Alyssa Maxwell – Gilded Newport Mysteries

The Joys of Binge Reading

Alyssa Maxwell – Gilded Newport Mysteries

September 09, 2024

Alyssa Maxwell is the author of the acclaimed Gilded Age, Newport mystery series featuring Emmaline Cross. She’s a Vanderbilt by heritage, a Newporter by birth and a force to be reckoned with. Each book is set in a famous Newport Gilded Age mansion, some of them still open for viewing.

Welcome to the Joys of Binge Reading, the show for anyone who ever got to the end of a great book and wanted to read the next instalment. We interview successful series authors and recommend the best in mystery, suspense, historical and romance series, so you’ll never be without a book you can’t foot down.

You’ll find this episode’s show notes, a free ebook, and lots more information at the joys of binge reading.com. And now here’s our show.

Hi, I’m your host, Jenny Wheeler, and in the last Binge Reading episode for a while, we talk to Alyssa about her fascination for historical mysteries, resulting in the widely praised, 12 books series, with Book #1, Murder At The Breakers. premiering as a Hallmark movie earlier this year.

We’re going to be talking about the latest book om the series today, Murder at Vinand. Emma must stop a bold poisoner who was targeting the society wives of the 400 in Gilded Age Newport, Rhode Island.

As I’ve announced a few posts ago, this is going to be the last episode of The Joys of Binge Reading podcast for a while. We’re taking a break, maybe permanently, after 300 episodes, but you can always catch up on your favorite authors in the published shows, which are currently being posted to YouTube as well.

Our Book Giveaway

Our free book giveaway for this episode is Sadie’s Vow, the first book in my Home At Last mystery series, set in Gilded Age San Francisco.

You’ll find the links to download in the show notes for this episode on the website, the joys of binge reading.com.

SADIE’S VOW – FREE BOOK

HERE’S THE LINK IF THE BUTTON DOESN’T WORK…

https://dl.bookfunnel.com/rg3g2284e7

As I say, this is the last show for me for a while. I want to use my time to write more books. I’ve loved the time that I’ve spent talking to and researching the authors that I’ve featured on the show. Many of them, I love to still read the books, but it is just now time for a change.

Links to things mentioned in the show

Gilded Age: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Age

Cornelius Vanderbilt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornelius_Vanderbilt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornelius_Vanderbilt_II

Consuelo Vanderbilt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consuelo_Vanderbilt

Consuelo Second Husband: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Balsan

Alva Vanderbilt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Balsan

Nellie Bly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nellie_Bly

Sleuths In Time: https://www.facebook.com/SleuthsInTime/

Newport: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newport,_Rhode_Island

Saratoga: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saratoga_Springs,_New_York

Newport Preservation Society: https://www.newportmansions.org/

The Breakers: https://www.newportmansions.org/mansions-and-gardens/the-breakers/

A Lady and Lady’s Maid mysteries: https://www.alyssamaxwell.com/ladys-maid-books

Arleigh House: https://househistree.com/houses/arleigh

Where to find Alyssa Maxwell online

Website: alyssamaxwell.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alyssa.maxwell.750

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alyssamaxwellauthor/

Introducing historical mystery author Alyssa Maxwell

Alyssa Maxwell: Gilded Newport mysteries

Now it’s time for Alyssa.

Jenny Wheeler: Hello there, Alyssa, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.

Alyssa Maxwell: Thank you, Jenny, for having me on.

Jenny Wheeler: Your Gilded Newport Mysteries have attracted great reviews, and you’ve also got the first book in the series now as a Hallmark movie. Congratulations on that.

Tell us firstly, why did you find the Gilded Age a fascinating period to write about and what do you think its attraction is for readers?

Alyssa Maxwell: For me, the fact that’s what Newport is most known for. Newport, Rhode Island is probably the biggest collection of Gilded Age mansions to be found anywhere, especially in such close proximity to each. Other. You could basically walk from one to the next as you’re going down Bellevue Avenue in Newport.

My husband’s from Newport, so I knew I wanted to set my series there, and I went with the Gilded Age because it is the most recognizable and famous thing about the city.

