What history tells us is this much: On the morning of Friday, June 11, 1920, wealthy bridge-playing playboy
Joseph Elwell was found dying in the drawing room of his locked-tight, four-story home on West 70th Street in New York City, a bullet having been fired from a semi-automatic pistol into the center of his forehead. Police at the time were baffled—and the murder hasn’t since been solved.
That puzzle propels the action in Mariah Fredericks’ seventh historical mystery,
The Girl in the Green Dress (Minotaur),
touted by Bookreporter as “over-the-top brilliant, an iconic fact-based work of art.”
Publishers Weekly, for its part,
called the novel a “riveting standalone” and added, “Fredericks has struck gold.”
The Girl in the Green Dress has been
nominated this year for an
Agatha Award and a
Lefty Award. It found a place among my own “
favorite crime fiction of 2025” selections, largely based on the appeal of its real-life players.
Thirty years after Elwell’s untimely passing, a journalist by the name of Morris Markey offered this gossipy description of the deceased in an article for
Esquire magazine:
The dashing Elwell (who was forty-four years old when he died) was no Johnny-come-lately. He had put together a quite substantial fortune despite the fact that the only capital he possessed at the beginning was his nimble mind, plus instinctive good taste, plus the manners of a gentleman that he had learned at his mother’s knee. On the morning that the bullet found him, he owned about $500,000 worth of real estate. He had about $100,000 worth of personal property. His stable of twenty thoroughbreds was racing at Latonia. He kept his yacht at Palm Beach for his annual winter sojourn there. He owned five automobiles and, of course, the house on 70th Street.
It is true that he laid the foundation of these riches at the card table, where he played bridge for ten dollars a point and, on one occasion at least, gained thirty thousand dollars. Yet, significantly enough, the very friends who lost to him insisted unanimously that he was by no means a professional gambler. “It was a pleasure to play with him,” they said, “and it was worth it to have him beat you, because he had a cool passion for the science of bridge, the philosophy of a card game. He never seemed to give a thought for the money involved, whether he won it or paid it out.”
Gambling at cards was not, in short, his weakness.
But he had a weakness. And it seems to have absorbed his time and his thoughts to an almost fantastic degree.
Among the countless distinguished men who were delighted to know him, he was a man of impeccable honor, of fastidious regard for the social conventions. He was generous and considerate, and his nod of assent was better than a signed contract. But among the countless beautiful women who were equally delighted to know him, he was an insatiable voluptuary, a heartless rake who, with neither compunction nor pity, took the full advantage of their frailty. He played upon a whole orchestra of women as a conductor upon the podium bends the fiddles and the woodwinds to his whim.
It’s appropriate to my story here that Markey should’ve penned that
Esquire piece. Born Lawrence Morris Markey in Alexandria, Virginia, in January 1899, he is said to have engaged in railroad work before signing on with the military in France during World War I. His initial newspaper job after returning stateside was with
The Atlanta Journal. He eventually became a member of the original staff at
The New Yorker, serving from 1925 to 1931 “in virtually every department” and launching that cosmopolitan weekly’s “A Reporter at Large” column, according to
his New York Times obituary. Other than what he called an “unproductive” stint as a scriptwriter in late-1930s Hollywood, and his turn as a war correspondent in the South Pacific during World War II, Markey persisted in his civilian reporting career. He undertook assignments for
McCall’s magazine, the
North American Newspaper Alliance,
Reader’s Digest, and of course,
Esquire.
(Above) The opening spread of Markey’s October 1950 story in Esquire magazine, “Who Killed Joe Elwell?”
Morris Markey is also one of the two “celebrity sleuths” Fredericks enlists to solve Elwell’s slaying in
The Girl in the Green Dress.
The other is 20-year-old
Zelda Fitzgerald, bibulous and madcap mate to Jazz Age novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald (
This Side of Paradise,
The Great Gatsby), and much later,
an author in her own right.
As the principal plot of Fredericks’ novel kicks off, it’s the small hours of June 11, 1920, and Markey is a headline-hungry newshound with the New York
Daily News (“a new tabloid based on the idea that most readers hate to read”)—21 years old, impecunious, and love-starved. After staggering back to his West 70th cellar flat from a party dominated by writers (notable among them: then-drama critic
Dorothy Parker), he espies Elwell, “a gentleman in a silk top hat and tails, stepping out of a canary yellow roadster” and entering his own abode directly across the street. Fredericks explains:
The door to the roadster was held open by a uniformed chauffeur in olive green. The gentleman carried a silver-topped walking stick, which he swung idly liked a bored conjurer. He was tall and arrow-slim. His sleek brown hair formed a clean, elegant line along his chiseled profile. His beauty and grace were such the grubby little street seemed transformed into a Broadway stage.
