Death of a Proper Bostonian (Old Los Angeles) by Anne Louise Bannon

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Death of a Proper Bostonian (Old Los Angeles)
Historical Mystery
6th in Series
Setting – Boston, 1873
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Healcroft House, Publishers
Publication date ‏ : ‎ June 12, 2026
Digital

A deadly homecoming

It’s August 1873, and at long last, physician and winemaker Maddie Franklin Wilcox makes the journey home to her beloved native Boston. Her business is to deliver her ward and apprentice, Elena Ortiz, to the local women’s medical school, and that also includes visiting her father, her sister and her family.

But at a dinner with the family of Maddie’s late and very much unlamented (at least, on her part) husband, young John Wilcox, a cousin there to entertain the guests with his nature talk, is shot. Then the next morning, the eldest of the Wilcox brothers is found shot in his bed. Maddie quickly concludes that the shooting of the oh, so charming naturalist was but a distraction for the shooting of her former brother-in-law.

Chased by a corrupt Boston police officer, confronted again and again by the relentless prejudice of the city’s medical practitioners, and in danger of losing her heart to young John Wilcox (who had plenty of reasons to want his cousin dead), Maddie’s happy homecoming becomes a morass of suspicion with someone willing to kill her and the people she loves.

Author Guest Post: GETTING HISTORY RIGHT (EVEN WHEN THE CORRECT FACTS AREN’T THERE)

By Anne Louise Bannon

I am constantly researching for my Old Los Angeles series. There is always more to learn about L.A. in the 1870s. There is a fair amount of my learning that has been serendipity, and I’m good with that. For Death of a Proper Bostonian, book six in the series, I read all kinds of histories of Boston’s storied Brahmins, read biographies, read contemporary newspapers, looked at maps and house plans, and even found a rare diary.

And yet, I shudder, wondering what I got wrong. It doesn’t mean I did. But we do live in a society that values perfectionism, and I sometimes succumb to it.

The inherent problem of writing a historical novel is that you can’t get it perfect. This does not mean I don’t try to. I work very hard to make sure my novels are as historically correct as possible. In fact, I double-check even the facts I’m sure of. Why?

Because the “fact” that you know going in will inevitably be the one that gets you in the end. Who me? Read something wrong? Of course, I have. Find something that invalidates something that you’ve already put in two earlier books? Yep. That happened, too.

It was about sterile surgery. When did that come to the United States? Joseph Lister, who practiced in Glasgow, had been working on it for much of the 1860s, publishing his first articles in Britain in 1867. But American doctors were very resistant to European discoveries – it took them decades to accept plaster casting for broken bones, for example, and they were almost as resistant to Lister’s work. I had checked medical history after medical history. One of the research librarians I consulted couldn’t find anything except a reference to an 1875 medical journal article that supported Lister’s work.

If you’re having that much trouble nailing a bit of information down, odds are good that it isn’t available to anyone. So I extrapolated and had my main character, Maddie Wilcox, bemoaning the lack of sterility in my first two books. Just as book three was almost out, I then discovered a website with scans of historical medical journals and found the California Medical Gazette, 1867-1869. Which had Joseph Lister’s article on germ theory and sterile surgery in it. Which meant that Maddie knew that sterile surgery existed before my series even began in 1870. Feh!

I don’t feel that bad about it, though. I did have an out in that Maddie’s home burns up near the end of book two, Death of the City Marshal, with, presumably, all of Maddie’s diaries from before then. And given that Maddie is writing her memoirs many years after the events she relates, well, I can just say that she didn’t remember the incident correctly.

That doesn’t mean that I didn’t recheck my research for Death of a Proper Bostonian, since there is some discussion of medical practice and surgery early on. In fact, I contacted the archives at Boston’s oldest hospital to see what they could tell me. I was told that they had carbolic bandages in 1873, but whether that was part of the surgical process at the time, the archivist didn’t know. I have since found out that it may have been. There are also records of American doctors vilifying Joseph Lister, so maybe not.

There’s always something new to find out, so I will keep up the research. But, hey, if the archivist at the hospital can’t tell me whether something happened or not, if I guessed wrong, you can hardly blame me. Much.

About Anne Louise Bannon

Author Anne Louise Bannon’s husband says that his wife kills people for a living. Bannon does mostly write mysteries, including the Old Los Angeles Series, the Freddie and Kathy series, and the Operation Quickline series. She has worked as a freelance journalist for magazines and newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times. She and her husband, Michael Holland, created a wine education blog, and she co-wrote a book on poisons. She and her husband live in Southern California with an assortment of critters. Visit her website at AnneLouiseBannon.com.

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