Jenny Wheeler: What is it that attracted the rich people to Newport? It became the summertime playground of the rich, didn’t it?

Alyssa Maxwell: They had been going to Saratoga for a couple of decades, I think, but Saratoga began to get old. They were getting bored with it. It was attracting what they considered a lesser crowd, so they needed a new place to go. Now Newport had been the summer playground of wealthy Southerners before the Civil War, so it already had a reputation as a summer resort kind of town.

Saratoga Springs is out, Newport is in

I guess they decided, Saratoga’s out, let’s go explore Newport. And they did. And decided this was where they were gonna build not only their houses, but their summer society. It was very much a society going on there. It had its own rules and its own etiquette, much as New York did the rest of the year.

Jenny Wheeler: I’m just interested in your comment about it being a playground for Southerners before the Civil War. After the Civil War, did that sort of rich southern society fade out a bit?

Alyssa Maxwell: Oh yeah. As soon as the war started, of course, they stopped coming. They had to stop coming, and after the war the money was gone for the vast majority of them. That was no longer an option.

The thing is, they didn’t tend to build mansions. they built smaller houses or they stayed in hotels because for them, the whole pastoral setting of the New England coastline was the attraction.

They were very outdoorsy. They didn’t have balls so much as, I think picnics, and outdoor kind of activities. It’s a simpler lifestyle.

Jenny Wheeler: Your key investigator, Emma Cross, is remotely related to the Vanderbilt family. Now, the Vanderbilts, they’re an extremely well-known name in American history. Tell us a bit about that family and her relationship to them.

The famed Vanderbilt family

Alyssa Maxwell: The family, of course, or the main part of it, was started with the first Cornelius Vanderbilt, who they called the Commodore. He started off in local shipping. And built that up into a railroad industry, little by little.

Emma would be his, I believe, great granddaughter. So, it’s a few generations removed.

And the reason she’s not a rich Vanderbilt is because she descends from one of the Commodore’s daughters.

He was a curmudgeon and he didn’t believe in leaving his daughters the vast fortunes that, he left his son William. By the time Emma’s generation comes along, most of it’s depleted, and what little money she has, she earns by working as a reporter.

But also she inherited a small annuity from a great aunt on her mother’s side of the family. So she is not living off the Vanderbilt wealth except for her contemporary relatives.

They have welcomed her into their lives when they’re in Newport and they do help her from time to time. They’re not gonna let her starve. They insisted on installing a telephone in her house so that she wouldn’t be so isolated out there in the Ocean Drive.

She has a nice relationship with them, but she doesn’t like to be beholden to them.

Following in the footsteps of Nellie Bly

Jenny Wheeler: Now, as you mentioned, she is a newspaper reporter, which would be a very unusual thing in that period, particularly for a woman of her social status. But you do have a bit of a model for her, don’t you, in the real life person of Nellie Bly. Tell us a bit about that and how you came to, to feel that it was okay to make her a newspaper reporter.

Alyssa Maxwell: Actually in the beginning of the series, she’s the society columnist for a local paper. So that was actually something women could do at the time. They could write about the balls and the fashions and who took what vacation or who’s gonna marry whom. That was okay. That was considered, women’s interests.

Of course she wants more. She wants to be a real news reporter. And that’s where I got the inspiration from Nelly Bly, who was a Gilded Age reporter and did things. She broke a lot of rules to get her story. She took a lot of risks and that is my inspiration. Nelly was unusual.

There weren’t a lot of women doing that, but she proved to a lot of readers that a woman could get a story and write well about it. This is where I modeled Emma, to a large extent.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes. It’s wonderful in a sense that each of the books features one of those historic houses, the amazing houses they built. Many of them still standing and able to be visited today. Tell us about that.

Murder at Vinland, the latest book. Are you still able to go to Vinland, for example?

Murder in Vinland

Alyssa Maxwell: Only if you’re a college student. Vinland and Wakehurst and Ochre Court, each of those have been books in my series. They are all part of Salve Regina University. They’re not open for tours to the public, but the students use them. They’re administrative offices, offices their classrooms.

