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You Should Have Died on Monday
(A Lizzie Stuart Mystery series)
- Overmountain Press; April 1, 2007
ISBN-10: 1570723192
(click on the ISBN to order directly from Amazon.com) - ISBN-13: 978-1570723193
The title of this book comes from an old blues song and appropriately so.
Lizzie Stuart has been looking at her past to some degree since the first
Lizzie Stuart/John Quinn book DEATH’S FAVORITE CHILD. YOU SHOULD HAVE
DIED ON MONDAY will bring Lizzie to the end of one journey and the beginning
of another. As the book opens Professor Stuart is given a lead into
her mother’s past. Lizzie has never known her mother nor the reason
she deserted her as an infant. As she wades through gangsters’ memories
and the music world Ms. Bailey opens a richly drawn world for her reader.
The history is outstanding, her characters resound with realism and her plot
keeps you turning the page until the very last. Like great blues, YOU SHOULD
HAVE DIED ON MONDAY builds to a crescendo of bittersweet sorrow that somehow
manages to offer hope.
-- Ruth Jordan, Crimespree Magazine
Here's an excerpt(PDF file)
Discussion Questions and Resources for You Should Have Died on Monday
Death's Favorite Child
A Silver Dagger Mystery
by Frankie Y Bailey
Overmountain Press; Oct. 2000
ISBN: 1570721467
(click on the ISBN to order directly from Amazon.com)
How I came to write Death’s Favorite Child. . .
. . .I went on vacation to Cornwall and took my characters, Lizzie Stuart and John Quinn, along. It happened when Joy, my best friend from grad school, received a Fulbright award. She was going to Finland to spend a semester teaching there. En route, she and her son Gregory wanted to do some sight seeing. They invited me to meet them for a week at a seaside resort in Cornwall. Although I had more than enough to do to keep me at my desk, once I had seen the images of Cornwall on the Internet, I couldn’t resist. So to salve my conscience, I decided that I would work on a mystery - an Agatha Christie type mystery set at a private hotel - while I was on vacation. However, here, I hasten to say that none of the characters in the book are based on or bear any resemblance at all to the lovely people we met at our hotel. And not even one person was murdered while we were there. In fact, I had it on the authority of the local police inspector that the town had a very, very low homicide rate. But Lizzie was there and Quinn was there, and I was writing a mystery. So inevitably someone died - at least, in my book.
Click here for an excerpt...
A Dead Man's Honor
A Silver Dagger Mystery
by Frankie Y Bailey
Overmountain Press; Oct. 2001
ISBN: 1570721718
(click on the ISBN to order directly from Amazon.com)
Making good use of one’s dissertation. . .
. . .When I sat down to write A Dead Man’s Honor - actually the book I was working on when I went off to Cornwall on vacation - I found myself going back to the dissertation I had written when I was a grad student about crime and justice in Danville, Virginia from 1900-1930. It was as I was researching and writing that dissertation that I really began to think deeply about mob violence, particularly about lynching and how it was related in some people’s minds to the concept of honor. So the book is about what happens in a Southern town on a hot August day in 1921 when the city physician is murdered. It’s about the ripple effect of that murder and the lynching that followed. In the book, Lizzie goes to this town - Gallagher, Virginia -- from which her grandmother, Hester Rose, fled as a 12 year old child.
In describing the city of Gallagher, I confess that I drew on the geography and some of the history of my hometown. But, as in Death’s Favorite Child, the characters are products of my imagination, there because of who they are and the story they have to tell. Actually, there is one character who caught me by surprise. He was supposed to have a walk-on role. But I was so fascinated by him that he ended up playing a more significant role than I anticipated. In fact, the city of Gallagher itself fascinates me so much that Old Murders, the third book in the series - coming in March 2003 - also takes place there.
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Old Murders
March 2003
Silver Dagger Mysteries
ISBN: 1570722188
(Click on the ISBN to order from Amazon.com)
An Execution in Virginia
On August 16, 1912, Virginia Christian became the only female to die in the electric chair in the state of Virginia. She was a 17 year old (her age was the subject of debate) African American juvenile who had been convicted of the murder of her white female employer, Ida Belote. Virginia and her family was sharecroppers on the woman's farm. I discovered the case when I was during research for Blood on Her Hands, a book about women and murder. In Old Murders, I change the details of the case a bit and move it up to 1955. This is the case from the past that Lizzie finds herself probbing as two land developers in present-day Gallagher battle for the contract to develop the city's waterfront. Lizzie is also trying to find out what happened to a talented young artist/Piedmont State student who has gone missing.
Click here for an excerpt of Old Murders
Nonfiction, Anyone?
If you’re interested in reading about the images and stereotypes of black characters in mystery fiction try my Out of the Woodpile: Black Characters in Crime and Detective Fiction (Greenwood, 1991). I wrote it when I was living in Frankfort, Kentucky, just after finishing my dissertation. To my surprise, it was nominated for an Edgar (Mystery Writers of America) in the criticism/biography category. The book begins with Edgar Allan Poe and goes up to 1990 examining all of the crime fiction I could get my hands on and offering my conclusions about how black characters were depicted as the mystery evolved. It includes a “symposium” in which a number of mystery writers (who I had met at conferences or simply wrote to out of the blue) graciously responded to my questions about the portrayal of black characters.
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Popular Culture, Crime, and Justice (edited with Donna Hale) is a volume that offers an introduction to criminal justice as depicted in popular culture/mass media. The book was published by Wadsworth in 1998, and includes chapters by well-known scholars on topics such as violence in popular films, comic books and censorship, the “criminalizing” of popular culture, media and the police, and movie images of police women, of female attorneys, and of prisons. Incidentally, in the introduction, Donna and I mention Murder, She Wrote. Since writing that introduction, I’ve heard a lot - as a writer of traditional mysteries with an amateur sleuth - about the “Jessica Fletcher syndrome.” Wherever Jessica went, murder followed. In the introduction, Donna and I discuss Jessica and the other television sleuths who have had such an impact on popular culture images of crime.
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On a more serious note, “Law Never Here”: A Social History of African American Responses to Crime and Justice (Greenwood, 1999) is a book that Alice Green and I - as African American criminologists - felt the need to write in response to the failure of many other books we had read to acknowledge the varied ways in which black people have responded to perceived oppression by the criminal justice system. In the book, we began with an examination of responses by African (later African-American) slaves to the dual system of justice that began to develop in the colonies (later the United States) in the 17th century. We trace the evolution of the criminal justice system from slavery through Reconstruction and into the 20th century, looking at contributions of the NAACP and other groups to the struggle for justice. We look at the roles of space and place in how African Americans have perceived and experienced the criminal justice system. The book ends in the 1990s with the riots in L.A. and the O.J. Simpson trial.
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Other non-fiction books by Frankie Y. Bailey:
Blood on Her Hands
- by Wadsworth Publishing; 1 edition August 2004
- ISBN: 0534197752
Famous American Crimes and Trials
- by Praeger Publishers October 2004
- ISBN: 0275983331