THE SHAKER INFLUENCE

Wednesday, 30 January 2013 04:14

The year has barely a month old so it’s time for my annual office cleanup. As part of the out with the old, in with the new, I have come across several ideas for blogs I meant to write.

Ah, so many ideas, so little time.

As I have said before, mystery fiction can bring us a new view of history, help us understand who were are and who we were.

This past year, at least one novel gave me insight into a piece of history I knew little about.

In A Simple Murder, Eleanor Kuhns took readers back to the mid-19th century when the Shakers were the largest and most successful utopian group in existence. These tight-knit communities were scattered throughout the Northeast and in Kentucky.

Before I read Kuhns’ novel, I had only thought of the Shakers as group that practiced celibacy and made wonderfully graceful but simple ladder-back furniture and crafts. I also had always meant to visit the Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill in Harrodsburg, Ky., which is the largest restored Shaker community in America and supposed to have a great restaurant that serves authentic Shaker recipes.

In her debut, Kuhns, a career librarian, shows how the Shakers lived, their daily routines and their faith, as well as how others were often suspicious of them.

I didn’t know until I read A Simple Murder that this religious sect stressed equality of the sexes and pacifism, or that orphans and abused wives often came to a Shaker village seeking refuge.

Sexual relations, even among married couples were forbidden, making it a difficult religion for many to follow. Married couples often joined after they’d had several children. Today, one Shaker community remains in Maine as well as several heritage villages and museums.

A Simple Murder, which won the Minotaur Books/Mystery Writers of America’s 2011 First Crime Novel Competition, is set in 1795. Kuhns' next novel, Death of a Dyer, will be out in June 2013.

Widowed weaver Will Rees arrives at a Shaker community seeking his 13-year-old son who had been under the care of his sister. Hoping to repair the relationship with his son, Will agrees to help the Shakers find out who killed one of their female members.

In my review that ran in the Sun Sentinel, I said: “A Simple Murder works as an intense historical but also a heartfelt story about families, especially the bonds between fathers and sons, and the grievances that can pull relatives apart.”