The Imagery of Doublethink

 John Copenhaver, Guest Author

The adventurous young women joyriding across the magazine cover remind me of Philippa and Judy, the sleuths in John Copenhaver's latest historical mystery, HALL OF MIRRORS. 

I recommend John Copenhaver's books highly, especially for people interested in 20th-century American social history and  fashion and architecture. John is both a co-founder of Queer Crime Writers and an at-large board member of Mystery Writers of America. His two previous mystery novels have won the Macavity, Lefty and Lambda Literary awards. The reviews for HALL OF MIRRORS are superlative. The Los Angeles Times mystery critic called the book a 'stunner,' and the New York Times cited the author's breathtaking skill."

I was fortunate to read an early copy of HALL OF MIRRORS, and also to see John speak at the Ivy Bookshop in Baltimore during his recent book tour. I invited him to share his thoughts about how the aesthetics, buildings and history of Washington DC shaped his brilliant book. Given the depth of his visual descriptions, I can easily imagine the book as a gorgeous suspense film.--Sujata Massey

My new historical mystery, Hall of Mirrors, is set in post-WWII Washington, DC. It’s the second book in a trilogy that began with The Savage Kind, set in 1948. Midcentury America was a period rife with contradictions, a time of relief after the Second World War but paranoia that communism would infiltrate and corrupt the “American way of life,” a time of technological progress, such as television and space travel, but conservative regress, limiting the roles of women in the home and the workplace and oppressing Blacks and LGBTQ+ people (from the racist G.I. Bill to the Lavender Scare) and a time of economic prosperity and future-thinking cast in the shadow of the threat of nuclear extinction.

 

On the surface, everything was high-gloss, buffed chrome, shades of bright pastels, and clean, wholesome looks, but underneath that veneer, the streets, schools, workplaces, and domestic spaces hummed with fear and dread. This fear has a very real impact on my characters, especially the gay couple at the heart of the story, one of whom dies in an apartment fire, purportedly by his own hand. He was booted from the State Department for being gay, which, according to officials, made him a security risk because he could be easily blackmailed by Soviet agents. 

 

To recreate this world of casual denial and high anxiety, I chose to contrast the beautiful and the horrible. My opening paragraph of Hall of Mirrors begins with mingling the “dusk sky” and “cherry blossoms hanging in the breeze” with “smoke” and 2101 Connecticut Avenue’s “demonic grotesques .. looming in vain, having failed to ward off evil spirits.” Along with 2101 Connecticut—which is one of DC’s more notable apartment buildings from the 1920s—I “scouted” various locations to set scenes that would offer these contrasts, from an empty ballroom at the Mayflower Hotel to the blood-red interior of The Colony Restaurant, which echoes the interior of Ernie’s Restaurant from Vertigo, to the Tidal Basin at peek cherry blossom bloom moments before a storm to the gorgeous farmland of Virginia, which may hold a grim secret. 

 

While I gave The Savage Kind a muted shadowy palette—fall leaves, rain, snowfall—I wanted Hall of Mirrors to be suffused with hyperreal colors like a Douglas Sirk melodrama or Vertigo’s vibrant technicolor. The bright décor, clothing, and setting are meant to contrast with the confusion, fear, and violence the characters experience to remind us that this was an age of denial, or at the very least, a kind of doublethink: how can the future be buffed to a shine, but fatalism and mass devastation be so prevalent in people’s minds?

 

During my research, I came across the cover of the April 5, 1954, Newsweek, and it captures this doublethink mindset so perfectly that I referenced it in my novel. On the cover, two women ride in a convertible, smiling and carefree, with their hair in bright scarves and suitcases tossed in the backseat. The photo's caption reads, “Spring-Summer Travel: Biggest Ever.” Then, a bright yellow banner across the cover says, “The Bomb: What Odds for Survival Now?” What an absurd contradiction: What will it be … vacation or annihilation?

 

As Hall of Mirrors develops, the bright surfaces burn away, and the rot underneath emerges, demanding acknowledgment and frank consideration. I believe we’re living through a similar time now. We have a strong economy, but the disparity between the haves and the have-nots has only been this great since the Fin de siècle, the age of the robber barons. The shiny veneer of contemporary life, especially the glitchy glow of social media and the 24-hour news cycle, is slowly crumbling; like the characters in Hall of Mirrors, we’re beginning to confront darker truths underneath.