Tough Act to Follow was something of a family history project for me. If you’ve read the first O’Dwyer & Grady mystery, Acting Innocent, you know that the character of Billy is based on my father, William Heyes. My research for this book sent me to my father’s hometown, New Bedford, Mass. When I visited in 2001, some of New Bedford looked much as it had when he was growing up in the 1930s: the public library, Abraham Lincoln School, and Dad’s old neighborhood. The places my father lived in – the tenement on Query Street and the Glennon Street house of his own Auntie Annie – still stand.

Early in the 20th century, the people of New Bedford were hugely dependent on the town’s cotton mills for work. In the 1920s, the cotton industry went through changes that put many mills out of business and many people out of work, including my grandparents (the models for Billy’s parents). The mills’ troubles, in turn, hurt other businesses, including fishing. Thus, some fishermen in the New Bedford area who could no longer make a living by selling fish put their boats to use smuggling liquor.

 The plot of Tough Act was inspired by a story I read in the newspaper a few years ago. A couple of local kids had gone into what they thought was an abandoned house and had found a skeleton there. The skeleton turned out to be the owner of the house. She had died about 10 years earlier, and no one missed her. I was so struck by that: No one wondered about her absence. No one came looking for her. No one glanced around one day and said, “Hey, where is she? I thought she’d be here.”

What kind of person would you have to be, I wondered, to be able to drop dead and have no one notice? What kind of life would you have to be living? I knew when I read that story that I’d found the beginning of my next mystery.

From that point, though, I made up my own tale involving Billy, Virginia, and the fabric of life in Depression-era New Bedford: unemployment, homelessness, rumrunning, and family solidarity. Find out the story behind the skeleton by reading O’Dwyer & Grady Starring in Tough Act to Follow.

 

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E-mail Eileen for information on how to order autographed copies.