The Importance of Time and Place in Strange Gods by Annamaria Alfieri

Annamaria Bragging on Monday

This Sunday morning just as I was leafing through my list of possible blog topics, I learned that the following article had just been published in the Journal of the Historical Novel Society, under the title above.  Its author, Marilyn Pemberton had interviewed me a few weeks ago.  I did not know that this would be the result.  I am, of course, delighted. First let me introduce the author of the article. (It seems to me that, like the founder of the Historical Novel Society, she is British. Can you see the evidence for that below?)

Marilyn Pemberton has a passion for fairy tales that subvert and challenge social mores. Victorian fairy-tale writer Mary De Morgan was the subject first of a biography, then a fictionalised life in The Jewel Garden. Her historical trilogy, Grandmother’s Footsteps, will be complemented by a fourth book, A Bearer of Tales, due to be published later in 2024.

 

 

 

After the publication of her third historical novel set in South America, Annamaria Alfieri’s agent and editor thought it was time for her to write a series. With this challenge set before her, Alfieri knew that she would have to find a place and a time that would allow her to write many stories.

“I had taken a couple of trips to Africa by then and had fallen in love with being there,’ she relates. ‘As with my other books, once I had an interesting place, I looked for the most dramatic time in its history. Once my imagination landed in that place at that time, I knew that there was enough grist for the story mill to last through a series.’

Alfieri has decided to write a ten-book series, based on a theme inspired by her late father. She remembers that, ‘Among his possessions, I found a leather bookmark inscribed with the Ten Commandments,’ she remembers. ‘It was like a message from Dad—to base a book on each of the commandments. So, for each book, one theme is the sin of the commandment. Another is a different evil that has no commandment, and I have the audacity to suggest it should have one.’

Strange Gods (Stonesong, 2023), the first book in the series, is set in the former British East Africa and based on the first commandment, which forbids worship of any but the one true God. ‘This brings up the clash of cultures between what the Europeans believe and what the Africans believe,’ Alfieri says. ‘The sin that has no commandment is the audacity of the colonizers, who move in and take over the territory where the indigenous people have lived for millennia.’

Each of the ten books will be set in sequential years of a decade, starting in 1911, a time frame Alfieri chose after ‘doing TONS! of research.’ She says that ‘All of the good ideas I get for my stories come right out of my research. The best sources for me are always the writings of people who had feet on the ground at the time. Also, there were books written about life in the Protectorate of British East Africa that were meant to attract settlers to the place. I have a copy of one, thanks to reprints by the University of Michigan Library. What a treasure trove! It even has the railway schedule, so that when my characters travel by train, I know what time the train is supposed to come and what time it’s supposed to get to their destination. All my research is aimed at helping me to feel as if I am there. Research is my time machine. Once I am there in my imagination, I can hang out with my characters, hear what they say, and I write down what they do.

Alfieri chose the 1910s in particular because it ‘brings readers to a time fraught with conflict. Colonialism was just really getting going. Missionaries from Britain had been moving into the area for about 20 years. The British government had taken control over the previous 15 years and even built a railroad from the coast to the shores of Lake Victoria and the center of the continent. And the British government had begun a campaign of recruiting settlers who were beginning to move in and establishing farms along that railroad. Also, the tribal people who had lived there for centuries were often in conflict with one another.’

This conflict, she explains, was evident from the outset, when ‘the missionaries and the King’s faithful empire builders of the administration were at odds over how the indigenous people should be treated. The arriving settlers were largely British aristocrats, often second sons, who were no longer guaranteed a cushy life back home and looking to find a place where the cost of living luxuriously was cheaper. Being of the upper class, they looked down upon both the “tin-god” administrators and the “shopkeepers’ sons” among the clergy. With all this conflict, there would be—in that place and time—lots of drama and many reasons for people to want to kill each other.’