He lifted a laughing girl from the car. Alighting from the roadster, she raised her bare arms and shimmied. She wore a dress of green and silver shards, as if she had been showered in dollar bills, with just enough clinging to her body to avoid arrest. Around her shorn auburn hair, a headband with a peacock’s feather drew the eye to her glorious, exposed neck. Markey stared. He felt sure he would step in front of a bus to protect that neck, the long, graceful arms, the sheer joy of her. She was a girl you’d do anything for because she’d make you feel you could do anything.
Markey soon retreats to bed, only to be jolted awake by a woman screaming outside. She’s Elwell’s housekeeper, who has just discovered the “Bridge King of Manhattan” shot and slumped in red silk pajamas. While ostensibly helping her and searching for killers secreted in Elwell’s closets, Markey inspects the crime scene in order to write all about it. No sign of the mysterious Girl in the Green Dress, but he does find evidence that Elwell had spent part of the prior evening at Midtown’s swank
Ritz-Carlton Hotel. So he speeds there, looking for people who might have seen Elwell … only to land on the doorstep of two other hotel guests, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. His first encounter with the latter is memorable, indeed. “She was not entirely dressed,” writes Fredericks. “Covered, somewhat, in men’s pajama bottoms and a silk robe that looped at the waist. A sudden gesture and it would fall open, and she seemed a girl given to sudden gestures.”
The June 14, 1920, edition of the New York Evening World supplies the latest news regarding investigations into Elwell’s murder.
Zelda is given as well to boredom. She’s desperate for fresh entertainment, while her hubby focuses on his writing rather than on her. Which is why she quickly volunteers to help Markey investigate Elwell’s demise. Her First Flapper renown opens doors through Gotham society that would’ve been closed to the scoopster, and her oft-flirtatious goading keeps Markey digging into who might have offed the card mechanic (a jealous inamorata—or perhaps an incensed husband?); what became of the lissome lovely Elwell brought home on his last morning alive; what the truth is behind the deceased’s “heartless rake” notoriety; and what all of this has to do with an organization dedicated to exposing German sympathizers during the recent war in Europe.
The Girl in the Green Dress re-creates Jazz-Age Manhattan in meticulous detail, with an air of ebullient postwar hedonism that refuses to be stifled by priggish moralizers. And it delivers occasionally splendid shorthand character descriptions, such as that of Markey’s demanding editor—“a wrung-out rag of a man who hadn’t really approved of anything besides a stiff drink in decades.” In addition, the yarn both captures the clever banter, boldness, and rompish energy we’ve come to associate with Zelda Fitzgerald (thanks to
several film and TV portrayals over the years), and periodically reveals her more philosophical mien. “This town is more a reflection of itself than anything real,” she muses. “When people talk
about New York, they’re really talking about themselves being in New York, like the city’s a mirror they like to see themselves in.” What’s more, around her book’s main mystery plot, Fredericks wraps the equally curious fate of Morris Markey, who—like Joseph Elwell—died at the wrong end of a gun.
(Left) Mariah Fredericks.
It was in mid-September of last year that I met author Mariah Fredericks
at Bouchercon in New Orleans, shortly after
The Girl in the Green Dress debuted. At the time, I was busy planning end-of-the-year wrap-ups and not anxious to shoulder additional responsibilities. However, I so enjoyed my conversation with her, that I finally asked Fredericks if she would consent to be interviewed for
The Rap Sheet. Her agreement let me inquire into her roots as a New Yorker; her time spent on the payroll of the Book-of-the-Month Club; her formative years as a young-adult author; her four-book mystery series starring early 20th-century lady’s mail Jane Prescott; her 2022 novel,
The Lindbergh Nanny, which examined the
1932 kidnapping of aviator Charles Lindbergh’s first son from the perspective of that child’s caretaker, Betty Gow; her subsequent book,
The Wharton Plot, which embroiled author
Edith Wharton in the 1911 shooting of muckraking journalist David Graham Phillips; and of course, the background of
The Girl in the Green Dress. In addition, I asked about what she has been working on since.
My original intent was to publish the following exchange more than a month ago, but
computer difficulties postponed its appearance.
J. Kingston Pierce: Am I correct that you graduated from Vassar in the 1980s with a B.A. in history? What specific area of history did you specialize in? And why make that your primary focus?
Mariah Fredericks: You are correct. I specialized in Russian history, as well as Russian language, and traveled to the Soviet Union as it was then. For that, we can lay all the blame on Robert Massie’s
Nicholas and Alexandra [1967] and Warren Beatty’s
Reds [1981].
JKP: How long after college did you go to work for the
Book-of-the-Month Club? Were there any other jobs in between?
MF: I landed at Book-of-the-Month Club about seven years after graduating. Before then, I worked in a bookstore and answered the telephone for various businesses. I had the idea that you should stay away from the publishing business if you wanted to write. That was a dumb idea. I remained artistically pure, but completely ignorant of how publishing works—which partly explains the three unpublished novels written in this time.
JKP: How many years did you work for the Book-of-the-Month Club? And what were your roles there? I understand you eventually wound up as head copywriter. What responsibilities did that entail?
