While devising a heroine for a murder mystery set in 1660s London, Susanna Calkins (MA’95, PhD LA’01) didn’t want her to be from the upper classes. Lucy Campion begins as a chambermaid for a magistrate and, despite a lack of education, uses her common sense to solve a murder.

“I envisioned Lucy as a hardworking servant, probably because I imagine that’s what I would have been had I been alive in the 17th century,” she says. “Lucy learns to read and write by listening to scholars tutor the magistrate’s daughter. I thought it would be more interesting if Lucy were not overly educated and had to piece together clues the best she could. All over the world, there have been cases of people who push against social restrictions to be able to read and write, and I wanted Lucy to be one of them. She ends up working for a printer in the next books, even writing anonymous penny pieces.”

A Murder at Rosamund’s Gate, published in 2013 and the first of six books in the Lucy Campion series, occurs during the plague and the Great Fire of London in 1665–1666. The fifth and sixth books are scheduled to be published in the next two years.

“I didn’t get serious about the first book until I’d graduated from Purdue, become an assistant professor of history, and started a family,” Calkins says. “My younger son broke his leg, and I had to stay home with him. I remember playing trains with him with my left hand while writing my novel in my right hand.” After 10 years of writing, she told her husband, Matt Kelley (MS HHS’98, PhD HHS’01), “I think I’ve written a book.”

At Purdue, Calkins explored Early English Books, a collection of sermons, ballads, broadsides, and pamphlets presenting glimpses into daily life and the social and political culture of England from the 15th to 18th centuries.

“One of the things that stayed with me was this story you’d see repeated over and over: a woman was found murdered, and in her pocket was a note that would say something like ‘Dear sweetheart, meet me in this glen at midnight. Don’t tell anyone. Your sweetheart,’ and then a signature,” says Calkins, who is a director at the Searle Center for Advancing Learning and Teaching at Northwestern University. “But I was always wondering ‘Who was this woman? Did she really know who had attacked her?’ These questions ultimately drove my first novel.”

The success of the Lucy Campion books led Calkins’s publisher to ask for another series, which she set in the Roaring ’20s. “When I moved to Chicago, I was always struck by how ‘lived’ Prohibition Chicago still is,” she says. “Everyone seems to have a Prohibition story, like, ‘My grandmother was a rumrunner off Lake Michigan,’ so it was not too hard of a stretch to write in this fascinating era of flappers, cocktails, and gangsters.”

Murder Knocks Twice follows Gina Ricci as she becomes a cigarette girl at a speakeasy. She learns that she is filling the position of a recently murdered young woman. Even more troubling, she discovers that a relative she never met works at the speakeasy too, and when he dies under mysterious circumstances, she is pulled into a dark underworld, not sure whom to trust. A second Ricci book, The Fate of a Flapper, was published in July.

“The journey of Murder Knocks Twice began about 10 years ago,” Calkins says. “I was still querying — unsuccessfully — A Murder at Rosamund’s Gate. I kept getting rejected by agents, and I thought maybe I needed to try my hand at something different. I wrote about 200 pages of a book set in 1930s Chicago. But then my first novel sold, and the 1930s book went in a drawer.

“When I was asked about another series a few years ago, I went back to that drawer. Most of the pages were scrapped, but the idea of the story remained. I wrote the first part without a contract, and then it was picked up. I firmly believe in persisting even when the outcome is not known. The persistence was helped by loving the world that I was creating for my characters.”