There are three main storytellers in Strange Gods, each one representing different groups, and it is their stories that Alfieri tells in this first book. ‘Vera McIntosh is the daughter of Scottish missionaries. She was born and grew up in British East Africa, and her playmates were Kikuyu children. Because of this, she has a foot in two worlds. She knows her parents’ culture and its requirements, but she also knows the world as well as the language of her playmates.

‘Justin Tolliver is the second son of an earl. But his family has no money to bankroll an upper-class lifestyle for him. Like most second sons, he is serving in the British military. His regiment was posted to South Africa in the aftermath of the Boer War. While there, he visited British East Africa and has fallen in love with its beauty. He wants to stay there, but without financial support from his family, he cannot afford to do what people of his class did – take a farm. In order to stay, he takes the drastic step of joining the police force. So, Justin too has a foot in two worlds.

‘Kwai Libazo,’ – arguably the most interesting character in the book – ‘is an askari, a police constable, who is half-Maasai and half-Kikuyu. Growing up, neither tribe accepted him. He is a young man who belongs nowhere. Then, serving in the police force, he meets and begins to work for Justin Tolliver, who holds justice as their goal as policemen. Kwai is now working for the white people, but he is not one of them. Having been rejected by the tribal people, he attaches himself to the idea of justice. Kwai too inhabits the liminal space between two worlds.’

Alfieri would like readers of Strange Gods to ‘feel as if they are there. I want my books to be their time machine that takes them to that fascinating time and place, where they learn what life was like and especially how wondrous, how beautiful is the place that is, after all, the cradle of humanity. Thirty-two of the thirty-three known remains of our hominid ancestors were found in the Rift Valley. To me, when I am in the Kenyan wilderness, on a cellular level, I feel as if I am home. Hopefully, armchair travelers who read my stories will join in and experience vicariously the majesty, the wonder of our ancestral birthplace.’

Agatha Christie Meets Out of Africa?

 Annamaria, Happy Annamaria

I am rejoicing because today my Africa series is free at last.  It had seemed to be thriving when the third in series launched back in 2018.  But, by the end of that last pre-Covid year, the series was in the doldrums, quickly found itself in limbo, which soon turned into purgatory.  After years there, it began to look as if it was headed to hell.  (The difference between Purgatory and Hell, of course, is only one of timing.  Purgatory is temporary. Hell, we all know, is permanent.). As of today, the series is back!

The original publisher of Strange Gods then used the words of the title of my blog today to describe the first book and the entire planned series.  Dame Agatha's name works if it reads as code for a murder mystery.  But are the Vera and Tolliver books like Out of Africa?  My answer is, "Sort of."  Here's why:

Those familiar with Isak Dinesen/Karen Blixen's famous book or the movie loosely based on her life will easily recall that from a business point of view, Karen's coffee farm had its ups and downs.  Certainly, like Karen's farm, my Vera and Tolliver books started off quite well, but ran into trouble. My fondest hope is that the series will now depart from Karen's Out of Africa story. Her farm was ultimately a failure.  I am doing everything I can to avoid such a fate.  And I have the distinct advantage of not having to rely on the weather, which did in Karen's coffee.  For Vera and Tolliver, I cry "Onward and upward!" Excelsior, as we say in Latin.

The strongest correlation between the Out of Africa and V&T is the time in history and the place where the stories are set.  Almost equally equivalent is the cast of characters.  Karen herself does not arrive until the 4th book, because in real life, Karen did not arrive in BEA until 1914.  But, many of the real people she is going meet when she gets there are already in the books, including the man she will marry within hours of arriving: Bror von Blixen-Finecke.  In fact, Bror is here in volume one, giving evidence in Justin Tolliver's first murder investigation.

The film does not stick slavishly to every fact of Karen's existence, but it does follow pretty closely the general emotional arc of her life in BEA.  And to the extent that she shows up in the V&T series, she stays very close to the character and actions of the real Karen (who was played by Meryl Street).