MF: I worked there for almost a decade, starting as junior copywriter and rising to head writer. It was a wonderful job. Every three weeks, you were handed 30 titles ranging from literary fiction and genre to history and how-to. I, with two other writers, had to write articles for each book. It was a terrific education in commercial publishing. They had author lunches and I met people like
Robert Harris (lovely) and
Robert B. Parker (grumpy the day I met him). I’m still friends with old BOMC colleagues today.
JKP: Had you always wished to pursue a fiction-writing career?
MF: Sadly, yes. I remember at 7 typing out a half-page “spy novel,” because I noticed my parents’ obsession with
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and I thought it would be a good way to get their attention.
JKP: Did you begin writing novels while you were still working for the BOMC? Or did that come later?
MF: No, I was on my fourth failed novel by then. But I got my first agent and wrote my first book that ever sold while working there.
JKP: You’re talking about
The True Meaning of Cleavage (2003). What led you into the young-adult fiction genre, rather than adult fiction? And what did you learn from working on
Cleavage that helped you become a professional novelist?
MF: All my failed adult novels were informed by what was selling at the time. Bret Easton Ellis, Tama Janowitz, and Jay McInerny. The coke-and-clubbing novels. Since I neither did coke nor went clubbing, I don’t know what I was thinking. I did the break-up novel, the I-hate-my-mother novel, etc.
They were bad and they got rejected. I got depressed and sat in an empty bathtub in the dark. At which point, my husband, who worked in children’s books and deeply admired those authors, suggested I try something for younger readers. Since he thought I could do it, I felt I had to try. So I turned to an event from 9th grade, a betrayal of a friend of which I was deeply ashamed, and that became
The True Meaning of Cleavage. It was much more emotionally direct and authentic than anything I’d written until then. I found my first voice with that book. I learned a few things from that success. If what you’re writing isn’t getting you where you want to go, change it up. And while you should know something of the market, if you hate what’s selling, don’t try to imitate it. Write what you would read.
JKP: Before we move on, let me ask about those unpublished novels of yours that you’ve referenced
three times already. Whatever happened to those books? Did you later cannibalize them for other stories, or are they never destined for any public exposure whatsoever?
MF: Never destined for public exposure. 😊
JKP: So you published your second novel, a women’s lit work titled
Fatal Distraction (2004), as “Emmi Fredericks.” Why the pseudonym (which you used only once, as far as I can tell)?
MF: My young-adult editor preferred that I keep the careers separate. (He had a tricky experience with a middle-grade author who went on to write some very racy books.) I also used the pseudonym for a tarot guide that I sold as
The Neurotic Girl’s Guide to Tarot, but ended up as
The Smart Girl’s Guide to Tarot [2004].
JKP: At the time
Fatal Distraction saw print, you described yourself as a “celebraholic.” Was that true, or was it merely a character trait you invented for your author alter ego? If it was true, then in what ways did your celebraholicism (is that actually a word?) manifest itself? Have you remained a follower of the famous? Who among today’s media personalities attract your attention most strongly?
MF: Absolutely true! I tried to be classy about it—
People magazine, but not
National Enquirer—but I was fascinated by celebrities in a “what are they really like?” kind of way. Living in New York, I was glared at by Sean Connery, I tripped over Jack Nicholson, and I once sat behind
Stephen Sondheim at the theater. (My sister forbid me to speak to him.)
I watched every awards show, hoping someone would be drunk or senile enough to reveal themselves. Every royal wedding, every royal funeral.
The rise of Kardashian culture has sort of killed the passion. With every move and emotion scripted and performed for public consumption, it’s hard to feel there’s any real person to discover. Also the intense nastiness of social media; you feel too aware of what anyone in the public eye has to cope with. A lot of that curiosity has shifted to historical figures. What would it be like to be in a room with Edith Wharton or
E.B. White? Would someone evil be weirdly likable one on one? Would someone admirable be an annoying bore?
JKP: Tell me if I’m wrong, but you continued penning young-adult fiction/romance through 2013, with
The Girl in the Park and
Season of the Witch being your last entries in that category. Can we say that
The Girl in the Park was also your first published crime novel?
MF: Oddly enough, my third YA novel,
Crunch Time [2006], was my first published crime novel. It was about four kids who take the SATs; one of them cheats and you have to figure out which one did it. I had no idea it was a crime novel until it was nominated for an Edgar Award. I had just given birth and was in that sleep-deprived state where you wonder if you’ll ever leave the house again, so needless to say, I was a happy mom writer when I got the news. I remember the ceremony (I lost) being so good-humored and unpretentious. Everyone seemed happy to celebrate one another. And you got an
Edgar Allan Poe bobblehead! I was like, I need to find a way back to this party. So
Girl was my attempt at that, but it didn’t get nominated.
JKP: Had you long been a crime-fiction enthusiast?
MF: As a kid, I read true crime, Agatha Christie and
Ira Levin. (Who, I realize is more horror than crime, but he lays clues to the conspiracy throughout his books.) I thought you had to be a brilliant puzzle-minded person to write mystery. I never thought I was smart enough. So I am eternally grateful to the Mystery Writers of America and Edgar voters for setting me on that path.
