Murder at the Pontchartrain (Sydney Lockhart Mystery #6) by Kathleen Kaska | Spotlight ~ Guest Post from the Author ~ Excerpt
Book Details
Murder at the Pontchartrain by Kathleen Kaska
Series: A Sydney Lockhart Mystery #6
Published by Anamcara Press on June 28, 2023
Genres: Fiction, Detective/Sleuth, Historical Fiction
Format: eBook, Paperback
Pages: 280
I'm Sydney Lockhart. I solve murders, most of which I'm the primary suspect. My boyfriend/partner, Ralph Dixon, and I came to the Pontchartrain Hotel in New Orleans to get married. Instead, Dixon's in jail for a double murder. I'm in a swamp, spying on the KKK.
Helping me untangle this mess is my bubble-headed cousin Ruth who's undercover as a hotel chef. My twelve-year-old charge, Lydia LaBeau, dressed as a voodoo queen, is looking for clues at Pat O'Brien's. Rip Thigbee, a ghost detective, is my only hope.
So, mix yourself a Hurricane and join me in the Big Easy for another historic hotel murder case.
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Excerpt from Murder on the Pontchartrain
By Kathleen Kaska
Ruth and I went back to our hotel room. All I could think about was crawling into bed and disappearing under the sheet.
“What the hell?” Ruth yelled from her doorway. “Did you do this, you little brat?”
It was evident that Lydia had rearranged the furniture and moved Ruth’s clothes. Lydia went into her room and slammed the door. Sharing a hotel room with Ruth meant I’d sleep in a sofa, chair, or on the floor. I’d be lucky to have a flat, lumpy pillow. At least this time there was a cot.
“That child is a royal nuisance.” Ruth stomped her foot. “Her father lets her run wild. She should be in school. She’s certainly not being taught anything at home despite all those home- school textbooks strewn around that bawdy theater. She needs to be taught to behave.”
“I don’t think of Lydia as a child,” I said. “As far as her behavior, I find it refreshing. I have to admit, though, she is smarter than the two of us put together.”
“Oh please. Hey, look at this.” Ruth held up the hotel’s brochure, kicked off her heels and crawled into my bed. “It says Tennessee Williams wrote A Streetcar Named Desire while staying here.
“Yeah, I heard that.”
“I wonder which room he stayed in.”
“The concierge could probably tell you.”
“Why would any playwright name a streetcar Desire as part of the title?”
“Go see the play.”
“He could have named it, A Streetcar Named New Orleans or A Streetcar Named Louisiana.”
“Ruth! He named it Desire after the street in New Orleans named Desire.”
“Why would anyone name a street Desire? What’s wrong with Oak Street or Elm Street, or Main Street?”
“I can’t answer that, Ruth. But you have to admit that the title A Streetcar Named Main, doesn’t have the same ring to it. It’s flat. Something named Desire has a sultry, maybe passionate, or erotic feel.
“Hmmm, now that I think about it, why would anyone name a child Tennessee?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he was born in Tennessee.”
“Thank goodness he wasn’t born in Massachusetts.”
I threw a pillow at her. “I’m getting up early and going to the appliance store. I want you to stay at the hotel and poke around.”
“By the way, I saw the movie a few months ago. It was hard to envision Vivien Leigh as Blanche DuBois. She will always be Scarlet O’Hara. But now that I think about it, I have to agree with you about passionate and sultry. The name Blanche DuBois is, I don’t know, sexy and sultry. But what kind of name is Stanley Kowinski? It just doesn’t fit Marlon Brando.”
“Kowalski!”
“That doesn’t fit either. Brando deserved a better name.”
“It doesn’t work that way, Ruth. The play was written first, and then the movie script, and then the actors were cast.”
I crawled onto my cot and stuffed a pillow over my head. I prayed a room would be available for Ruth tomorrow.
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Guest Post from the Author of Murder at the Pontchartrain
The Sydney Lockhart Mystery Series Summary
The idea to write a mystery series set in different historic hotels came when my husband and I stayed at the Arlington Hotel in Hot Springs, Arkansas, for our annual vacation. We always stayed in the same room, and on this one particular trip, our room wasn’t ready, and we had to wait about three hours.