Sydney Pollack’s brilliant film's credits and opening are, to me, some of the most engaging and beautiful ever.   

Today V&T return with Book 1.  This is the first in reviving the series and getting all the back-list books available asap.

You can order Strange Gods here.  I hope you will.  And also review it.  As my blog brother Jeff Siger and others of our mates have stated here, your on-line reviews are enormously important to the success of any book.  

The plan is to release new editions of V&T#s 2 and 3 in quick succession.  A Death on the Lord's Day V&T#4 has been waiting in the wings since May of 2018! It's release this coming Spring/Summer is the prize I have had my eyes on all this while.

Choosing a Setting for Fiction

 Annamaria on Monday

As with the works of many of my stellar blogmates, the title Murder is Everywhere fits my books perfectly.  I want to talk about how I choose my fictional locations today.  But first, I cannot help but begin by revealing the cover of a new edition of my Vera & Tolliver #1: Strange Gods, which is about to launch.

A thing I love about this cover art is its portrayal of the splendor of the location.  For me, when thinking about a story, location comes first.  I attribute this to my early childhood infatuation with an atlas and the wanderlust bug whose bite still dominates at least a chamber and a half of my heart.  As soon as I had the wherewithal, I started traveling.

I also knew when I was nine years old that I wanted to write stories.  But my two major compulsions did not join up until I was closing in on retirement age and could afford the luxury of indulging my whims.  That's when fascinating places and their histories began to inspire my stories.

My first three novels are set in different times and places in South America, all stand-alones, because I was not savvy enough to think of writing a series.  When my agent and my publisher suggested a series, the idea intimidated me.  All my stories had arisen from the history of a place I had fallen in love with.  Would I be able to find a number of stories, all with the same people in many places or all in the same place always with the same people?

I knew if I was going send my imagination to only one place for a long time, it would have to be Africa.  No other place fed my soul like the places in South Africa and Botswana that I had only recently visited for the first time.  And I had read and reread Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa a few times, and had a glimpse of East Africa's history from her point of view.

I also worried about coming up with a series-worth of unique plots.  A few memoirs of people who had had boots on the ground in British East Africa convinced me that there would be no paucity of plot material. Colonialism sets up the perfect atmosphere for a series of murder mysteries. BEA in the second decade of the 20th Century offered plot fodder galore.

The scores of tribes in what is now Kenya had been fighting one another there for a millennium:

The Maasai VS the Kikuyu

The mssionaries had been on the scene for a few decades, working to convert the "natives" to Christianity, with the second passionate goal of stamping out the slave trade.  By the turn of the 20th Century, with the strategic importance of controlling Lake Victoria, the King's faithful empire builders wanted to employ the labor of the tribal people, whereas the missionaries were determined to protect their converts from being forced to work for puny rewards.

The Missionaries VS The Administrators

Then in came a flood of aristocrats who were finding it hard to acquire a cushy lifestyle in European countries that were undergoing the Industrial Revolution.

The settlers in the lap of luxury!

These latest arrivals looked down their toffee noses at the missionaries AND the administrators, who were - after all - nothing but a bunch of  shopkeepers children.

There they were waiting for me, an entire population that had many, many reasons to want to kill one another!

As long as it is fictionally, what fun!

Romania Goes to Africa

 Annamaria on Monday

This story begins at Icelandic Noir in November of 2014.  I am exercising a great deal of self-control not to turn this post into a pean to one of my favorite crime conferences.  It was at the meetup in question, for instance, that I found friends who have been boon companions ever since.

And where Stan and I pledged to draw the world's attention to crime fiction set in warmer climes, which resulted in Sunshine Noir.

Besides, being in Iceland in winter means one sees the sunrise and sunset every day with images like this:

That year, Jeff and I were on a panel about locations outside the Scandinavian sphere.  With us were two Romanians, including Bogdan Hrib--an author/publisher that I have stayed in touch with ever since.

