Q&A with Norman Woolworth

 

 

 

 

 

Norman Woolworth is the author of the new novel The Bolden Cylinder. He also has written the novel The Lafitte Affair. He is a retired corporate executive, and he lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

 

Q: Why did you decide to focus on the jazz musician Buddy Bolden (1877-1931) in your new novel?

 

A: I find it fascinating that Buddy Bolden is frequently credited with being the first jazz player, yet no one alive has heard him play a note.

 

Around the turn of the 20th century, Buddy was said to have combined ragtime and the blues in a way that hadn’t been done before, and out of that marriage came the beginnings of what would eventually be called jazz.

 

In his day, Buddy was wildly popular. According to his contemporaries, interviewed 20 and 30 years after his rise to prominence as “King Bolden,” he played louder and dirtier than anyone else. But his reign was brief. He literally goes crazy, is institutionalized in 1906, and spends the last 25 years of his life in a sanitarium.

 

There are no known recordings of Buddy, though his bandmate Willie Cornish said the group recorded a wax cylinder in 1898. But what if a recording had survived, I wondered? It struck me as a promising premise for a historical mystery. 

 

Q: This is the second in your Bruneau Abellard series--did you know you'd be writing a series when you wrote the first novel?

 

A: Yes. My protagonist, Bruneau Abellard, is a curmudgeonly antiques store owner in present-day New Orleans, and his childhood buddy Bo Duplessis is a property crimes detective with NOPD.

 

In each novel, a present-day crime is linked to a historical mystery, and the former can’t be solved until or unless the latter is unraveled. It’s an extensible concept which I embellish with a cast of eccentric characters.

 

As the series progresses those characters develop in various ways and the relationships between and among them evolve accordingly. Readers have told me they enjoy spending time with Bruneau and his friends. 

 

Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?

 

A: As with my first book, The Lafitte Affair, I read widely to build my foundational knowledge before I began writing.

 

Once I did start to write, and a specific question would come up, or I wanted to set a scene in a particular time and place, I would set about researching that particular topic. The novel is fiction, of course, but it was important to me to present historical context as accurately as possible.  

 

Q: As you noted, the novel is set in New Orleans--how important is setting to you in your writing?

 

A: Many readers have commented that New Orleans itself is a character in these books, and I think that is true. The city is such an atmospheric place, one that engages all one’s senses, and I try to convey that.

 

And then of course it’s also a place where the past and present are forever interwoven, which makes it a natural setting for a historical mystery series. 

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I am about three-quarters of the way through book three. It does not yet have a title, but it concerns the Ursuline nuns, who occupy a uniquely important role in New Orleans history.

 

They arrived almost at the beginning, in 1727, and are still there, operating the National Shrine of Our Lady of Prompt Succor, which adjoins Ursuline Academy, the oldest private girls’ school in the country.

 

In addition to fulfilling their core mission of educating girls, the Ursulines at various times ran an orphanage, operated a hospital, owned a plantation that depended on slave labor, and expertly navigated the complex political challenges of French and Spanish rule, the transition to the American Republic, the Confederacy, Union occupation, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Civil Right Movement. There is a lot to explore.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Bruneau Abellard is, among other things, a discriminating gourmand, and readers of The Lafitte Affair told me that they greatly enjoyed the descriptions of his indulgences. They can look forward to more of the same in The Bolden Cylinder. 

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Norman Woolworth.