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I regret to say that I have no post to make this week. I'm waiting on documents from Wayne County for two separate projects I'm working on. Until then, I hope you enjoy this photo of the fire station that once stood on the southwest corner of Sixth Street and Baker (now Bagley). Courtesy of the Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library The Detroit Fire Department's Engine Company No. 4 was erected in 1871. In 1918, it was replaced with an updated facility, seen in this 1976 photograph: The building still stands today, but it no longer serves as a fire station. It has been converted into the law offices of Gregory J. Reed & Associates . This intersection is half a block from the Susan Buchanan House, profiled previously.

Bounty hunters go back to 1872, when the Supreme Court ruled they were part of the U.S. law enforcement system. Thus, the bounty hunter was pretty much a free agent; he was not held accountable to the rules of due process as sheriffs and marshals were. While this may have contributed to the general lawlessness of life in the Old West, it did ease the burden on local law officers, who in those days had trouble enough in their own back yards. Pinkerton detective Charlie Siringo, for example, had a long and controversial career as a bounty hunter. Reputed to have “steely nerves” and the devil’s smarts, he tracked and brought back alive hundreds of robbers and murderers. (The incentive to bringing them back alive was that the bounty hunter’s fee was cut in half if the prisoner died.) Charlie Siringo was unusual not only because of his spectacular success but because he used his real name, and that name was - contrary to common practice at the time - recorded. For most bounty hungers,

I recently wrote a brief essay on the history of the Turnip. Not the root vegetable, but the unlikely hero of my seventh book, The Mischief of the Mistletoe . Turnip was my experiment with a different brand of hero, a hero so far from alpha one might even call him gamma. Turnip, aka Mr. Reginald Fitzhugh (although almost no-one calls him that) first blundered into my books as a disposable side character in my second book, The Masque of the Black Tulip . I had intended him purely for comic relief, but before he had uttered his second “deuced havey-cavey!” I knew he was there to stay. Turnip emerges from a long literary tradition. Chaucer’s naïve narrator has a bit of Turnip in him (when the literary critics refer to a man as a good-natured bumbler, you know he’s of the lineage of Turnip), as does Jane Austen’s beloved Bingley, over whom Mr. Bennett shakes his head for “being so easy, that every servant will cheat you; and so generous, that you will always exceed your income”. Fortunate

Into every author’s life a little rain must fall. One example is that all-too familiar moment when she – or he – can’t think of a single word to put down on that smug piece of blank paper. The condition is called writer’s block. For me, it feels as if words are trapped somewhere deep inside my skull. They race around in a mad vortex, desperate to escape but far beyond my reach. My challenge is to break them free – and give me back my sanity. (Something that helps the book would be nice, too.) Every author has different methods for cracking writer’s block. My recipes include the following. I usually start by getting a good night’s sleep (which is rare, when I’m doing much writing), followed by a long shower. That works well for simple problems with a book, so much so that I keep pads of paper close by. Then there are the bigger problems, the ones that make an author pace the floor for days or seek out wise counsel. Thank God for friends; they can solve almost anything. Bone-d

Small screen but big news! Our own Leslie Carroll, chronicler extraordinaire of royal marriages through history, will be sharing her wealth of historical knowledge (and maybe a little dish as well) on the occasion of the upcoming British royal wedding, tonight with Katie Couric on the CBS Evening News, 6:30 PM est. To find out more about Leslie's books about royal marriages, royal affairs, and royal pains (those are the kids), click here . While the smaller story (the one about the evil twin) deals with Pam Rosenthal's dark, comedic, alter-ego, Molly Weatherfield, author of the erotic cult classic, Carrie's Story , that Playboy listed as #12 (between Lolita and Fear of Flying ) of the 25 sexiest novels ever written -- and which will be the subject of the Naked Reader Book Club's online discussion tomorrow night (Tuesday 4/26) 6-8 PM est. To follow the discussion click here . To register in order to participate, click here . And if you're curious this other side of

Nancy Eliza Kingston lived with her father at 132 Baker Street as early as 1896. She had technically owned the residence since 1890 on the condition that her father be allowed to spend the rest of his life there. When he died in 1899, she was free to do with the house what she pleased. Miss Kingston's birth date is unknown, but according to church records she was baptized in Mariners' Protestant Episcopal Church on May 7, 1854. After the death of her mother, she was raised by her maternal grandparents in Bertie Township, Ontario, just west of Buffalo, New York. Miss Kingston's name occasionally appeared in the " society pages " of the Detroit Free Press after she moved into the home on Baker Street. On November 30, 1902, it was noted: Mrs. [sic] E. N. Kingston gave a dinner Thursday in honor of Miss Stokes, of Erie, Pa. The decorations were American Beauty roses and smilax. She is also mentioned on November 16, 1902: Mrs. E. N. Kingston, No. 132 Baker str

