42 | lifestyle & arts sunday breakfast
■ by david sweet As a graduate student at Purdue University, Susanna Calkins would thread through the microfilm reader an enormous collection of ballads from 17th-century England. These works were songs Englishmen and women sang to each other — and they always involved a murder. “Why would they always find this letter on the person murdered? Was it that the criminals were dumb? Just a recurring theme?” says Calkins while enjoying a breakfast of eggs, toast and coffee a short walk from her home at the Country Kitchen in Highland Park. “This was sifting in my brain for years, trying to answer these questions.” This month, “A Murder At Rosamund’s Gate” will be published by Minotaur Books, the first of a two-book deal featuring the protagonist Lucy, a 20-year-old chambermaid in London during the late 1600s. The period fascinates Calkins, as London is afflicted first by a brutal plague and then by a devastating fire. “The time after the fire is one of intense social mobility,” Calkins says. “You see servants taking over their master’s homes because the owners fled during the fire.” Given the popularity of “Downton Abbey,” it’s natural to connect the story of an English chambermaid (whose brother is charged with a murder) with the PBS show. But Calkins says her debut novel offers few similarities. “I do like the upstairs, downstairs of Downton Abbey. But I don’t go to the upstairs,” explained Calkins, a fan of both Anne Perry and Agatha Christie mysteries. “Lucy has more freedom, and they live in a small household.” Calkins has visited London several times and conducted research at the British Museum, poring through tracts, ballads and more from the 1600s. During graduate school, she even worked on the Golden Hinde — a replica of Sir Francis Drake’s galleon that traversed the globe — on the Thames River. She gave tours, hoisted ratlines and scrubbed the deck before leaving each day to research her dissertation. At least it was better work than a job she had as a teenager in Philadelphia. After being promoted from a candy girl to projectionist at a movie theater, she set up “Steel Magnolias” to run and then watched it from the crowd. “I was supposed to put the arm down by the projector and didn’t,” she said. “I got back in there and the film was all over the floor. I went down to give free tickets to all of the customers.”
Murder, she wrote
These days, Calkins is an associate director of faculty development in the Searle Center for Advancing Learning and Teaching at Northwestern University (her husband, Matt Kelley, is a professor of psychology at Lake Forest College.) She has already written another unpublished novel, targeted at young adults, about a team of teens who live in sewers in 19th-century Paris. With her busy job and with raising two sons, Alexander and Quentin, how does she find the time to write? “I’ll take any half hour I can get,” she says. ■
“Why would they always find this letter on the person murdered? Was it that the criminals were dumb? Just a recurring theme?” | Susanna Calkins
Susanna Calkins
illustration by barry blitt