About a year and a half ago, Bogan suggested that the first in my Africa series, Strange Gods might appeal to his readers and be a candidate for translation.

The ensuing effort moved along quite quickly, especially given the usual plodding pace of publishing.  And voila:

The Romanian edition of Strange Gods will launch in a couple of weeks.  What fun!

Others of my books have been translated, often into languages I cannot read at all.

I can read the page numbers!

But Romanian is a Romance language.  In Italian "Strange Gods" would be "Dei Stranieri." Zei Straini isn't that different.  So, though I cannot read the description for potential readers, since I kind of know what it says, I can get the drift.

I am sorry that I can't be in Bucharest for the launch.  I am hoping to right that omission as soon as such travel is possible.  How I pray it will be soon!  

Vera and Tolliver Sound Off

Annamaria on Monday


Actually my title today probably should say "Sound On."  I have not had a BSP (Blatant Self-Promotion) post for well over a year.  Today, I am taking a raincheck on my Bouchercon hiatus opportunity in order to tell everyone this:

I am very proud to announce the publication of audio versions of Idol of Mombasa and The Blasphemers—Vera and Tolliver #s 2 and 3!

The audio for the first in my Africa series—Strange Gods—has been available for some time.  The voice artist who narrated Vera and Tolliver # 1 did such a marvelous job that I knew I wanted him to record the other books in the series.

You can find out more about Dennis here



Dennis Kleinman is a South African, living in LA, who has the right soul, the right voice, and ALL the right accents to do a superlative job of reading Vera and Tolliver. Audible chose him to narrate Strange Gods, and when I first heard his recording, I was stunned by the result. In Dennis’s voice, my own characters became even more real to me than they were in my imagination.  The Scots, the English, the tribal people all sound exactly right to me when Dennis reads their dialogue. He also puts just the right emotional ring to what they are saying.

Once the audio rights to Idol and Blasphemers reverted to me, Dennis went to work, doing his magic on characters that presented new challenges: Arab and Swahili voices, Midlands English, as well as tony British aristocrats.  The results are superb.

If you listen to books and are new to the series, you can start with the audio book for Strange Gods here:

And then,  I invite you to follow Vera and Tolliver from Nairobi and its environs to the costal Arab trading city of Mombasa and then to the Maasai region of Nakuru in the East African Highlands:

Idol of Mombasa Audible 


The Blasphemers Audible 

What next for Vera and Tolliver?

There is no fourth in the Vera and Tolliver series to brag about this year.  What that is so is a long story and definitely not a thriller.  Here is the expurgated version:

I completed the next in the African series—A Death on the Lord’s Day—some time ago. Complications of changing publishers has kept it under wraps. Readers have asked me for more of V&T, and I promise you more is on the way.

We used to use the word “glacial” to describe things that moved painfully slowly.  Now we are pained by how terribly fast glaciers are moving. I can safely say that moving at “publishing speed” wins my vote as the new metaphor for the most frustrating pace on the planet. Snails gallop by comparison. Tortoises are far less tortuous. Or torturous for that matter.

Photo: Annamaria, Serengeti 2006


I promise I will not give up.

A Death on the Lord's Day will be published soon.

Stay tuned.

https://www.annamariaalfieri.com

African Series Cover Art, Deconstructed

Annamaria on Monday

I have been very fortunate with the cover designs of my books.  They have all been attractive and, especially as of late, inviting to perspective readers.  With one exception, they have been true to the story I was trying to tell--some more than others, but by and large, they all evoked the time and place.

One emblem appears on all of the African series' covers, and it is actually the correct standard for British East Africa:

 

The hardcover jacket design shows a scene of a Maasai cattle herder.  Though there is no such person in the story, the image is apt for two reasons.  It shows the intense beauty of the African wilderness, which (I hope) reads like a character in the story.  Even better, the tribesman is carrying an accurately pictured Maasai spear, the shape of which is a critical clue in the story.  Bravo designer David Baldeosingh Rotstein!

