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| Florence Griswold Museum, Lyme, CT |
Ann Blair Kloman
is the author of three mysteries and is currently at work on her fourth book. Learn
more about Ann and her books at her website.
The
Mystery of Old Lyme, Connecticut
I’ve been reading murder mysteries since my
teens, planning on writing my own novels. But, raising four rambunctious
children and welcoming ten equally wild grandchildren seemed to force
continuing postponements, until my husband and I retired in 1994, moving east
to Lyme, Connecticut.
I volunteered at our local art establishment, the
Lyme Art Association, located in Old Lyme, just a few miles south of our new
home, and became fascinated with the artists and their techniques. There are an
amazing number of artists of all genres living in the area, some poor and
others definitely nowhere close to starving, And I finally had time to
construct my first mystery, located in the fictional town of Elmore Harbor,
Maine, clearly modeled after the town where we spent some of every summer,
Tenants Harbor. It was published in 2005.
My second featured a series character from the
first who traveled from Maine to Wyoming, Stockholm, and Bermuda, places I had
visited and enjoyed. When I started my third book, I naturally considered Old
Lyme as a possible murder scene. So not set one in the Lyme Art Association?
Old Lyme is a relatively tiny village, of some
7,600 residents, enlarged each summer by vacationers. Created in 1665 when its
settlers split off from Saybrook, across the Connecticut River, it features
shorelines along that river and Long Island Sound and many examples of fine
architecture. Its flourishing art colony includes not only the Art Association,
but also the adjacent Florence Griswold Museum and the Lyme Academy College of
Fine Arts (now apart of the University of New Haven.) The towns of Old Lyme and
Lyme (five miles up the river) are also known as the place Lyme disease was
first detected in 1975.
Here I arranged for a local artist to be nastily
stabbed in the eye with a paintbrush and had my protagonist just miss her own
demise at an old house above the Sound where I spent many mornings with a
writing group.
Many moldering old mansions cling to the shore of
Long Island Sound . The one where I set a murder is also reputedly haunted. It
is a huge shingled warren of rooms full of Dickensian atmosphere, and home to
an eclectic jumble of valuable antiques. A circular dumbwaiter rises from
the old basement kitchen to the second level pantry off the dining room. The
house is structurally bizarre but solid. It survived the Hurricane of
Thirty-Eight, and, despite heavy damage from other storms along the
northeastern coast, still reigns intact on a hill above the shore. One’s first
sight on arriving, after winding up the long drive, is eerie. The shingles have
darkened with age and there’s a conical eighteen thousand gallon water tank
rising over one corner of the roof like a giant witch’s hat.
And it was in that water tank where I tried to
dispatch my heroine!
A Diamond to Die For
Do painters often resort to murder?
This question is posed in A
Diamond to Die For, Ann Blair A woman, a hand, a diamond? Mystery! At least
for Isobel Van Dursan, the peripatetic "hit-woman" who continuously
finds herself embroiled in murders, by both her own hand and others. A diamond
ring is the focus of this new novel which carries the reader from Newport, RI,
to Bainbridge Island, WA, and Old Lyme, CT, before returning to Isobel’s home
base of Elmore Harbor, Maine.
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Thanks for the photos, Ann. I went to college in Vermont, and traveled from Philadelphia to VT by train. I loved passing through CT. It's a beautiful area especially in the Fall.
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