While Murder in the City of Liberty draws greatly on the political and sociocultural climate of 1940 Boston, I did take fictional liberties to heighten the atmosphere and tension of Hamish and Reggie’s world in an accessible way.
As a voracious reader of historical fiction, I am most invested in stories that are suffused with enough historical ambience and detail that I am inspired to read more about their settings and time periods, and I sincerely hope readers feel the same.
While the Christian Patriots were a fictional organization, many anti-Semitic and racist groups were rampant in large cities across the United States and many of the viewpoints aligned with Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent became popularized as the war rampaged overseas.
All of the baseball teams and players are fictional, but I did find Ken Burns’s Baseball: An Illustrated History a remarkable snapshot of the racial tensions experienced by players of color in Major League Baseball during the first half of the century.
During the beginning years of World War II in Canada, there were many shifts in the view of psychological evaluation for men enlisting. Psychology was still met with skepticism, but within the higher ranks of personnel selection, greater attention was being placed on determining the psychiatric competence of men fit or unfit for duty. I find it likely that a Canadian doctor would—beyond the censure of his colleagues in the medical field—posit that men with anxiety with episodes and visible symptoms such as Hamish would be seen unfit for duty overseas. After all, many of the men on these committees served themselves in the Great War.
The Cyrus Dallin Museum in Arlington, Massachusetts, was an incredible place to learn more about the man behind the iconic statue in the Prado behind the Old North Church. I highly recommend reading more about the nearly half century it took for the statue to find its rightful place and for Dallin to fulfill his promised commission. As well as on-site research, I found Rell G. Francis’s Cyrus Dallin: Let Justice Be Done a fantastic pictorial guide to this remarkable man and his work.
I did rely on the Massachusetts Historical Society’s impressive range of 1930s maps to attempt to recreate the Boston Reggie and Hamish would have cycled and strolled. All errors in the presentation of history are completely my own.
However, what is wholly accurate is my passion for Boston, its people, its heritage, and its culture.
While I conducted extensive research into how Hamish’s illness would be viewed through the lens of 1930s medicine, I required no research in presenting his symptoms. I have suffered from a panic and anxiety disorder my entire life and am determined to normalize it in the fictional community. I encourage readers to engage with me on social media using the hashtag #FictionForEmpowerment to continue the discussion.