The paperback of the same story gives a different impression.  The wilderness is there, but the central female character is brought to the fore.  Lucky me, my current publisher--Felony and Mayhem--is run by Maggie Topkis, who spent a couple of decades as a mystery bookstore owner.  She knows what kinds of covers attract a browser's attention.  

The ensuing books in the series are treated with similar images.

 

The Idol of Mombasa opens with Vera and Tolliver aboard a ship, approaching Mombasa harbor.  Only one person saw the mistakes on this cover's arresting image.  The coastline in the background is not historic Mombasa, but historic Zanzibar.  And the sticker on Vera's suitcase is Queen Elizabeth II--who was not Queen until 1952.  But the story takes place forty years before that.  The person who saw these errors was Shel Arensen--the editor and publisher of Old Africa Magazine.  He--who knows the history of Kenya better than perhaps anyone--said, "As I was reading the story, I kept waiting for the characters to go to Zanzibar."   They didn't!  He gave the book lovely review despite that.

 

If you ask me, with the next cover, the designer--Anthony Wing Kosner--more than made up for those small departures from perfection.

That's a kudu on the luminous cover of The Blasphemers, and yes, Vera does go hunting and kudus show up a couple of times in the story. 

Annamaria's Events

Bouchercon

11-15 October

Toronto Ontario

Sheraton CentreToronto, Ontario
My Panel: Read the World
Thursday the 12th

AND Tah-dah...

Dagger Awards Gala Dinner
Thursday 26th October
Grange City Hotel
London

Where our own Leye Adenle and our fellow HOT Writer Ovidia Yu are short listed for the short story Dagger Award.  Hooray for Sunshine Noir!

A Mysterious Affair in PrincetonSat, November 4, 2017
1:00 PM – 5:00
Solley TheaterArts Council of Princeton
102 Witherspoon Street
Princeton, NJ 08540

Policing British East Africa

Annamaria on Monday

First a confession:  My modus operandi when starting a new book is to research broadly, keeping story possibilities in the back of mind.  At some point, my characters start moving around in their time and place—doing and saying things.  I follow them and write down their words and their actions.  Eventually, the adventure takes shape, and I am off and running on a workable first draft. 

I was, in this way, about the begin the fourth chapter of Strange Gods when I realized that I knew nothing about how the police force operated in British East Africa.  I had a good idea who Tolliver was.  He had had an encounter with some South African drunks who were shooting up a hotel bar.  He was about to go out to the Scottish Mission to investigate the murder of Dr. Josiah Pennyman.   It suddenly occurred to me that I had no idea of the historical context for such an investigation.   I sent myself back to the research salt mines.  Google quickly got me to a monograph called “Policing the Empire” by a Cambridge scholar.  Its first two footnotes referred to a memoire—A Cuckoo in Kenya—by an Anglo-Irish police officer, W. Robert Foran who served in BEA from 1905-09.  Pay dirt!  Just my research cup of tea—the recollections of someone who had feet on the ground there and then.   And of course, my precious New York Public Library had a copy.  I dug right in.  I got to know Foran and his lifestyle.

But I did not to give my Justin Tolliver Foran’s rather devil-may-care, jolly attitude toward law enforcement by a colonial power.   Based on what I gleaned from Foran’s story, I imagined what life for a man with Tolliver's attitudes would be like once he joined the police.  I gave my particular policeman a deep-seated regard for justice.  This, I imagined, would not coincide with the motivations of his superiors in the government.  It was all intuitive for me, a way of creating an atmosphere that served my story.

That scenario served well in that first of the series and in the following two books.  Then, just over a month ago, preparing to crawl my way into Vera and Tolliver 4, I found a new research source—a 1994 paper by a sociologist that wasn’t on the Internet when I started work on the series back in 2013: “Law Enforcement in British Colonial Africa.”  The paper explained to me how right I was about the difference between Tolliver’s idea of policing and what his King’s empire builders would require of him.

