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ALUM NI P RO F I L E
SUSANNA CALKINS
R AC H E L LOI S N EUBAUE R
W
hile devising a heroine for a
murder mystery set in 1660s
London, Susanna Calkins
(MA’95, PhD LA’01) didn’t want
her to be from the upper
classes. Lucy Campion begins
as a chambermaid for a magistrate and, despite a lack of education, uses her common
sense to solve a murder.
“I envisioned Lucy as a hardworking servant, probably
because I imagine that’s what I would have been had I been
alive in the 17th century,” she says. “Lucy learns to read and
write by listening to scholars tutor the magistrate’s daughter. I thought it would be more interesting if Lucy were not
overly educated and had to piece together clues the best she
could. All over the world, there have been cases of people
who push against social restrictions to be able to read and
write, and I wanted Lucy to be one of them. She ends up
working for a printer in the next books, even writing anonymous penny pieces.”
A Murder at Rosamund’s Gate, published in 2013 and the
first of six books in the Lucy Campion series, occurs during
the plague and the Great Fire of London in 1665–1666. The
fifth and sixth books are scheduled to be published in the
next two years.
“I didn’t get serious about the first book until I’d graduated from Purdue, become an assistant professor of history,
and started a family,” Calkins says. “My younger son broke
his leg, and I had to stay home with him. I remember playing trains with him with my left hand while writing my
novel in my right hand.” After 10 years of writing, she told
her husband, Matt Kelley (MS HHS’98, PhD HHS’01), “I think
I’ve written a book.”
At Purdue, Calkins explored Early English Books, a collection of sermons, ballads, broadsides, and pamphlets presenting glimpses into daily life and the social and political
culture of England from the 15th to 18th centuries.
“One of the things that stayed with me was this story
you’d see repeated over and over: a woman was found murdered, and in her pocket was a note that would say somePUR D U E A LU MN I . O RG
thing like ‘Dear sweetheart,
meet me in this glen at midnight. Don’t tell anyone. Your
sweetheart,’ and then a signature,” says Calkins, who is
a director at the Searle Center
for Advancing Learning and Teaching at Northwestern University. “But I was always wondering ‘Who was this woman?
Did she really know who had attacked her?’ These questions ultimately drove my first novel.”
The success of the Lucy Campion books led Calkins’s
publisher to ask for another series, which she set in the
Roaring ’20s. “When I moved to Chicago, I was always struck
by how ‘lived’ Prohibition Chicago still is,” she says. “Everyone seems to have a Prohibition story, like, ‘My grandmother
was a rumrunner off Lake Michigan,’ so it was not too hard
of a stretch to write in this fascinating era of flappers, cocktails, and gangsters.”
Murder Knocks Twice follows Gina Ricci as she becomes a
cigarette girl at a speakeasy. She learns that she is filling the
position of a recently murdered young woman. Even more
troubling, she discovers that a relative she never met works
at the speakeasy too, and when he dies under mysterious
circumstances, she is pulled into a dark underworld, not
sure whom to trust. A second Ricci book, The Fate of a Flapper, was published in July.
“The journey of Murder Knocks Twice began about 10
years ago,” Calkins says. “I was still querying — unsuccessfully — A Murder at Rosamund’s Gate. I kept getting
rejected by agents, and I thought maybe I needed to try my
hand at something different. I wrote about 200 pages of a
book set in 1930s Chicago. But then my first novel sold, and
the 1930s book went in a drawer.
“When I was asked about another series a few years ago, I
went back to that drawer. Most of the pages were scrapped,
but the idea of the story remained. I wrote the first part
without a contract, and then it was picked up. I firmly
believe in persisting even when the outcome is not known.
The persistence was helped by loving the world that I was
—JON CAROULIS
creating for my characters.”
“I firmly
believe in
persisting
even when
the outcome
is not
known.”
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