JKP: After that, you launched your well-received adult mystery series starring early 1900s Manhattan lady’s maid
Jane Prescott. How did you choose her as your ideal amateur detective? And what were your objectives in creating a series around her?
MF: I didn’t choose Jane, she chose me. I was writing one of my last YA novels and the first two lines of
No Importance came into my head: “I will tell it. I will tell it badly.” It was a young woman, but the tone was not contemporary. She had a secret she had kept for a long time. She didn’t think anyone would listen to her—why? Because she had no power. What would you keep a secret? Murder. A famous murder that only she knew the truth about precisely because she was a nobody. That’s how she became a lady’s maid.
It had to be New York, because that’s the city I know, and it had to be 1910s, because I can’t cope with the facial hair before then. That’s how I ended up writing something I never thought I could write: a historical mystery. For Jane, I was willing to try.
My goal for the series was the lead-up to the Great War. One book for every year of the 1910s, each touching on a major event of that year—
Triangle Fire,
Armory Show—with a sense of domestic and international violence growing worse and worse until the war touches everyone in the series.
JKP: You were born, reared, and remain a resident of New York City. The Jane Prescott books gave you the perfect excuse to exercise your fascination with the city’s history. How satisfying was that?
MF: It’s more than satisfying. It’s healing. My parents met working for
The New York Times. They made a point of taking me—as many parents do—to key places in the city. Broadway. Gino’s. The Plaza.
The old Times building. I lost them relatively young and to write about a particular side of the city, to honor the places and people they valued, and have it recognized lets me connect with them in a way that gives me real joy.
JKP: What did your parents do at
The New York Times, and did they live out their whole careers at that broadsheet?
MF: My mother was a fact checker for the magazine—
Russell Baker once sent her flowers. And my dad was the picture editor for
the magazine. He was forced to retire early, went into teaching, then back to magazines for the rest of his career. He and Morris Markey have a few things in common. Mom retired from the magazine joyfully.
JKP: Does your family claim deep roots in New York City history?
MF: Neither of my parents were born here. My father moved all over, my mother was from Ohio. They were what E.B. White called “settlers”—in his view, the best kind of New Yorker. But we have a lot of writers and therapists in the family, and a connection by marriage to the
Zabars [of specialty markets fame]. I’ve lived in three of the five boroughs. So … pretty New York.
JKP: Why did you stop penning the Jane Prescott series after
Death of a Showman (2021)? Did you run out of ideas or interest, or did you think it had played out as far as it could?
MF: Oh, not at all. I would love to go back to Jane. So many stories in my head! But the economics of series makes it hard. I really hope I find a way to get those books out in the world someday.
JKP: So you followed up
Showman with
The Lindbergh Nanny. Was that book one you had been noodling over for some while? I’ve heard that your interest in the Lindbergh kidnapping was ignited originally by watching the 1974 film adaptation of
Murder on the Orient Express. Can that really be the case?
MF: You mean did my otherwise intelligent parents think that was a good movie to take an 8-year-old to? The answer is
yes. I was completely horrified—and fascinated—by the idea that the worst thing in the world could happen to a small child. My parents had always assured me otherwise.
JKP: The Prescott series was told from the viewpoint of a lady’s maid with detective instincts.
Nanny explores the snatching of 20-month-old Charles Lindbergh Jr. through the perspective of Betty Gow, that child’s real-life nurse—who for a while was a suspect in the still-infamous crime. In the course of your writing both, what did you discover about the domestic staffs of yore that watchers of, say,
Upstairs, Downstairs or
Downton Abbey do not know?
MF: What struck me was the lack of a private life. You are living in someone else’s home. You can’t leave, except on your day off. You are there to serve the family’s needs—as unobtrusively as possible. We think of domestic staff being beloved characters—Jeeves or for that matter, Jane. But really, you weren’t supposed to have a personality. Who wants the washing machine to offer an opinion? A lot of the Morrow/Lindbergh staff had substance-abuse issues. I think it must have been a way for them to create a private mental space for themselves.
JKP: How much research, and of what varieties, did you have to do for
The Lindbergh Nanny in order to prepare yourself to advance your own theory about that 1934 kidnapping? Did it take you a lot longer to write
Nanny than it had your previous historical novels? After all, that kidnapping has been studied by so many people, you were likely to face criticism for any small deviations from the historical record.
MF: The historical Betty Gow left behind just the right amount of information. We know what she was doing at key points of Charles Lindbergh Jr.’s life and after his death. We have a sense of her voice, her opinions of the family, and the basics of her timeline. She was not an overwhelming subject in the way that, say, Zelda Fitzgerald is.