I started imagining possible reasons for the delay. Was there a plumbing problem? Did someone have a wild party and trash the room? Or something far worse? Did the housekeeping find a dead body? That was it! A dead body was in the bathtub; the guy’s throat had been slit. The police were called, and after they removed the body, it took a while to scour the blood stains off the seventy-five-year-old tile. Of course, the latter didn’t happen, but what if it did?
When you walk into the historic Arlington Hotel, you walk into the past. It’s one of the reasons I love staying here. On Friday nights, there’s ballroom dancing in the lobby with big band dance music by Glenn Miller, Tony Dorsey, and Benny Goodman. Blueberry Hill by Fat Domino is repeated half a dozen times during the evening. And many of the regulars are dressed in period fashion.
It was when my husband and I were dancing that my imagination sparked again. I remembered that the first time I stayed at the Arlington, I was on an assignment to write a travel article for a local magazine. So, what if the mystery series was set in the early 1950s, and my protagonist was a young travel writer assigned to write about spa or luxury hotels? And what if she found a dead body every time she checked it?
Those ideas came to me years ago. Since then, my protagonist Sydney Lockhart has encountered bodies in six different hotels. I spend a lot of time in all the hotels I select. Murder at the Luther, book two, takes place in the old Luther Hotel in Palacios on the Texas Coast, where LBJ and Lady Bird used to stay when he was a Texas senator. I stayed at the Luther so many times they considered naming a room after me.
Book three is set in the 122-year-old Galvez Hotel in Galveston, Texas. In the first half of the 20th century, during prohibition and before Las Vegas became the country’s gambling mecca, Galveston was known as the Playground of the Southwest. Across the street from the hotel, the Balinese Room, a supper club and casino, was built on a pier that jutted out into the Gulf of Mexico. Frank Sinatra and the rest of the Rat Pack, Guy Lombardo, Fred Astaire, Rudy
Vallee and Groucho Marks frequented the establishment while staying at the Galvez. It was only natural that gamblers and gangsters figured into the plot of Murder at the Galvez.
In book four, Sydney and company are in Austin, Texas, at the Driskill Hotel bar on the night a Texas gubernatorial candidate is murdered. By this time, Sydney and Ralph Dixon, an ex- cop she met in Hot Springs, have joined forces and opened their own detective agency. The campaign manager and brother-in-law of the murdered candidate hired Sydney and Dixon to find the killer.
Then on to San Antonio and the Menger Hotel—the oldest continuously operating hotel west of the Mississippi—for Murder at the Menger. Sydney’s on the tail of a notorious bookie, Johnny Pine, who checked into the Menger. She checks into the room next to Pine’s only to find him murdered and herself a suspect.
My latest book has Sydney and Dixon at the Pontchartrain Hotel in New Orleans, where they planned to tie the knot. However, that plan is squelched when a woman is murdered in their hotel room while they are filling out their marriage license at the courthouse. I had a blast researching this book, so Sydney is running all over the Big Easy to find the killer. Murder at the Pontchartrain will be released this June, but you can pre-order now from the publisher or Amazon.
For all who pre-order, I will give you short excerpts as sneak previews of all the places Sydney ends up while she’s in the Big Easy. And if you know Sydney, you know she’s not seeing the sights on a streetcar with the other tourists.
I’ve selected the hotel for book seven, but it is a secret right now. I love getting suggestions for historic hotels from readers, so please leave a suggestion in the comment box. Keep in mind the series is set in the south, but I can be nudged to leave the region if the hotel is too good to pass up.
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About Kathleen Kaska
Kathleen Kaska is the author of the awarding-winning mystery series: the Sydney LockhartMystery Series set in the 1950s and the Kate Caraway Animal-Rights Mystery Series.
Her first two Lockhart mysteries, Murder at the Arlington and Murder at the Luther, were selected as bonus books for the Pulpwood Queen Book Group, the country’s largest book group.
She also writes mystery trivia. The Sherlock Holmes Quiz Book was published by Rowman & Littlefield. Her Holmes short story, “The Adventure at Old Basingstoke,” appears in Sherlock Holmes of Baking Street, a Belanger Books anthology. She is the founder of The Dogs in the Nighttime, the Sherlock Holmes Society of Anacortes, Washington, and a scion of The Baker Street Irregulars.
Watch for Murder at the Pontchartrain: the 6th Sydney Lockhart Mystery in June 2023.
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Purchase Murder at the Pontchartrain online from your local Bookshop!
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Amazon Easy Info Links for Murder at the Pontchartrain
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