Real-Life Roots of HERON ISLAND, from R. A. Harold

We're pleased to welcome R. A. (Roberta, Robbie) Harold as our guest on the blog today. Robbie is a dedicated Vermonter with enough experience of other locations to know how good life is in the Green Mountain State! I'm a fan of her new Dade Wyatt mystery. Here, she gives the back story to the book.

The first Dade Wyatt historical mystery, Heron Island, germinated in spring 2001, when my husband and I made a farewell visit to an island in Lake Champlain's Inland Sea owned by a friend. She was about to sell the birch-shaded, thyme-turfed Eden, whose ten acres featured a bird sanctuary and a miniature Adirondack Great Camp built in 1902 by the heir to the International Paper fortune.

A largely unaltered slice of the past, the Vermont lodge boasted a gallery ringed with trophy heads, huge screened verandahs with white wicker furniture, and acres of Oriental rugs. In a curio cabinet sat an 1895 Mauser rifle—the service weapon, we learned, of Spanish troops in the Spanish-American War.

Teddy Roosevelt

"They say a daughter of one of the early owners married a Rough Rider," our friend said. Local folklore also had it that Teddy Roosevelt had visited the island for their wedding.

A few weeks later, the image of a handsome, mustachioed man with a brimmed hat came into my head, and my detective Dade Wyatt rowed an Adirondack boat into the story. A melancholy widower, former Shakespearean actor, Pinkerton agent, and Rough Rider,  he's providing security for the island's politically ambitious owner, who's trying to lure Roosevelt for a summer visit in 1903. On a dry run for the event, somebody ends up dead. Suspicion falls on an Italian anarchist musician—perhaps from the granite works of nearby Barre, a hotbed of labor radicalism, or from the teeming immigrant slums of New York's Lower East Side.  Wyatt sets off to track down a killer and gets mixed up in more than he bargained for.

I discovered some intriguing historical nuggets in the course of writing and revising Heron Island: Vice-President Roosevelt learned about the shooting of President McKinley in 1901 while attending a reception at the Isle La Motte, Vermont home of Lieutenant Governor Nelson Fisk; Roosevelt and his Cabinet members were frequent Vermont visitors (in some cases summer residents), and the leading Italian anarchist of his day, Luigi Galleani, who inspired the devotion of the more famous Sacco and Vanzetti as well as the "Red Scare" of 1919, hid out in Barre, Vermont from 1903 to 1912, publishing a radical underground newspaper called Cronaca Sovversiva.

There are two terribly sad things about the real-life roots of this story. The Adirondack lodge on the island burned to the ground in the fall of 2007. Our friend who'd owned the island died last year, much too young. Perhaps she'd be pleased that the place lives on in fictional form.

--Robbie Harold

[Thanks very much, Robbie! Kingdom Books is glad to have some signed copies of HERON ISLAND on hand.]