in it, but I learned about present day hunting licenses, the realignment of Saddle Road, etc. My first published novella had great monetary success and even better, Toby’s huge fan base started to buy my historical fiction.
I wrote Coconut Island next. This time, history played a great role. When I lived on the Big Island, I wondered why the buildings were so far back from the bay. One night while teaching an adult ed class, one of my students said that she had “this much room to breath in the corner of my room and then the house fell apart.” She was speaking of a tsunami that wiped out Hilo and killed many of her classmates. A few months later, at our wedding in 1974, an uncle of my husband’s wanted to see Coconut Island. It turns out there was a USO Club for the military during WW II located there, it was also wiped out by the tsunami. I remembered those details for over 40 years. Solving a 70 year-old murder in present day time allowed me to uncover details on the April Fool’s Day tsunami 1946, when Hilo was wiped out and over 159 people were killed.
Then came Volcano House,centered around the history of the fabled Volcano House at Kilauea Crater on the Big Island. Mark Twain visited its earliest version around 1866. When I was a student at UH Manoa in the 1970s, a grass hut was up near the campus on Oahu. Turns out Robert Louis Stevenson spent some time in Hawaii. The grass hut was a replica of the one he stayed in Waikiki. Stevenson’s visit to the Big Island in 1889 is woven into Volcano House. Though he didn’t feel strong enough to trek up to Kilauea, he did spend time in Ho’okena south of Kona-Kailua, a thriving Hawaiian ethnic community. At City of Refuge, he was inspired to write The Bottle Imp, one of his spookiest stories. It was first published in Samoan in Samoa. In Volcano House, his manuscript is missing and discovered at a book sale by members of a book club. A little murder along the way.
Finally, Hilina Pali. My recurring character, Auntie Bee Watanabe, a 80 year old retired school teacher, gets personally involved in the CCC Camp Kilauea’s history through her brother and his campmates’ involvement in a fatal accident in 1940. The Civilian Conservation Corps has been a special interest of mine since I published Tree Soldier. It’s only in the past 10 years that I discovered that some of the places I visited in Hawaii were actually projects done by the CCC.
For this novella, I relied on the 2005 Archaeological Survey of the 1940 Hilina Pali project done by the CCC boys. The survey reveals a lot of history of the erosion project the enrollees did. Volcanoes National Park also had some wonderful oral interviews with some retired park workers whose fathers were CCC boys as well as talks about the CCC by park rangers. I’ve become a great fan of Google Earth for getting me around places so I can describe them. Fortunately, there is a street view that takes you 12 miles down the Hilina Pali Road built by the CCC in the 1930s to a shelter that overlooks the 2,200 foot drop to the lava desert below. Another fun story is the goat eradication project the boys participated in. Feral goats in the 1930s were a huge problem then as now. The 1940 Territorial Census of Hawaii was also very interesting. The Hawaii State Library is a wonderful resource for research.
Searching for the CCC in the Hawaiian Islands has caused a lot of interest in the national organization preserving the history of the CCC, CCC Legacy. One very interesting conversation we had on their Facebook page was the issue of what happens to an enrollee’s family allotment when he dies? I needed this information for the story. It turns out a family who was receiving $25 dollars a month from the CCC (roughly $425.00 in today’s money) would receive his last full check of $30.00. All funeral costs were also covered, including sending the body home. As for someone dishonorably discharged, the family would receive nothing. This was an important plot point in the story but it caused people in the Facebook group to scramble to look at their relative’s papers.
I’ve enjoyed writing all of these mystery novellas. Once I brought history into the stories, though, I felt I was at home. The Kindle Worlds are licensed fan fiction and has been very rewarding for me. As a writer, I’ve stretched my skills in learning how to write a novella. Being connected to Toby Neal’s readers has increased my visibility. In the future, I’m told, all rights will revert back to me. Currently, I plan on putting the last three historical novellas into a box set. There could be more.
Aloha nui loa for letting me talk about a place I love so much.
Janet Oakley, April 2, 2018