Quick: what did Cleopatra look like? And if the beautiful face that comes most readily to mind is Elizabeth Taylor's from the lumbering 1963 movie extravaganza -- well, until recently it did for me too, and probably would have done so even before Taylor's lamented death last month. With, I'll sheepishly confess, Nefretiri's even more beautiful one a close second in my muddled imagination of the ancient world -- at least until a quick trip to Wikipedia informed me of the little matter of 1300 years intervening between the reigns of the two Egyptian queens. But even taking into account my historical imagination shamelessly in the thrall of pop history and history according to the movies, it turns out to be pretty understandable that I couldn't call an image to mind of a woman whose name has become a byword for fatal female attraction. Because the images we have of Cleopatra -- from an age when public representation of rulers was ubiquitous -- are a paltry few, most

I was thinking last Sunday as I was getting ready to watch the new Upstairs Downstairs series on Masterpiece (who else remembers when it was called Masterpiece Theatre?) on PBS that the original series from the 1970s as well as other Masterpiece Theatre series such as Poldark and The Pallisers , probably mark that point when I well and truly fell madly in love with period drama, (not to mention men in poufy shirts, buff-colored breeches and shiny boots, with swords at their hips, and the full-skirted and full-bosomed women who loved them). The Three Musketeers I was also mad about the Victorian and Edwardian eras. A Glorious Day , a musical adaptation of GB Shaw's Getting Married And from earliest childhood I drew pictures of princesses with flowing tresses and flowing gowns. So I caught the royalty bug early on, too. Guinevere and Lancelot in King Arthur Some years ago in NYC, before I started writing, I founded a nonprofit professional theatre company dedicated to performing

I'd like to express my gratitude to Mary Lou Duncan of the Detroit Society for Genealogical Research, who provided me with valuable additional information about Joseph Kingston, including the name of the village where he was born, the exact church in which he was married, and the not-so-subtle fact that he had two different wives that I had negligently believed to be the same person! * * * * * Joseph Kingston was born November 12, 1817 in Crohane, County Cork, Ireland. He came to Corktown around the early 1850s, where his brothers Thomas and Samuel had already settled. Joseph Kingston was a drayman (one who drove a flatbed cart, called a dray , used to transport large items). Joseph married Eliza Ann Rose in Detroit on October 14, 1852. The marriage record lists the officiant as "M. Hickey" (Manasseh Hickey), pastor of Lafayette Street Methodist Episcopal Church at the time, but the couple were in fact married at Mariners' Protestant Episcopal Church . The marriag

 Fairview School, 1925  With the exception of the Harmony School on Limestone Road, there seems to have been very little written about, and very little attention paid to, the other dozen or so 19th Century schools that once operated in Mill Creek Hundred. When you think about all the children and future community leaders who passed through these schools, it's a shame that few people today even know the names of these schools or where they were located. Even if I'm not able to give too much more information than that, I can at least do that much. In fact, these posts (where I have precious little information) are often the hardest for me to write. It's here that I have to consciously bear in mind that these posts are not an endpoint of authoritative exposition, but rather a starting point for discovery. (That's a nice way of saying that I know very little and I hope we find out more, right?) The particular school we'll look at in this post was known as the Fairvie

Nothing is fair in love and war… Europe’s elite have gathered at the glittering Congress of Vienna—princes, ambassadors, the Russian tsar—all negotiating the fate of the Continent by day and pursuing pleasure by night. Until Princess Tatiana, the most beautiful and talked about woman in Vienna, is found murdered during an ill-timed rendezvous with three of her most powerful conquests… Suzanne Rannoch has tried to ignore rumors that her new husband, Malcolm, has also been tempted by Tatiana. As a protégé of France’s Prince Talleyrand and attaché for Britain’s Lord Castlereagh, Malcolm sets out to investigate the murder and must enlist Suzanne’s special skills and knowledge if he is to succeed. As a complex dance between husband and wife in the search for the truth ensues, no one’s secrets are safe, and the future of Europe may hang in the balance… ” Shimmers like the finest salons in Vienna…a perfect blend of history, mystery, romance, and suspense." - Deborah Crom