Local archaeologist/mystery writer Sarah Wisseman has published a new novel, The Bootlegger’s Nephew, set right here in East Central Illinois. The protagonist of the book is a 40-year-old doctor with a 19-year-old flapper daughter, who starts trying to figure out why some of his patients are inexplicably dying. Following that mystery leads him and his daughter into the speakeasies and blind pigs of Champaign County, and into some scary situations with the gangsters who control them. Along the way, the reader learns a lot about East Central Illinois in the days when Al Capone to the north and the Shelton gangsters to the south were all alive and kicking.
Wisseman will be signing copies of The Bootlegger’s Nephew at Jane Addams Book Shop, Saturday, April 14, between 2:00 and 4:00 p.m.
Why East Central Illinois? Why the 1920s?
The Bootlegger’s Nephew is a change for Wisseman — it is set in the past and her previous mystery novels all have contemporary settings. To learn more about Wisseman’s earlier mysteries, you can check out this article from two years ago.
When I spoke with her recently, she told me that reflecting on her own ancestors helped push her in an historical direction:
I suppose it’s because I’m at the stage of life — I just turned sixty — where I’ve been pulling together family records, thinking about my grandparents, who are long deceased now. That was part of what made me want to do something historical. The other thing is through attending mystery writing conferences, I’ve gotten to know other historical mystery writers. And one of them, Jeanne Dams, researched her own town of South Bend, Indiana. I think her time period is 1880s, 1890s. And I thought, ‘Boy, it would be fun to move to my own backyard, but take it back a number of years.’ So once I had that idea, I thought, ‘OK, why not take it back to the time period where my grandparents were young.’ I wanted to cover the period before archaeology became an academic discipline, and I also wanted the period before antibiotics were available for my doctor character. So he’d be practicing a much cruder form of medicine.
Wisseman said she enjoyed spending time researching Champaign-Urbana, and got so involved in the historical angle that she ended up making a non-fiction appendix to the novel about East Central Illinois during Prohibition, which is available for download on her website (pdf). She said, “It was great fun wandering around downtown Champaign and taking pictures of the buildings I already knew existed in the 20s and trying to build up images in my mind of what it looked like. And going to archives and using photos, and going back to The News-Gazette.”
Many of her characters have last names familiar to people who live in Champaign-Urbana — Vriner, Keck, Cunningham, etc. — but aren’t supposed to depict actual people alive in the ‘20s. Wisseman explained:
I used the last names, but so far as I know I didn’t use any of the first names from that time period. If I did, it’s purely accidental. I didn’t want to run into the problem of living descendents thinking I was writing about one of their relatives. The only exception would be the Keck robbery — there are some real details from that. But her name was Lucy Keck instead of Linda Keck. And so I made her into sort of an interesting character on her own. I know nothing about the real Lucy Keck. I think it was her son who was injured in the historical robbery, and she fired a shot at the robbers.
Wisseman also calls Champaign-Urbana “Big Grove” in her book. Why? She explained, “I thought that would be a nice way to fictionalize the town. People who live here know perfectly well that I’m talking about Champaign-Urbana. I did it just for fun. And also to make it one community instead of two.”
The bitter truth is that some people think that Champaign County is a flat, dull type of place good for growing soybeans and corn, but hardly an exciting location. I asked Wisseman if she ever worried that East Central Illinois wouldn’t be an interesting enough setting for a fast-paced mystery novel. She replied:
No, I guess I didn’t. The process of writing fiction is so exciting to me that I figured I could have any sort of event take place here. And I was also thinking about the fact that many of the people who have written historical fiction set in Illinois have set it in Chicago — I know a number of Chicago writers; I keep running into them at mystery conferences. And I thought, ‘No one has written about our community. Why not start a new trend?’ There is another writer, Patricia Stoltey — I think she’s now in Colorado — who had a story set around here in a mythical town between here and Chicago, who made up her town name too. The book’s title is The Prairie Grass Murders, but so far as I know we’re the only two who have written mysteries set around here.