They’re very functional. They’re still used today. Other houses like the Breakers’ Marble House, and The Elms, these are all part of the Preservation Society of Newport Counties. Properties that they maintain as museums, so people can go in and out and, see all these things that I’m writing about, and I get to go in them and do my research even more importantly.

Jenny Wheeler: Fantastic. We mentioned at the beginning about one of the books being a Hallmark movie, and that was book one in the series, Murder at the Breakers. That was a movie that featured Cornelius Vanderbilt, the original Vanderbilt’s grandson, as part of the story. Is that still showing on Hallmark?

Could people still see it?

Alyssa Maxwell: It comes and it goes. It repeated a few times in February and I think in March. I don’t know what their schedule is. They don’t tell me, but I would assume it’ll be on again eventually.

These are movies, so they’re not like regular television shows that are on every week like a series that you’d sit down and watch every week.

They pop up, they go away for a while, others come and go?

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Murder at the Breakers

Jenny Wheeler: Did you have much to do with the making of the movie? Were you very involved in it at all?

Alyssa Maxwell: No, not at all. No. My creative input was writing the book. And then they took it from there. I wasn’t consulted about anything.

Jenny Wheeler: And are you happy with the result?

Alyssa Maxwell: I’m happy. There’s always gonna be things that I wish either they had done differently or things that they had included. It’s my book and I wrote it all and it’s all important to me, but you can’t fit everything in a book, in an hour and a half. It is just not possible.

And I think that’s why they don’t consult with writers. I think it’s because they know that for us, we’re too involved in it. We are gonna want all those things included that can’t be.

Jenny Wheeler: Sure. Book Two, Murder at Marble House features another fascinating real life figure, and that’s Consuelo Vanderbilt. She’s got an amazingly sad story as an absolutely beautiful, rich girl who her mother Alice, almost sold off to an English Duke.

Her mother wanted the status of having a Duke in the family, and the Duke needed the Vanderbilt money, but it was a rather ill-fated pairing, wasn’t it.

Tell us a bit about that.

Alva Vanderbilt – the ultimate pushy mother

Alyssa Maxwell: It was. Alva Vanderbilt was her mother. Alva was a very ambitious woman. I really think that so many of the Gilded Age women were highly intelligent, assertive, and aggressive in a way that today would’ve allowed them to be CEOs and lawyers and, any other kind of career you might think of.

But then they couldn’t, and so they had to channel their talents and abilities and all of that into domestic affairs, which had to have been incredibly frustrating. But, there it was.

One of Alva’s outlets was to arrange a glorious marriage for her daughter. Now, Consuelo, at the time of the engagement, was already in love with another man, an American, and she planned to marry him.

They had an understanding. Alva would have none of it. She even went so far as to practically lock Consuelo in her room at Marble House while they awaited the Duke’s arrival from England so that they could make it official and get them engaged. They really had nothing in common.

He was coming for her money. They say she went down the aisle with tears in her eyes. I don’t know if that’s true. It may have been it probably was true. Unfortunately, immediately in the marriage they knew it wasn’t gonna work, so she, birthed the “heir and the spare,” and after that they pretty much lived separate lives.

She made the most of her time over there as a Duchess. She was very involved in charity work. She had a little home of her own near, I think it was just outside of London, where she would entertain artists and poets and writers and those kind of people. She enjoyed that. And, by the time of World War I she was no longer having anything to do with her husband.

He was in love with somebody else. And after the war, she met her second husband, a Frenchman Jacques Balsan. They married and were happy. So she did finally have the life she wanted and she reunited and, made up with her mother and they were able to have a good relationship for the rest of Alva’s life.

It took a while to get to happy ending

Jenny Wheeler: Oh that’s great.

Alyssa Maxwell: Yes. There was a happy ending, but it took a while to get there.

Jenny Wheeler: Over the course of the series. Emma herself has two significant romantic attachments in her life. Without giving too much away, for those who haven’t started reading the series yet, explain a bit about her romantic dilemmas and what she has to make a choice between.

