In downtown Big Grove (a.k.a.
Champaign, Illinois) there’s a new bar and restaurant called Seven Saints. It
used to be a sporting goods store and before that, a drugstore—with a speakeasy
on the second floor. According to a 1999 newspaper article, patrons of the
speakeasy escaped out a back door into an adjoining building and through an
underground steam tunnel to avoid Prohibition agents. This part of town,
conveniently located near the railroad station, was chock-full of illegal
speakeasies, “blind pigs,” gambling dens, and houses of ill repute during the
1920s. Blind pigs were legitimate stores such as laundries, candy stores, or
lawyers’ offices that housed speakeasies hidden away in the back or on another
floor.
When I
began to write my first historical mystery, The
Bootlegger’s Nephew, I thought my theme would be archaeology in its “Wild
West” days, before it became an academic discipline. To my surprise,
Prohibition and the practice of pre-antibiotics medicine took over. With the
year 1923 as my starting point, I plunged into a world of cheerful corruption:
bribery, transporting bad booze, and all kinds of illegal behavior by perfectly
ordinary citizens. My research taught me about the resurgence of the Ku Klux
Klan in Illinois and Indiana, rabid anti-immigrant prejudice, the changing
roles of women, and birth control in the age of Margaret Sanger.
Unexpected
characters strolled onto my stage. My protagonist, Doc Earl “Illinois” Junker,
is a forty-year-old physician and an amateur archaeologist who accepts
artifacts looted from local sites instead of cash for medical treatments. Doc
Junker travels his community in his Model-T Ford dealing with farm accidents,
difficult pregnancies, and illnesses caused by imbibing adulterated liquor
along with prescription medicines and home remedies. His daughter Anna, a
nursing student who frequents local speakeasies, helps him track down a
murderer and break up a local gang of bootleggers.
Martha
Junker, Anna’s mother and Earl’s wife, is the other heroine. Martha is a rather
straight-laced German immigrant, the daughter of an alcoholic and a member of
the local temperance league. Encouraged by a fellow immigrant, Martha breaks
out of her usual roles of obedient wife and strict mother and becomes a bar
maid in an effort to locate illegal liquor distribution hubs.
>Born and raised on the East Coast, I had no clue the
Midwest would become my home. Writing this book led me to take an architectural
history tour of our university town, visit local archives, sit mesmerized in
front of Ken Burn’s PBS series on Prohibition, and soak up the stories of local
residents. All this has enriched my appreciation of where I live.
