(The Dutchman Series)

Trivia of the Month:
Did you know that "close" buttons in elevators are often just for show? They don't affect the doors at all, the doors close automatically; the buttons are just there to give us the illusion of control.
The Olde English "spede" as in "God-spede," (or God-speed) originally meant "may God prosper (you)." i.e. good fortune, back in 1250.

HISTORY IN AN HISTORICAL NOVEL

Over the years, as we've researched and written THE DUTCHMAN(1664), THE KINGSBRIDGE PLOT(1775-6), THE HIGH CONSTABLE(1808), THE DUTCHMAN'S DILEMMA (1675), THE HOUSE ON MULBERRY STREET(1895),and THE LUCIFER CONTRACT(1864), we have spent hours at the New-York Historical Society and in the New York Public Library, reading about those who walked the streets of Manhattan during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.

We've poured over maps and read about food and clothing, furniture, weapons, the flora and fauna, politics, religion, and social issues. We've wandered the City of New York. At first we limited ourselves to the fifteen hundred feet from the tip of the island to Wall Street that was New Amsterdam, bordered on three sides by water and on the fourth by a wooden wall.

We try to be historically accurate. Hogs did run in the streets. Pearl Street was paved with oyster shells. Most of the citizens of New Amsterdam were against fighting the English. Pieter Stuyvesant did free African slaves on their petition. Pavonia was the name for the land (New Jersey today) across the North River. Nutten Island is now called Governors Island. Asser Levy was the first kosher butcher in New Amsterdam. Pieter Tonneman was schout of New Amsterdam in 1664, during the time THE DUTCHMAN is set. He was also the first sheriff of New York.

In 1808, the time of THE HIGH CONSTABLE, the City fathers were so sure the City limit would always be Chambers Street, they ordered the outside walls of City Hall be marble on three sides, leaving the back side common brownstone. After all, only the beasts and birds of the forest would see it.

Fans of the series wrote to us demanding we return to Pieter Tonneman so that they could discover what happened to Tonneman and the Jewish widow with whom he'd fallen in love. We did just that in THE DUTCHMAN'S DILEMMA, and in doing so, were able to deal with the seventeenth century hysteria about witches, to which by and large the City of New York never surrendered.

With THE HOUSE ON MULBERRY STREET, we took a forward leap into the late nineteenth century, when the City of New York was grasping at the twentieth century, but its feet were still planted solidly in the nineteenth. Pieter Tonneman's descendants are still cops, but the Force is corrupt, waiting for the new commissioners (one of whom is Theodore Roosevelt) to take charge. Our mystery here hinges on the art of photography.

THE LUCIFER CONTRACT is a Civil War thriller, based on an actual historical event known as the Incendiary Plot. It happened in New York in 1864, when a group of Confederate officers slipped into the City with the intent to embarrass Abraham Lincoln and create havoc on Election Day.

The most amazing thing we have discovered is that New Amsterdam, Colonial, and post-Colonial New York, in terms of people and what moves them, are strikingly similar to New York City today.

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