Because I viewed the crime as a domestic tragedy, I started with the biographies of the Lindberghs. Then you move on to the big basic books on the crime, like Jim Fisher’s
The Lindbergh Case [1994], then the more targeted, such as [Mark W. Falzini’s]
Their Fifteen Minutes [2008]. I think I consulted at least 30 books. Most of the original source materials—police interviews, witness statements—are held at the
New Jersey State Police Museum. I was writing during COVID and the museum was closed. I was enormously fortunate that
a fellow writer reached out and offered his digital files. The archivist of the museum, Mark Falzini, was also very generous about answering questions. And I did check out the many message boards, just to make sure I was aware of the different arguments and takes.
It took me about a year and a half to write. The research was intense, but of course, your plot is basically written for you. I tried very hard to get the details right and not to deviate from the known facts, except in a few small points which I covered in the afterword. Because yes, there are a lot of people who are fascinated and quite knowledgeable about this case. With one unpleasant exception, the Lindbergh kidnapping community has been very generous to me and to the book.
JKP: Because so much is known about Charlie Lindbergh’s abduction, was it difficult to find ways to exercise your creativity in
The Lindbergh Nanny, to make that story your own?
MF: No, because I knew no one had done Betty Gow’s point of view before. [British table maid and onetime suspect in the kidnapping]
Violet Sharpe, yes, but not Betty. And oddly, little Charlie can get a bit overlooked. I wanted the reader to see him as a real little boy, adorable, much loved, difficult as toddlers can be. There are little scenes of him, pulling off his shoe, getting his hair cut, jumping on sofa cushions, so that hopefully the reader remembers him once he’s gone.
JKP: Your depiction of Charles Lindbergh and his wife, the former
Anne Morrow, is not all that complimentary. Did your opinions of them change as you researched their behavior before and after the kidnapping, or did you always have a sense that they were somewhat less-than-skilled parents?
MF: The Lindberghs’ approach of leaving Charlie to fend for himself seems to us like a cruel isolation from care—Betty Gow had real problems with it. But who knows what future generations will say about the “cry it out” sleep method. Yes, Lindbergh had a callous, juvenile side that showed itself in disturbing ways. Anne made some questionable calls. Against that, you have to put the reality that some of his children at least tell stories of him as a creative, committed, and engaged dad. (Albeit one who had
secret families.) But whenever something terrible happens to a child, we look for what the parents did “wrong.” Unconsciously, I think, so it won't happen to us. I’m in the minority here, but in some ways, the last thing I would judge about the Lindberghs is their parenting. They suffered the worst loss you can and it just seems like cruelty on top of cruelty.
JKP: Do you do the vast majority of your historical study before you start writing one of these novels, or do you begin writing early but continue to research as the story progresses?
MF: I start by doing just enough to get rolling with the voice and a general sense of the story arc. With
Lindbergh Nanny, for example, I learned that Betty had her first interview with the Lindberghs in a hallway in the
Morrow house [in Englewood, New Jersey]. I learned what was said—what she remembered—and developed the voices of all three characters in that scene. What the actual house might have looked like got researched later on. Architectural and scenic details are my least favorite.
JKP: Many people don’t remember nowadays that there were a number of prominent kidnappings during the 1930s. Not just the Lindbergh case, but also the abductions of
Mary McElroy,
Charles F. Urschel,
Brooke Hart, and others. What was the cause of that “trend,” and what sort of national law-enforcement action did it provoke?
MF: Of course, one of the first books I looked at when starting my research was David Stout’s
The Kidnap Years [2020]. It was the Depression. People were brutalized economically, and some became brutal in response. Gangs had been involved in the kidnap business since the turn of the [20th] century. Sometimes the child was returned once the ransom was paid, which may have led to some complacency about the scope of the problem. The Lindbergh kidnapping ended that. The case notably brought about the
Little Lindy Law [aka the Federal Kidnapping Act of 1932], which made interstate kidnapping a federal offense.
But it also led to a more “professional” approach on the part of law enforcement; it was a big boost for
J. Edgar Hoover. Before then, the parents were allowed to take the lead on how the negotiation should proceed. The police weren’t seen as having any special tools or expertise and it was their child, after all.
(Right) A 1932 poster asking for the public’s help to find 20-month-old Charles Lindbergh Jr.
JKP: After exploring an unsolved crime through the eyes of a real-life character in
Nanny, did you find the writing of
The Wharton Plot—which enlists author Edith Wharton as a crime solver—any easier? Or was it just harder in other ways?
MF: Harder in almost every way. It was the first third-person novel I had ever written, and I decided it should “sound” like a Wharton novel. No problem! Also, while Betty was authentically part of the crime narrative, I had to work to make it credible-within-the-bounds-of-genre-fiction that Edith Wharton would insert herself into a murder investigation. And the victim in this case [novelist-journalist
David Graham Phillips] was very hard to pin down as a personality.
But it was a happier story than Lindbergh. Betty’s story is one of terrible loss and survival. Edith begins
The Wharton Plot at a crossroads. But she ends happy and triumphant.
JKP: Were you a big Wharton fan before diving into this novel?