Here is what this new information confirmed for me:  When it came to law enforcement, in the end of the Nineteenth and beginning of the Twentieth Centuries, the British had two models: One for their island home and another for the “possessions.”

The Home police, the Metropolitan Police Force established in 1829 in London, became the pattern for almost all towns and cities in the British Isles.  These policemen were civilians whose job it was to enforce the law, prevent crime, and keep the peace.  They lived in the communities where they worked, were accountable for their own actions, and never under the direct command of the governmentally powerful.  They were unarmed.

In the territories of the Empire, the model was based on the Royal Irish Constabulary.   This police force was established in 1836 to put down disturbances that had arisen in British-occupied Ireland.  Unlike their Metropolitan distant cousins, these men were a semi-military, armed force.  They were commanded by their superiors, whom they were required to obey.  They lived in barracks, rather than the communities they policed.  Their main function was to support the ends of their government as it took control of new territory—to aid in Britain’s conquest, to support the economic and political goals of the British government. They upheld what passed for British Law only when it suited them.

In fact, outside of areas where the British had political or economic interests, there was no British “law enforcement” in BEA.

This approach to policing was not limited to BEA.  It was well established in India before the British entered East Africa.  Once the Protectorate of BEA was formed, they then found it convenient to import officers from service in India, to use the Indian Code of Law, and to bring in lesser police officials from the Raj.  This happened to such an extent that in BEA, the police records were kept in Urdu!

Now I know what “really” happened.  When Tolliver joined the force, he was imagining joining a Metropolitan Police-style organization.  But he found himself in an African incarnation of the Royal Irish Constabulary.  And he was just where I needed him to be: a man at odds with his surroundings.

BSP: The idol of Mombasa

Annamaria on Monday

HUZZAH!  The second in my Africa series--The Idol of Mombasa--launched this past Saturday.  We MIE bloggers avoid Blatant Self-Promotion except when we have a new book out.  Today it's my turn to take a victory lap.

Here is a the story in brief.

The Idol of Mombasa takes place in the Protectorate of British East Africa in 1912.  The English King’s administrators are tangled in an uneasy peace with the Sultan of Zanzibar, especially when it comes to the slave trade. The British have outlawed slavery, but Sharia law allows it. Both laws obtain.  That slippery morality infuriates Vera Tolliver, a Scottish missionary’s daughter, and her husband Justin, an English police officer, whose job is to enforce the law.  Complications increase when a runaway slave is murdered.  A lifelong friend of Vera’s family becomes the likeliest suspect, and British official fingers are knotted into the tangle’s every strand.

Here is what the critics are saying about it and its sister in the series Strange Gods:

“Set in 1912, Alfieri’s captivating, complex second mystery set in East Africa highlights cultural and social issues.” Publishers Weekly

"In Alfieri's intriguing series, some humans are less trustworthy than the wild animals in British East Africa in the early 20th century. The author expertly captures the beauty and danger of the land and the duplicity of man."—RT Bookreviews (4 stars)

"With the flair of Isak Dinesen and Beryl Markham, the cunning of Agatha Christie and Elspeth Huxley and the moral sensibility of our times, Alfieri permeates this tragic novel with a condemnation of imperialism, a palpable love of Africa, a shocking conclusion and a reminder that good does not always triumph." –Richmond (VA) Times-Dispatch

"Alfieri illuminates the complexities and cruelties of colonial rule while giving readers an engrossing romance and mystery."
—Booklist

“Alfieri aims for the audience who loved Out of Africa, with heartbreaking romance married to a complex mystery.” – Kirkus

Michael gave the launch a boost with an interview in The Big Thrill - the monthly magazine of  International Thriller Writers.  You can find that here.

AND my publisher is offering the paperback at a low introductory price.  Follow this link to take advantage of it.   

 Wish good luck to the new kid on the block!