Introduction & How I Ended Up in 1870s London

Karen Odden - alternate Thursdays 

A couple of years ago, I had the pleasure of moderating a Left Coast Crime panel in Tucson comprised of four very talented authors, including the prolific, award-recognized Karen Odden. 

 

Karen is the author of multiple works that take her readers on a first-person 5-senses journey through Victorian London and the mores of its different classes. I think it’s fair to say Karen has been immersed in all things Victorian for most of her adult life. She’s taught about it, written about it, edited about it, and sets her acclaimed Scotland Yard Inspector Michael Corravan series in 1870s London, where she deftly weaves in sharply divisive prejudices, deeply traumatic national tragedies, and the ruthless domestic politics of Britain on the world stage.

 

I’m honored to announce that Karen is bringing her prodigious talent to Murder is Everywhere as our newest team member. What follows is her debut post, which I assure you will have you yearning for more. 

 

Welcome, Karen.

 

––Jeff

First off, thank you to all the MIE folks for asking me to join. I’m delighted to be blogging with some longtime friends in the mystery world! 

By way of introduction -- I was born and raised in Rochester, NY and after graduating college, I bounced around to Ann Arbor, San Diego, Providence, New York City, Milwaukee, and various spots in Connecticut before finally landing in Arizona, where my husband and I raised two kids and adopted a very winning beagle named Rosy, who sat in my office chair and kept me company for years. She passed away, and we all still miss her.

I’ve set all my novels, and most of my short stories, in 1870s London. It’s my zone, my happy place, smelly and dank and foggy as it is. (Here’s a particularly appealing illustration of the Thames, during the Great Stink, summer 1858.) 

My fascination with the period began in graduate school, in the 1990s, at New York University. My first semester there, I took a course called "The Dead Mother," with Professor Carolyn Dever. She was curious about why there are so many orphans in Victorian novels – Jane Eyre, Pip, Oliver, Daniel Deronda, Heathcliff, etc. One of the insights I took away from that class was how a literary trope (the orphan) gestured toward a real socio-economic phenomenon, namely a significant shift. In the 18th century, your social and economic standing was determined by that of your parents; if your family was working class, you were too. However, in the 19th century, with the new opportunities that came with industrialization, men (and a few women, but mostly men) had the opportunity to bootstrap themselves to a different socio-economic standing. Victorians wholeheartedly embraced the idea of “Self-Help,” espoused by Samuel Smiles in his wildly popular book by that name. The parentless orphans in fiction marked the Victorians' evolving, uneasy belief that they were free to define themselves, apart from their parents, and to determine their own place in the world. Observing this link between literature and history sparked something in my brain. 

When it came to writing my dissertation, I became fascinated with another historical phenomenon – railway disasters. With virtually no safety devices, railway crashes occurred frequently – but nowhere near the rate at which people wrote about them. There were thousands of works written about railway crashes and the subsequent injuries they caused – in newspaper articles, medical journals, parliamentary reports, novels, poems, musical hall songs, pamphlets, cartoons (such as Cruikshank's alarming rendering, here), and so on. In many ways, representations of railway crashes became a trope for the new, modern chaos and the dangers of the newly industrial world.  

One of the most famous accounts of a railway disaster was penned by Charles Dickens, who survived a railway crash at Staplehurst, in Kent, in 1865. He crawled out, dragging his mistress Ellen Ternan (a pretty young actress) after him, and helped minister to other victims (photo). He returned home to London and went to bed, but in the morning when he woke, his hand was shaking so badly he couldn’t write his name. Over the years he developed tremors, high blood pressure, and nightmares that were so terrifying he would often fall asleep at his desk rather than go to bed. We’d probably call this PTSD; some of the medical men who were confronting this bizarre array of symptoms came to call it “railway spine.” (Note: Dickens never fully recovered, and he died five years to the day after the crash.) 

My dissertation traced the way these thousands of written works formed a linguistic web of words, phrases, and concepts that eventually underpinned ideas about hysteria (for Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer in 1890s), shell-shock (for WWI physicians), and our current ideas about trauma and PTSD. After graduating NYU, I continued writing for academic journals, edited for the journal Victorian Literature and Culture (Cambridge UP), and taught literature at UW-Milwaukee. But with two small children at home, I eventually opted out of academia … and decided to try my hand at a novel. 

But what could I write about that hadn’t been done a million times already? 

Well, I knew a lot about 19th-century British railways. (#trainnerd) 

I plundered my dissertation for my first book, A Lady in the Smoke. It’s about a young woman, Lady Elizabeth Fraser, who, after an unsuccessful London Season, gets on a railway train with her laudanum-addicted mother. The train runs off the rails, the result of sabotage by a corrupt railway magnate who is manipulating stock prices for his own gain. And so I remained camped out in 1870s London for my second book … and my third and fourth and fifth. 

My sixth book, AN ARTFUL DODGE (Soho, June 2026) is about a  jewel heist and an all-women thieving gang operating out of Elephant & Castle, in 1879 Southwark, based on true history. Fun fact: women thieves often had special pockets that extended the length of their crinolines. Stay tuned for thieving tips...