Green-Wood: Where the Dead Go in Brooklyn

Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn occupies the highest point in that famed borough and the site of the Revolutionary War Battle of Brooklyn.  From the grounds, one can see the Statue of Liberty in the harbor to the west.  Now a National Historic Landmark and on the Registry of Historic Places, Green-Wood was founded in 1838 by Henry Evelyn Pierrepont, a Brooklyn social leader. Among the first subscribers was the Van Ness family, who were descended from very early Dutch settlers and were the ancestors of my beloved mother-in-law, Ruth Van Ness Clark.  Ruth’s remains now repose among those beautiful rolling hills.

A tourist attraction for more than 150 years, Green-Wood now draws half a million visitors a year.  It boasts a magnificent chapel designed by Warren and Wetmore, who also designed Grand Central Terminal.  Many of the most famous and infamous New Yorkers are buried there, including Boss Tweed, Theodore Roosevelt Sr, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Leonard Bernstein.  At this moment in spring, it is glorious with blossoming trees and still gorgeous despite the devastation wrecked by Hurricane Sandy.  Here are photos taken this past Monday, when I played hooky and went on a delightful jaunt there with my friend Jay and left some spring flowers for Ruth.

Grave of Louis Moreau Gottschalk

Here is a movement from one of Gottschalk's symphonies in case you need an introduction to his music.

A Van Ness family mausoleum.  Not from our branch of the family.

 

Ruth is buried somewhere among those small tombstones in the background. Not so ritzy a place, but also not so cosmologically confused.

Memorial to the Battle of Brooklyn

Very simple grave marker for Leonard Bernstein and here is a clip of his music to go with the red white and blue.

Now just some random shots to show you how lovely and interesting Green-Wood is:

Annamaria Alfieri

The Historian Sleuth

Triss Stein, multi-talented mystery author, is a bright star in the firmament of mystery writing. A former native of Watertown, New York, after degrees at Brandeis and Columbia in history, classical studies and library science, she embarked on a fascinating career that would provide material and talent for future exciting novels, including consulting for McKinsey and Company, children's librarian, and staffs of publishers DC Comics and Conde Nast.

Her successful novels, Murder at the Class Reunion and Digging Up Death, paved the way for her current popular novel, published by Poisoned Pen Press, Brooklyn Bones.

Active in MWA-NY and SinC, Triss recently managed the SinC research study on mystery readers.

We are delighted to welcome this gifted, creative New York writer here today!

Thelma Straw

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I have a confession to make. I might be the only woman mystery writer in the US who never liked Nancy Drew. My interest in mysteries did not come from my childhood fiction reading at all, but I am beginning to suspect that it might have come from my interest in history and archaeology.

Think about it. The historian or the archeologist digs down through the facts, documents and artifacts to arrive at the truth. Or anyway, “A” truth. Or at least a narrative. Doesn’t that sound familiar? The PBS program, History Detectives, shows us how they do it, and naturally I adore the show. Of course I know that in the show they take a few short cuts, but that’s television. And I have on my desk a 1968 book called The Historian as Detective: Essays as Evidence, edited by Robin Winks, who was all of the following: a distinguished Yale history professor, a mystery fan and an Edgar winner for Best Critical Work.

Real history is full of real unsolved crimes. What did happen to those princes in the Tower? Did Robert Dudley’s wife fall down the stairs or was she pushed, and how much did Queen Elizabeth I know? Poe’s lost last days? Meriwether Lewis’ questionable demise? And who can forget Judge Crater?

In fact, I started Brooklyn Bones not with a sleuth but with a crime—old bones in an old house—and a historian came to mind as the right person to solve it. I made her an urban historian so she would naturally be interested in the context—the time and place—of the crime. I gave her a partly-written dissertation about the dynamics of neighborhood change in Brooklyn because I live in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, so does she (not coincidentally, the same one), and the old house with the bones is hers. I gave her a child, because I wanted to write about being a parent. I gave her a teen-age child because—well, conflict is good for plotting!

As she came alive in my mind and started talking to me, I realized I had found my perfect heroine. She’s younger than I am, has a completely different background, she’s a lot more impulsive, a lot less worldly, a lot more street smart. But I know what drives her and I can send her to research life in the past in a way that smashes right into conflicts of life in the present. The mini-mansion mausoleums of historic Green-Wood cemetery? The Jewish gangsters of Brownsville? The Brooklyn Navy Yard when it was operating around the clock to help save the world? The lost and found freed slave community of Weeksville? Erica is never going to run out of old Brooklyn stories to research. And because there are more than bones in those mausoleums, Brownsville still has gangs, and the later fate of the Navy Yard, a large piece of waterside real estate, was much debated, I am never going to run out of modern crimes.

