Miriam Grace Monfredo

Tom Chaney: Miriam Grace Monfredo on ColumbiaMagazine.com

Tom Chaney: Miriam Grace Monfredo

Of Writers and Their Books: Assassination, Abolition, and the Rights of Women
By Tom Chaney

Serendipity has once again reared its delightful head.

This time in the guise of another woman mystery writer dealing with women sleuths.

The author is Miriam Grace Monfredo, herself a librarian. The women sleuths are variously Glynis Tryon librarian of Seneca Falls, New York, and Glynis' niece Bronwen Llyr who has bullied her way into employment by the Pinkerton Detective Agency about the time of President Lincoln's inauguration.

The novel which first caught my eye was The Stalking Horse, fifth in Monfredo's Seneca Falls Series.

Pinkerton sends Bronwen to Montgomery, Alabama, before the inauguration of Jefferson Davis as president of the rebel government. She is supposed to be in the tutelage of two veteran agents. Both of those agents are killed leaving Bronwen on her own.

The murder of the two agents is related to a confederate plot to assassinate president-elect Abraham Lincoln in Baltimore on his way to take office in Washington. Much of the novel is given to her hair-raising trip by rail and ship to get word back to northern authorities. Neither the reader nor Bronwen know just whom to trust.

In the end, all is well as Monfredo weaves mid-nineteenth century political and social history with her believable cast of fictional creations to create a mystery which both informs and entertains.

In fact, I was so delighted by The Stalking Horse that I hied me to the mystery department to see what other Monfredo might be lurking there.

I was amply rewarded by The North Star Conspiracy set in the mid 1850's, some seven years before The Stalking Horse. In this novel, Glynis Tryon herself is the detective. The town of Seneca Falls is opening a new theatre in an abandoned church. The church had become the property of the local bank after its minister was forced to leave the territory after providing too much pastoral comfort to certain ladies of the village.

Glynis investigates the suspicious death of a freed slave and unearths the grizzly details of a ten-year-old murder of an escaping Virginia slave. Seneca Falls is a station on the underground railroad helping fleeing slaves get to the nearby Canadian border.

Brothers of Cain

North star conspiracy

The stalking horse

Seneca Falls inheritance

Children of Cain