Wisseman said that before settling on the 1920s, she considered other time periods for her East Central Illinois novel:
There are plenty of fascinating time periods for this area. I went back and forth — I wanted to have a time period for which I had access to information. That’s important — you don’t want to have a time period that there are no records of, or it will be totally fiction. But I didn’t want something so recent that my readers would be second-guessing me all the time. So that was partly why I chose the ‘20s. Then, when I started researching the ‘20s, I started thinking it would be fun for all sorts of reasons. This was the period that my grandparents came of age in, and I had never really read about the ‘20s before. And the other thing that was fascinating was the changing role of women.
Although Wisseman has lived in Champaign County since 1982, she said, “I’m kind of playing catch-up on local history.”
I asked her what came as a surprise to her as she researched the area’s past. She said:
The thing that surprised me the most — and I felt kind of stupid about this — is that I hadn’t really read about the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan around here in the ‘20s. I had read about what had happened earlier on in the South, in Mississippi, but I hadn’t realized what was going on in our neck of the woods. The Klan had a big rally over in East Saint Louis near Cahokia in the ‘20s. They had people riding around our part of the countryside looking for people shacked up together. They were looking for immoral behavior. So it’s really creepy when you realize that that stuff was going on around here too. Not just in someone else’s state.
Archaeology in Illinois
Wisseman originally planned to orient the novel around archaeology — her own real world profession and the main focus of her earlier mystery novels — but things took an unexpected turn:
When I started to write the book, I thought it would be mostly about archaeology, but I got so fascinated by Prohibition. This happens to other writers too. You start off in one direction, then you get sidetracked, and then you discover that your sidetrack is more interesting than your original plan for the book.
Then, because my husband is a doctor and because I’ve consulted him on the other books, I asked him ‘What existed in the ‘20s? What do you know about medical education back then? What existed that my physician character would have been treating?’ And he said, ‘Well, pregnancies gone wrong, farm accidents, that sort of thing,’ and he also said that if you had a bad wound in your stomach then — before antibiotics — the doctor mostly couldn’t do anything. It was like the Civil War in that way. The patients would usually die. So I found that fascinating — sort of the history of medicine. So the book took me in directions that I didn’t intend to go.
While the focus of The Bootlegger’s Nephew transferred to prohibition and the practice of medicine before antibiotics, quite a bit about archaeology in Illinois made it into the story. For instance, the doctor protagonist is also an amateur archaeologist. Also, the novel starts off with a bang, when a Champaign County man gets shot while poaching Native American artifacts in the night. Wisseman told me that it was her enthusiasm for early archaeology in Illinois that helped inspire her to write the novel in the first place:
The other thing that got me going is that I work at the Illinois State Archaeological Survey, and I’ve been there several years now. Some of my favorite people there are the senior guys, and they’re just full of wonderful stories of earlier archaeology. So it was some of those coffee conversations with them that kind of got me going, particularly when they talked about guys like William McAdams. He was a newspaper guy, and he had another profession too, but he was famous for going around and digging up archaeological sites. He had his own museum and published a lot of mound archaeology, but he did it in a very unscientific way. So that was the late 1800s. But the story I loved that one of the archaeologists told me was that he drank a lot and finally drowned in the Mississippi River, and his wife was so delighted he was gone that she took all of his papers and burned them; I thought, ‘This is the basis of another novel.’
Someone else was telling me about the Dickson family — you know, of Dickson Mounds Museum — that those guys would ride around the landscape and sometimes take pot shots at each other if someone was overlapping on someone else’s property. You know, ‘I want to get you away from my dig.’ So that’s why I had the gunshot at the beginning.
A book set here by an author who lives here
You don’t have to live in Champaign County to enjoy The Bootlegger’s Nephew — it’s a fun book outside of that. But it helps if you do live here — you’ll know enough about the area already to see how much research went into the writing and you’ll get the sense very quickly that the author probably got things right:
- That buying silk stockings at Robeson’s store was pretty much how Wisseman describes it
- That you really could buy the same things off the menu at Vriner’s that her character does
- That Burham Hospital in 1923 was essentially the way it is her book
If you’re reading this article, Champaign County is probably where you live, and it’s worthwhile to look at what it was like 90 years ago. Reading The Bootlegger’s Nephew is a painless way to do just that.