On weekday evenings, she said she might do what she calls “writing-adjacent” work, which includes researching/reading (1929 editions of Chicago Daily Tribune), promotional work (writing short articles for different outlets), and events with libraries, book stores, book clubs. Calkins tries to write a few hours on the weekends, in between her kids’ soccer games. Some of the research is still there, and I think I mention Evanston and Northwestern a few times in my books,” she said. I also did some research at the Evanston History Center. But I did spend a lot of time working in Northwestern’s archives, reading through the Northwestern Daily and the yearbooks, as well as some memorabilia that had been left to the university by Northwestern alumnae. So I actually ended up tossing the Northwestern/Evanston connection and moving the whole book to Chicago’s West Side, and one year earlier to get the last glittery year of the Roaring 20s. “However, I started realizing that Gina was a more snappy, scrappy character who became the protagonist. Gina was in my book, as the roommate of my original protagonist.” And even though Evanston was a dry county, I still created a speakeasy for it.

Because I teach the History and Philosophy of Higher Education, I was interested in setting the book on a college campus, especially as I learned about women who attended college back then. “When I was first thinking about writing the book that became “ Murder Knocks Twice,” , I had originally set it in Evanston in 1930. Calkins was asked by her publisher to write a new series. Calkins.Īfter writing four historical mysteries set in 17th-century London, a focus of her studies in graduate school, Ms.

‘My grandmother was a rumrunner off Lake Michigan.’ ‘My great-uncle used to cut Al Capone’s hair.’ So it was not too hard of a stretch to want to write set in this era of flappers, cocktails and gangsters,” said Ms. Everyone seems to have a prohibition story.

“I was always struck by how ‘lived’ Prohibition Chicago still is. Prohibition ended about 70 years before Susanna Calkins joined the faculty at Northwestern University, but in Chicago she noticed it still had a presence.

Murder Knocks Twice by Susanna Calkins