This week's "Author R&R" (Reference and Research) guest is
Jane K. Cleland, who received an MFA in Playwriting and currently teaches in the writing programs at several colleges, as well as conducting writing workshops. Jane is also the author of the Josie Prescott Antiques Mystery series (set in Rocky Point, a small town on the rugged coast of New Hampshire) that has been called "an Antiques Roadshow for mystery fans."
The latest installment in the series,
Dolled Up for Murder, was just released last week, and centers on a doll collection that someone finds valuable enough to resort to kidnapping and murder. Jane offered up the following tidbits on how she went about researching the book:
To research dolls for the seventh Josie Prescott Antiques Mystery, DOLLED UP FOR MURDER, I consulted websites, doll collectors, antiques dealers, and vendors at doll shows. I tried to learn why some dolls are appealing while others aren’t. What I learned is that the definition of beauty is individual, subjective, and idiosyncratic. No doubt you know that old saying… that one man’s meat is another man’s poison. Well, it’s the same with dolls. One girl’s favorite is another girl’s, ummm, not so much. That said, here’s what I learned and what I concluded.
Dolls are a reflection of the makers’ views of people, of how they look to them, or of how they want them to look. Dolls reflect someone’s image of reality or idealized beauty.
The concept of idealized beauty is on the minds of many people at the college where I teach—LIM College in New York City. The school’s tag line is “Where business meets fashion.” My students are pursuing careers in the business side of the fashion industry.
In my classes, we’ve considered how the concept of idealized beauty has changed from da Vinci’s time, when the definition of beauty was based on proportion and symmetry, to now where it’s based on size and shape. We’ve talked about the power of the media in determining what people perceive as beautiful, and how governments, for instance, Spain, now regulate it. And we’ve talked about dolls, and how little girls determine what they should look like based on the dolls they play with. For instance, we’ve seen how Barbie is constructed in an anatomically impossible way. How if her proportions were transferred to a real person, she’d meet the medical definition of anorexic. Barbie was introduced in 1959, but this issue has been around for as long as dolls have been around. To look at dolls is to witness society’s definition of beauty at any moment in time.
There is a category of dolls known as Queen Anne dolls. It is extraordinarily unusual to see a doll that dates from earlier than1850, so even though Queen Anne’s reign ended in 1714, dolls that meet two parameters are known as “Queen Anne” dolls. First, they’re crafted of wood dating from before 1850; second, they look like adults. Most early dolls were—and most dolls still are—crafted to look like children. Dolls from the 17th and 18th century that look like adults are among the rarest of finds, and thus the most valuable. In excellent condition, they’re nearly priceless. I learned all this from talking to sellers of dolls. It’s interesting, but what really captivated my imagination was trying to understand how and why these dolls came to be.
Think of the 18th century doll maker. He’s a cabinetmaker, probably, not just a carpenter. In other words, he’s a specialist… you’ll note, by the way, that it’s safe for me to say he’s a man because at that time essentially all carpenters and cabinetmakers were men… when I say he’s a specialist, that means he’s adept at using his tools. He didn’t just nail boards together; he crafted ornate finials and ornamental door pulls, work that required skill and finesse and dedication. It was these men who fabricated the dolls we refer to as Queen Anne dolls. He crafted them out of hard wood, carving faces so realistic you can’t believe the images aren’t real, adding paint to highlight her lips and eyes and suggest the color and curl of her hair. As a writer researching these dolls, I want to know more. I want to know which women these Queen Anne dolls are based on. Is she modeled on the maker’s wife? The girl who got away? The girl of his dreams? The woman he hopes his daughter becomes?
I can’t ever know, of course, but I can gather additional clues by considering what she’s wearing. So I began analyzing doll’s clothing. Is her clothing constructed out of silk? Or scraps of cotton? Is she wearing a traditional, festive costume, part of a celebration, perhaps? Or is she dressed for work, in peasant garb? As Mark Twain once wrote, “Clothes make the man. Naked people have no influence on society.” Fair enough. But is it a man, the maker, who dressed those girls and women? We can’t know. We do know that starting in the mid-19th century, European doll makers used porcelain and leather to craft dolls that integrated modern technology. Some of these dolls could play music and eat or drink. Amazing! We also know that sometimes these dolls were drafted into occupations their makers never intended—smuggling.
Given that I write murder mysteries, you can imagine how my ears perked up at that. I knew that I wanted the pivotal antique to be dolls, but until I studied the world of smuggling dolls, I didn’t have a plot.
Here’s an example of what I learned. There’s a Civil War-era doll named Nina who, it seems, came to America from Europe with her papier mâché head filled with morphine or quinine, an effort orchestrated by Southern sympathizers to get medical supplies past the Union blockade and into the hands of sick Confederate soldiers. Nina lives in the Museum of the Confederacy, in Richmond, Virginia, which holds the world’s largest collection of objects related to the Confederacy. Nina hid medical supplies. Knowing that got me thinking about what else could be hidden in dolls’ heads or in their hollowed out legs, or under their clothing, strapped to their little bodies. Jewels, perhaps, or illegal drugs, or military secrets… or who knows what else.
Dolls of all kinds have been used for smuggling for as long as dolls have existed, and smuggling itself has been going on for even longer than that. I am a realist, so I get it. If you have something to smuggle, you want to find something that’s not likely to attract attention. I may understand the smuggler’s motivation, but to my mind, there’s something especially distasteful about using dolls for illicit purposes. Dolls represent innocence, or should. When a drug dealer or a spy or a thief use dolls to stash contraband, it isn’t merely breaking the law. It’s a betrayal of innocence.
And that’s the genesis of the plot of DOLLED UP FOR MURDER.
Thanks to Jane for participating and offering up insights and a behind-the-scenes look at her novel. To read an excerpt from this seventh installment of what Library Journal calls a "winning cozy series," just follow this link.
