Please welcome Jeannette de Beauvoir to the blog today. She is a bestselling novelist who writes both historical and mystery fiction and whose work has been translated into 12 languages. A Booksense Book-of-the-Year finalist, she’s a member of the Authors Guild, the Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, and the National Writers Union. All her novels are firmly rooted in a sense of place, whether it’s a mystery series set in Montréal or on Cape Cod, or historical fiction set in World War II or in medieval France. More at her website, or on Instagram, Goodreads, Amazon, or Patreon.

Jeannette says of her work, “… I want this series to be a celebration of Provincetown. The Deadliest Blessing, out last year, reflects the Portuguese community and its pride in its fishing traditions. And this summer’s addition, Book Four in the series, is about our fabulous (in every sense of the word) carnival week, when all the communities intersect.”

 

Writing Mysteries at Land’s End

Provincetown sits on the inside curve of a spiral, where the peninsula that is Cape Cod turns around on itself and curls backward. It’s known as Land’s End—the first stop east is Portugal—and it collects the kind of people who accumulate at the end of the world, people called characters, eccentrics, crazies. Nobody gets here by accident; Provincetown isn’t on the way anywhere else..

It’s mostly because of those people, who I’ve known and loved for years, that I decided to make Ptown the background for my current mystery series. Because I want to honor them for their courage and independence and grit, all of which it takes to move here… and stay here. There are the Portuguese, who came for the whaling and stayed for the fishing; at one time the commercial fishing fleet out of Provincetown numbered 55 vessels. There’s the gay community, which found in Ptown a home and a safe haven when there were precious few others. There are the visual artists, who understood the uniqueness of the light here and came to capture it, and now work on stubbornly in tiny studios despite gentrification that threatens to force them out.

And then there are the ghosts. The Wampanoag who once lived and fished here saw their numbers decimated by the “white” diseases brought by the colonists. The colonists themselves, experiencing violence and near-starvation and loneliness, dying far from home in an inhospitable land. The poets and bohemians whose words still echo through the narrow streets at night, if you listen hard enough to hear them. And the men who came here to die of a plague that no one even wanted to name, the weekly funerals, the fear.

How can you not want to write about all that? The stories practically write themselves.

The different communities live alongside and atop each other, usually amiably, occasionally in conflict, each experiencing the town in different ways from different perspectives. How do you capture that? I’m doing it through my protagonist, Sydney Riley, who as a fairly recent “washashore” is able to have friends, acquaintances, connections in all the different communities.

While Sydney is the wedding coordinator for a mythical place called the Race Point Inn, much of what I describe in the series is real: real places, real people, real events. I want someone who’s never been here before to walk down Commercial Street and recognize some of the shops and restaurants as Sydney’s haunts. I want people who have lived here for decades to recognize their neighbors and feel I’ve captured the “real” Provincetown—whatever that is.

How does it work? Provincetown offers a ready-made, built-in device: some years ago the business guild, in an attempt to draw in more visitors, began marketing “theme weeks.” Some of these weeks/weekends centered around something already in place—the Portuguese Festival and Blessing of the Fleet, for example, or Fantasia Fair, the longest-running transgender event in the country—and others were created to appeal to a demographic that visited the town but not necessarily at the same time—a week that centers around families with gay parents, or professionals dealing with whale entanglement… all sorts of things. Every theme week sees an influx of people coming into town, so in a sense it becomes a slightly different place each time. What a great backdrop for murder and mayhem!

I began the series with Death of a Bear, which takes place during “bear week,” when large hairy gay men take over the town. Most of my readers, of course, aren’t hairy gay men, and that’s the other part of honoring the people who live here: there’s way too much “us” versus “them” thinking going on in the world, and I want to show, through ordinary, likeable individuals, that we’re not all that different from each other. I want readers to mourn the untimely death of Barry, Sydney’s boss and a very nice “bear.” I want them to understand what it’s like for a transgender person to come here and be the person they want to be, even if it’s for only one week out of the year. It’s a little subversive, but with the very best of intentions!

Sydney’s best friend is a visual artist named Mirela, one of the many Bulgarian students who come to Ptown every summer and work their derrières off serving the needs of second-home owners and tourists; unlike most of them, Mirela stayed and is now part of the fabric of live here. Sydney’s boyfriend is Ali, a Lebanese-American who works in law enforcement and has a sometimes-uneasy relationship with his religion. Together with a whole range of characters borrowed or invented, they manage (as Miss Marple once did in St. Mary Mead and Jessica Fletcher did in Cabot Cove) to stumble across all sorts of bodies.

That part, of course, is fictional. In reality Provincetown is a very safe place. We don’t lock our doors, we help each other out, and the biggest crime wave in the summer is “borrowed” bicycles. I hope you’ll consider visiting soon—and, of course, reading about Sydney’s adventures here!