MF: Yes. I remember reading
The House of Mirth alongside
Portrait of a Lady in high school and the teacher insisting that Henry James was the superior writer. I thought she was out of her mind.
JKP: I imagine that capturing Wharton’s voice and attitudes with confidence was difficult. With
Nanny, relatively little was known about Betty Gow, so you could embellish her character somewhat. But with Wharton,
much is known. It must have been an intimidating assignment, to try and resurrect her at an uncertain stage in her midlife, and then charge her with solving the real-life slaying of a fellow author. How did you finally connect with her as a character?
MF: We are both middle-aged New Yorkers who write and love dogs. I was aware when I wrote it that I was no longer young; my “era” has passed. I felt a strong need for change and a fear of being disloyal or thoughtless. That was similar to what she was feeling in 1911.
And I could connect to her over the “fun” of a writer’s life. In that very first chapter, Edith is laying siege to her poor editor. She is dissatisfied with everything: her advances, the publicity, even the way they’ve printed her book. All true. She’s aware that she’s coming off as demanding and imperious, but the drive to make her views known on something that matters enormously to her—her work—overrides that. I think every author on the planet can relate to that. And probably every editor can sympathize with poor
[William Crary] Brownell. (Mine wrote “Ha!” in the margins several times.)
JKP: Had you happened across the Phillips slaying while doing research for your Jane Prescott series, also set in the early 1910s? Were you hoping to write about that crime, and finally dove in because you discovered that Wharton was
in New York at the time? Or did you want to write about Wharton, first, and went looking for some real-life crime that gave her reason to gumshoe about Gotham?
MF: The interest in David Graham Phillips’ murder came first. There’s something about a muckraking journalist, a self-proclaimed enemy of the American aristocracy, being shot in broad daylight right outside [architect and
fellow murder victim]
Stanford White’s old house that feels emblematic of the transition from the Gilded Age to the era of mechanized slaughter. But my editor felt we needed a bigger draw than Phillips, so I started thinking about writers, because I’m always fascinated by the narratives we create around a crime. I took a look at what Edith Wharton was doing and when I saw that she was in the process of upending much of her life—leaving New York, settling in France, leaving her husband—I realized that also represented the last gasp of the Gilded Age and the stories dovetailed nicely.
JKP: After writing about the well-known Lindbergh case, did you find it freeing to re-create Phillips’ demise, about which so little is remembered these 115 years later? Did it allow you more leeway to fictionalize around the edges?
MF: It did—and I had to because in the actual crime, the killer committed suicide right after killing Phillips, so there was actually no mystery about who’d done it. I feel ambivalent about the changes. Every “notable” crime has its own theme. With Lindbergh, it’s who do you let inside the house? Inside your life? When you monkey with the facts, you lose some of the elements that support the thematic and historical narrative. There were aspects that resonated with the [2022]
attack on Salman Rushdie, for example, and the toxic reach of social media. The truth was more harrowing than my version. But in a mystery, it’s not fair to have a total unknown be revealed as the killer at the last minute.
JKP: Are there advantages to writing standalone novels versus series?
MF: The key advantage to a standalone is its “news value.” You do Wharton in one book, Zelda the next. It’s not just the “next Jane Prescott.” You do get to meet new people and grapple with fresh narratives, which is fun. But if you’re someone like me who gets attached to characters, it’s very hard to leave them behind.
JKP: Lots of people have tried (with varying degrees of success) to shape mystery tales around historical crimes. Are there ingredients that are vital to make it work, or approaches that are better than others to grip the reader? And how much extra value is there in combining a real-life crime with a genuine historical figure, even if he or she is used fictitiously?
MF: I’ll only say what I try to do. I try to find a story that hit a nerve with the public because it revealed something ugly about their world that they might have suspected, but now—here’s the proof. Some of those anxieties are perpetual—as with Lindbergh. To be crude, you take the pain/fear point and put your finger on it and press hard. Give people a sense of how it felt to go through that.
I started putting famous writers into the story because the story that gets told about the crime is almost as fascinating as the crime itself. Their job is to depict the times in which they live. Crime is a great lens through which to see an era. And in the case of Wharton and Zelda, their lives reflect some of the societal change and turmoil that made the crimes resonate with the public so strongly at the time.
JKP: How did you come to compose
The Girl in the Green Dress? And what led you to choose the journalist Morris Markey as your sleuth, rather than the more boisterous and bibulous Zelda Fitzgerald?
MF: I discovered Markey’s work for
The New Yorker when I was reading up on big New York crimes of the 1920s and ’30s. He covered a lot of them for the magazine. Once I learned that he had died mysteriously—and in the same way as the subject of one of his last pieces—I really wanted to do both stories. As a writer and observer, he’s the natural lead detective. Part of Zelda’s enduring appeal is her divine narcissism. If it wasn’t about her or Scott, well, how fascinating could it be? But she did leave Scott behind to go off on jaunts and adventures with other men, so it seemed credible to have her go off with Markey. And the Elwell case at the center of the plot revealed a lot about people’s anxieties about the freedom of women after the war. And who embodies that better than Zelda Fitzgerald?