Asking questions. Digging up answers. Understanding what happened then and how it affects now. A historian sleuth makes a lot of sense to me.

Triss Stein
TrissStein.com

Criminal Intent

Glenville Lovell grew up in Barbados where he developed a passion for stories which unfolded with the mystery of dreams. He is the author of a collection of stories: Going Home in Chains and four novels: Fire in the Canes and Song of Night (Soho Press); Too Beautiful to Die and Love and Death in Brooklyn (Penguin). His shorts stories are featured in several anthologies including Queens Noir and Best African-American Stories 2010.

I met Glenville when he spoke on an MWA Dinner panel eight years ago. Then I read his two novels with an African-American ex-cop PI protagonist, 'Too Beautiful To Die' and 'Love and Death In Brooklyn'. What I loved about the books were their setting in Caribbean Brooklyn, home turf of the West Indian Day Parade--an exotic, ever-lively event that I'd policed in the 1970s---and his hero who sounded and behaved like the NYPD undercover cop he'd been. I asked Glenville to give me a story for 'Queens Noir' and he didn't disappoint. Read "Out of Body," set in South Jamaica, Queens where he'd lived, and see for yourself.

Robert Knightly

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One of the coolest things about being a published writer is getting to meet fans and readers at public events. I love talking readers and fans anywhere I can. And writers will agree that we get all kinds of interesting question when we’re out promoting a book. One of the questions I often get when people discover that I was born on the beautiful island of Barbados is this: How does somebody who grew up on a peaceful island like Barbados get to write crime novels? What do you know about about killers and criminals? The first time I was lobbed this question I really didn’t have an answer, because I’d never contemplated how or why I became a writer of mystery novels. I mean, what exactly was the person asking? Ironically, the question came from a fellow writer who was born in Jamaica. I’ve gotten the question several other times since and now have a more studied response.

Yes, I grew up in rather idyllic surroundings: beautiful sunshine, friendly neighbors, daily breezes off the sea to cool hot heads and hearts. Murders were unheard of at the time. So what? Does that mean that nobody in my quiet village ever contemplated murder, ever contemplated waylaying a rival for a woman’s affection with the intent of ending the rivalry once and for all? C’mon! Isn’t it part of human nature whether we were born in the bowels of poverty and despair in some crummy inner city neighborhood, or in the lap of luxury in the loftiest tower in Manhattan, or dare I say it, in a quiet village in Paradise?

This was brought home quite forcibly to me in 1986. One cold January night I got a call from my sister that my youngest brother had been stabbed to death in Brooklyn. I traveled from my home in Manhattan to see my brother’s frozen body sprawled in the street. It was an eerie experience. I think I might’ve had an out-of-body experience at the time because I don’t remember having any emotions. I remember looking at the body, but it was as if another person had taken over my body.

I obsessed about my brother’s killer for about a year. My intent was to get rid of him one way or another. I didn’t care how. The police were dragging their feet making an arrest. The lead detective had too many cases on his hands. Everybody knew who the killer was, but none of the witnesses wanted to talk. I went to a friend of mine, a former marine marksman, and begged him to teach me about guns. He refused because he knew quite well what my intentions were. So, I was left to stew. I began to contemplate what forces had thrown my brother and his killer together to produce the result that left my family pondering whether moving from Barbados to New York had been a sound move. What would’ve gone through the killer’s mind before he stuck a 10 inch blade in my brother’s neck on a Brooklyn street? Why did he follow my brother out into the street instead of going off in the other direction? What was his real intention?

I began to work on a story called: When Blood Runs to Water, which I published many years later. As I delved into the background of my brother’s killer—who ironically had emigrated from Barbados like my brother—discovering that violence had swirled around him for a long time, I became more and more fascinated by how he and my brother ended up in a hazy basement room gambling together. And I became convinced that this guy would’ve killed someone at some point in his life.

Nowadays, whenever I sit down to write, I remember my brother. I remember how I wanted to know as much about his killer as I could. I remember my quest to understand what forces threw them together that night. I remember the disgust and disillusionment of the lead detective on the case. One of the joys of writing crime fiction is that you get to use character to offer insight into the social, political and moral climate around you. And in the end, you catch the bad guys.

(Aside: It’s sort of ironic that when I began to write crime novels, the name of my hero turned out to be Blades Overstreet.)

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Visit Glenville Lovell's website or follow him on Facebook or Twitter:

www.glenvillelovell.com
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