Alyssa Maxwell: I know a lot of people groan when they hear romantic triangles, but Emma’s life is a triangle in a way. She’s Vanderbilt. She is just an ordinary Newporter. She’s a working woman. And so these men that come into her life, one is an ordinary Newporter, he’s a police detective.

The other one is a wealthy. He’s an heir to a newspaper empire. They represent those two sides of her life, and which side is she gonna go with? I

t would be easier to go with a detective because this is more the life she lives for most of the year. But the rich guy, she has to admit, ignites her passions more.

But then on the other hand, there’s that third angle of her maybe just wanting to remain an unmarried, independent woman, because in those days, a married woman had to give up a lot of her autonomy, her independence. So it’s all a dilemma for her,

Jenny Wheeler: Fantastic. You have another mystery series that I’d like to mention, and that’s called The Ladies and Ladies Maid Series, and it’s set in England post-World War II. It’s been described as ‘for Downton Abbey fans’ because it’s dealing with that period when the aristocracy in England was facing a huge amount of social change.

Tell us about that series. I guess that was the first series you wrote, was it? How did you get started in your writing?

Downton Abbey with a mystery twist

Alyssa Maxwell: The Newport mysteries did come first, and then I got into I the second series. I had already written the first two or three of the Newport series, I think, when my editor came up with the idea of a Downton Abbey series with a mystery twist.

I’m a huge fan. In fact, I’m be watching them again now. I haven’t seen them in a little while, so I thought it was time.

I chose that time period. I could have said it anywhere after the turn of the 19th century, early 20th century. But I picked that.

I didn’t wanna get bogged down in the war. I thought that would take over so much of the narrative. It was so complicated, so much and the tragedy and all of that, but the years immediately following were also very complicated because the war did away with so much of the class values.

They weren’t gone. The classes, were still very much there, but the edges were blurred between, the poor, the middle class, and the wealthy, because when the men went off to war, they were fighting side by side and they depended on each other.

And so did the women. The women were home, were raising money and gathering supplies and rolling bandages. And again, they worked side by side, the wealthy and the, the poor. Everybody had to pitch in. And when the men came home …. well so many of them, so many of them did not come home.

So many were maimed. That they said a whole generation of men were lost and a whole generation of women might not ever find husbands. The women left behind had to work.

They began working during the war because they had to fill in the labor gap and when the men came home, suddenly women were expected to stay home and make babies, but there weren’t the husbands available to do that with.

Women had to fight to keep those jobs in the workplace. It was a very complicated and a very flux time. Things were very much changing. And Downton Abbey goes into that quite a bit in the Post-War years. I just, I find that interesting.

During the war, everybody knew what their role was. There was a job you had to do and you did it. But after the war, it was confusing. What do I do? Do I have a job? Do I talk to this man who’s wealthier than I am or can I not? It was very confusing and I find that fascinating.

An ‘Old school’ approach to research

Alyssa Maxwell: Yes, that’s a tricky one, because it’s such a delicate balance. I think since I’m writing mysteries, I always know in the forefront of my mind that the mystery has to take precedence over everything else because if it’s not a a good mystery, the rest of it isn’t gonna matter.

I always start when I begin a series with a stack of books. It’s old school. I go to the library, I go to the used book networks online, and I hunt and I look for interesting things.

I love newspapers or something I just love to research with. I have one of those subscriptions to archive newspapers that go back, as, as far back as, as I’ve needed.

Jenny Wheeler: It must have involved a huge amount of research, both series actually. How do you go about tackling that research and how do you go about balancing fact and fiction?

And, there isn’t a lack of information on either time period. So that’s a big help. It’s all available. You just have to look for it. You just have to read it. And I like that history is the framework for both series. It’s the stage, but everything going on the stage is the mystery and the fiction and my imagination of work.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes That’s a lovely way to look at it. You’ve got some wonderful tips on your website about visiting Newport and the places you should go and the things you should see. Just give us a quick little rundown, maybe the five things you think visitors to Newport should include in their itinerary.

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