Sad news: Mystery author Triss Stein passed away yesterday. R.I.P., Triss. You will be missed.
She was the author of the Erica Donato mysteries set in Brooklyn.
Brooklyn Bones (2013)Brooklyn Graves (2014)
Brooklyn Secrets (2015)
Brooklyn Wars (2017)
Brooklyn Legacies (2019)
She was also the author of the Kay Engels mystery Murder at the Class Reunion (1993)
Mystery Readers Journal was honored to have an author essay from Triss for the New York City Mysteries I issue of Mystery Readers Journal (32:1) Spring 2016.
I'm reprinting the essay here:
Tres Brooklyn by Triss Stein
New York, New York. So nice they named it twice. I think I always felt that way. It wasn’t that I didn’t like my hometown, a small city in northernmost upstate New York, near the beautiful Thousand Islands and a real foreign border (exotic Canada). However, it was a place where nearby Syracuse represented quite as much excitement as most people wanted. I didn’t know anyone else who thought his or her future was in the big city. Or any big city.
When I was a child, right after the dinosaurs, it was still perfectly all right for a little girl to say, “I want to be a wife and mother when I grow up.” Not me. I wanted to be Doris Day, a career girl with a cute apartment in New York.
The surprise is that I did become a New Yorker, though it was almost by accident. I came from Boston for graduate school, owed New York state two years for a fellowship, and then I was going back to Boston. But I found a job. Fell in love. Had a family. Bought a house in Brooklyn that shouted old New York. I loved the old, I loved New York.
The moment I knew I was never leaving was when I was on the subway and two subway preachers were trying to out sing each other, shouting hymns across the aisle.
My first job was working as a children’s librarian in the Brooklyn Public Library system. I worked in nine different neighborhoods, and I was fascinated to see how different they were. Our patrons did not say they were from “New York”, or even “Brooklyn,” but “Mill Basin.” Or “Van Dyke Houses.” Or “Cypress Hills.” Many of them only ventured into Manhattan once a year. In other words, it was a lot more like small towns than most of them knew.
The history fascinated me too. How can you not love a place that sent a parade of elephants to prove the safety of that soon-to-be-famous, brand new bridge?
I didn’t know it then, but I was getting ready to write a mystery series about Brooklyn. Acting like a librarian, I was filing all those memories and oddball facts away for when I needed them.
I have lived in Brooklyn now for most of my adult life. We started out in a neighborhood that was still touch and go. The playground was dangerous late at night and we had two children’s car seats stolen from our parked car. It is called Park Slope and it has evolved into the quintessential gentrified, quaint, very chic urban neighborhood. It is tres Brooklyn, as they now say even in Paris. Could there be lots of tension around these changes? That long downhill slide and the controversial revival? And does tension create plot? How about a body discovered in a house undergoing renovation? Houses here are always undergoing renovation. That became Brooklyn Bones.
The second series book, Brooklyn Graves, is about a beautiful, historic, art-filled cemetery and a lost Tiffany window, but also about a deteriorating neighborhood saved by a flood of Russian immigrants. Saved? Or was it ruined? It all depends on who you ask.
Brooklyn Secrets, released in December, 2015, is about Brownsville, a decidedly unrenovated neighborhood where young people now struggle with many of the same pressures as young people did generations ago when it was the breeding ground of the notorious branch of the mob called Murder Inc.
I know I will never run out of Brooklyn stories to tell. The next one will be about the Brooklyn Navy Yard, which ran 24/7 during World War 11, employed 70,000 people including women, built the battleship Missouri and then died a slow, painful death. After that? I have few ideas cooking.
I haven’t yet worked out how to write about the flock of bright green tropical parrots that live on the Brooklyn College campus, or the house where Winston Churchill’s mother was born – no one is sure exactly which house it was – but they may yet find their way into a story.
And those elephants on the Brooklyn Bridge? I don’t know where they came from – was the circus in town? – but maybe I should find out.
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