JKP: I’m guessing that the greatest part of the research you did for your latest book focused not just on Joseph Elwell’s slaying (which was well-covered by newspapers at the time), but on Zelda’s life as a 20-year-old celeb and new wife. What did it take for you to capture Zelda on the page? Did you read biographies of her as well as watch some of the TV movies and series in which she featured? Did any of the actresses who have portrayed her (Blythe Danner, Natasha Richardson, Alison Pill, Christina Ricci, etc.) become your image of Zelda as you wrote? Or were you able to keep the real woman in mind?
MF: Zelda’s voice really changes over time, to my ear. For her voice in New York, 1920, I relied on pieces she wrote in the early ’20s, especially “
Eulogy on the Flapper.” It’s clever, defiant, still a bit shocking. She makes big bold pronouncements that don’t always scan logically, but it’s very entertaining. I read a few of the major biographies of her and of Scott. I read their letters of this time. I have a few images of her: the classic
“Elizabeth Arden” shot of her and Scott where she’s heavily made up. Then the
softer, very Southern photo of her from a few years before that. There’s also a silent film clip of her—supposedly—sort of hopping in place. It gives you a sense of her incredible energy and fun.
Of all the Zeldas you mentioned, I thought
Alison Pill was the best [in Woody Allen’s 2011 film,
Midnight in Paris]. I think Jennifer Lawrence will be amazing
if that project ever happens. But the actress who conjured her devastating impact best to me was someone who never played her:
Jessica Lange.
JKP: I must say, every time Zelda steps onto the page in
The Girl in the Green Dress, it’s as if a black-and-white picture suddenly turns to color. She just brings with her so much life! Was it as much fun to write about her as it is to read about her? Or were your feelings about Zelda mixed by the time you’d finished with her?
(Right) Caddish card sharp and murder victim Joseph Elwell.
MF: It was almost too much fun in that you risk reducing her to an enchanting chaos agent. “This scene needs some life, let’s get Zelda in here!” Starting with Fitzgerald, writers have exploited her unique charisma, and I had to fight the easy choice to just use her to tell Markey’s story; she deserves an arc of her own.
Unlike Wharton, Zelda at 20 is not someone I have a natural affinity for. Before starting the book, I only knew the basic mythology: Southern, sexy, crazy. I had to ask why. Why did so many young women embrace an intensely mercenary hedonism? The image I kept coming back to was
Madonna’s Material Girl, that vicious 1980s rejection of earnest ’70s feminism. By the end, my feelings were far less mixed. She was quite brave. So young. She fought hard to stay part of life. What she went through in the name of treatment is harrowing—as is her death, obviously. She actually turned down an invitation from Wharton to meet. I wish she hadn’t. The two women might have agreed on many things and Wharton could have given her some very good advice about the importance of friends, the trap of marriage, and how to follow your own creative path. Of course, it’s also possible she would have been imperious and condescending and Zelda was quite right not to go!
JKP: In real life, Morris Markey and Zelda never met, though they did have acquaintances in common. Yet in
The Girl in the Green Dress, she sweeps him off his feet! I’m not sure she completely understands what affect she has on Markey, but the reader certainly does. She’s an exemplar of the “new,” post-World War I woman—less inhibited and reserved than their mothers, more prone to speak their minds and seek out pleasures. How important was it to your story, or to your development of their characters, that Markey more of less falls in love with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s missus?
MF: In a way, this is a Fitzgerald story, so someone’s heart has to get broken by a woman they can never have. Markey really wants to be a success. He really wants to fall in love. He really wants to leave the war behind and be part of this gaudy spree of post-war America. Zelda represents all of that. But we know right from the start it ain’t gonna happen. Working out the exact dynamic of how he makes his final, futile bid for her affections, the precise way in which she shatters him, took a lot of time. I wanted their need for each other to have integrity. History dictates they cannot be anything to each other, but there is, I hope, a sense of loss for both of them when it all goes wrong. They should have been pals. I’m sad I never got to write a scene where he visits her at
Highland Hospital when they’re middle-aged.
JKP: You got to work here with a locked-room puzzle, a mystery-fiction trope that was very popular during the early 20th century. Was that part of your attraction to this story?
MF: Yes. I even gave
S.S. Van Dine a cameo because, rumor has it, he based the first
Philo Vance novel [1926’s
The Benson Murder Case] on the Elwell case. In a way, the locked room is a natural progression from the Lindbergh kidnapping, which has at the heart the weakness in the household that lets the danger in. With a locked room, you’re supposedly safe, but you’ve inadvertently trapped yourself with the very person (or habit or choice) that will end your life.
Given the backdrop of the ’20s, which ends with
a crash, and the lives of Markey and the Fitzgeralds—ditto—I saw the locked room as a metaphor for addiction, troubled marriage, fame, even mental illness, although that’s not a choice of course. All the self-destructive ways we trap ourselves. In Elwell’s case, you could say it was arrogance. Choices he made for which he thought others would suffer consequences, but never himself.
