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May 25, 2003

A Novel Idea

Author draws on local mystery for book

   He also got a strong suggestion. Johnson had spent years studying the 1895 case of Julia Curtis, a Peninsula Township servant girl who was strangled and buried in a shallow grave by her lover, Woodruff Parmelee, the grown son of the family for whom she worked. Since Lewis was a writer, Johnson thought he’d be interested in the tale as well.

"What really jumped out at me was the fact that Woodruff’s son by his first marriage testified in his behalf at his trial. I want to focus on that boy’s dilemma. What does he do - does he support his father’s alibi or not? Particularly if he knows the truth." Stephen Lewis, author

   “His mother had actually worked in the Parmelee house after it had passed to another family, and he really wanted someone to write about it,” said Lewis. “He said, ‘This would be a good story, don’t you think? Just the way it is?’¡”

   But since Lewis is a novelist, not a historian, he’s planning to do more than tell it “just the way it was.” He’s more interested in the drama of the story, and he’s more than willing to change a few details around to heighten that sense of drama.

   “I’m writing a novel, not a history,” he said. “What’s interesting to be is the tension between the facts and the fiction.”

   But the facts are plentiful; they include newspaper accounts, maps, property descriptions, court records, and photographs. And that’s been a source of fascination to Lewis, whose most recent novels are a series of mysteries set in colonial New England. Researching the Parmelee-Curtis case has been far easier than that effort, since there are far more of what historians call “primary sources.”

   And that’s what Lewis will be talking about during a May 29 lecture at the Traverse Area District Library. Using his current project and the three historical mysteries in his colonial series, he’ll be discussing the challenges and strategies of writing historical fiction. The 7 p.m. talk, sponsored by Michigan Writers and the Michigan Council for the Arts & Cultural Affairs, is free and open to the public.

   Born and raised in the Flatbush district of Brooklyn, the 60-year-old Lewis taught English at Long Island’s Suffolk Community College and wrote short stories, poetry, scholarly articles and textbooks before turning his hand to historical mysteries. His mystery novels include The Monkey Rope (1990), And Baby Makes None (1991), The Dumb Shall Sing (1999), The Blind in Darkness (2000) and The Sea Hath Spoken (2001).

   But thanks to his wife, Carolyn, he’s also had a strong seasonal connection to the Old Mission Peninsula and its farming families. Her father, Walter Johnson, was a retired engineer and fruit grower who accumulated an impressive collection of documents, memorabilia and knowledge about local history; he died in October at the age of 79.

   The Lewises spent three years searching for a place of their own on the Peninsula before finding a restored farmhouse on Center Road, with five acres and a sweeping view of Old Mission Harbor. There they live with their youngest daughter and a pair of rambunctious retrievers.

   “He’s still adapting,” said Carolyn, who’s taken her father’s place as a local historian and is helping her husband with his research. “He spent his whole life in New York, and this is a very different environment for him. It’s been a radical change.”

   “It’s not just the geography, either,” adds Lewis. “The culture here is so different. I go out and walk my dogs, and my neighbors come out and ask me how I’m doing. That would never have happened on Long Island, unless they thought I was going to let the dogs run in their yards. And there’s this whole continuity of connections between people and places that’s really foreign to me.”

   Although he’s written plenty of historical mysteries, Lewis doesn’t want to write this book (tentatively titled “Murder on Old Mission”) as a whodunit. The who of the matter is fairly clear, he said; it’s the why that he finds most interesting. An autopsy established that the murdered girl was pregnant, and the court that convicted Woodruff Parmelee was convinced that he killed her to prevent her from making that fact widely known.

   “What really jumped out at me was the fact that Woodruff’s son by his first marriage testified in his behalf at his trial,” he said. “I want to focus on that boy’s dilemma. What does he do — does he support his father’s alibi or not? Particularly if he knows the truth.”

   That’s a departure from the historical record, which doesn’t suggest anything of the sort. And Lewis freely admits taking other liberties with history — making Woodruff an only child, for instance, and having his father be still living at the time of the murder when the real-life George Parmelee had actually died several years earlier.

   “And I’m changing the names,” he added. “These were prominent families who still have descendants out here.”