JKP: How confident are you of your conclusions regarding who killed Elwell and their motivation in committing that crime?
MF: I came to my vision of the right solution for my version of the story very early and never wavered. There is no evidence that it’s the historical truth. But there’s no evidence that it’s
not.
JKP: And I love it that this book contains parallel mysteries: the unsolved murder of Joseph Elwell and the
supposed suicide of Morris Markey, who also died by gunshot in 1950, decades after the main events recounted in
The Girl in the Green Dress took place. You’ve said that parallel helped convince you to write this novel.
MF: Absolutely. That was the initial hook. I had high hopes of making Markey a series character. A Southerner who becomes one of the first important voices of
The New Yorker, who writes about the city and its major crimes—and dies violently after writing about a murder that mirrors his own death—seemed like a natural to me. The mystery surrounding his death would be in the reader’s mind throughout the series, and with each book, you would learn a little more about what really happened. But people haven’t been clamoring for a Markey series. They want Zelda back!
JKP: An author publishes a book and thinks she or he understands everything there is to know about that book. But then readers and reviewers come along, and they often have unique insights into the story and its assorted players. What have you learned about
The Girl in the Green Dress that you didn’t know before, after hearing about it from the reading public and interviewers?
MF: One reader pointed out the many echoes of
Gatsby in the book, most of which I didn’t actually plan, and which serve as a testament to how deeply that book gets inside your head. On a more frightening note, I came across an
AI summary of the book’s plot and themes. Strictly speaking it was accurate and it even picked up on things some readers have missed. But it was so hollow and inorganic. Like Styrofoam thought.
JKP: Did you know, when you were in the process of writing this book, that Canadian popular history author
Dean Jobb (
A Gentleman and a Thief,
The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream) was working on
a non-fiction work about Elwell’s death, due to come out in 2027?
MF: I did know! I wrote to him saying how much I enjoyed
Murderous Dr. Cream and how excited I was for the Elwell book. I didn’t ask him questions about the actual case, because he doesn’t know me from Eve and there’s a certain sensitivity about using other people’s research for your book when their book hasn’t come out yet. But he very kindly congratulated me when
Girl was
reviewed in The New York Times. I hope his book tour brings him to New York.
JKP: When I met you at Bouchercon in New Orleans, you told me you were working on a Christmas mystery involving the
1932 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and threats against Santa Claus.
Can you say anything more about that book now? Does the story again involve any real-life figures? Does it have a title yet, and when might we read the finished work?
MF: It’s called
Murder on 34th Street and it will be out [from Minotaur Books] in October of 2026. It’s a lighter book than my other standalones, more in the Jane Prescott territory, with a smart, spirited assistant named Grace Verlander saving the day. Like Jane, Grace just got into my head and refused to leave until I’d done her story. The
Straus brothers and
Tony Sarg, balloon genius, have walk-ons. After Lindbergh, Wharton, and Zelda, I was ready to do something fun and funny and romantic. I love the Macy’s Parade. I used to get up at 4 a.m. to get a spot on the curb.
JKP: I think about your evolution from young-adult storyteller to adult novelist. Do you imagine the readers who enjoyed your early works would have themselves evolved to appreciate your more recent efforts?
MF: I hear from readers of my YA work occasionally, but it’s to say how much they loved those books, not the mysteries. I have a sneaking suspicion many of them are reading “
romantasy” these days.
JKP: Finally, if you could have written one book that doesn’t already carry your byline, what would it be?
MF: Last summer, I re-read [George Saunders’]
Lincoln in the Bardo for the umpteenth time and I thought, which I almost never do,
God, I wish I’d written this. It has all the things I admire in storytelling: theatricality and discipline, a deep sense of history, brilliant characters—from the stars to minor players—and at the heart of it, a “problem” so simple and deep: a parent who has lost a child and cannot move on. But the inventiveness! The language! Saunders puts actual hell on the page in a way that would send the strongest atheist to a house of worship, just to make sure they didn’t end up there. It’s silly to envy anyone their genius or success. But I envy him the experience of writing that book. It had to be glorious.
Weimar Republic (1918-1933), and the period between the two world wars in Europe. Operation Berlin is rooted in that era.
passion for books to me. I realized that I was just trying to write books that my mother would like to read!
auctions in the UK, the U.S., and Germany for the book. When Free to Trade was published in 1995, it got to No. 2 on the UK bestseller lists and was translated into 35 languages.
found out about book collectors, the more this initial impression has been reinforced.
service officer’s wife four decades before. Now, in your mid-60s, you have begun this Foreign Correspondent series. Would it be fair to say you’ve come full circle, as far as your time-period interests are concerned?
a novella sequel, Operation Lost Hours, available to download for free here. And next year will bring us the sophomore Foreign Correspondent novel, Operation Vienna. Can you tell us a little about how you see this series shaping up in the future?
