From Courtroom to Kitchen: Researching The Green Baize Door

A guest post by Eleanor Birney, author of The Green Baize Door

The Green Baize Door by Eleanor Birney

The Green Baize Door is inspired by the record of murder trial I ran across nearly fifteen years ago.

It involved a man accused of murdering an elderly housekeeper. His defense was, essentially, that while he may have been a bad man, he wasn't that sort of bad man. That distinction fascinated me, and it still does.

Our societal preference for perfectly innocent victims and completely bad villains comes up fairly often in my line of work (I’m an attorney). So, to see a man in 1828 engaging directly with that moral complexity — and using it as the basis of his defense — was surprising and intriguing, in no small part because the accused was so persuasive.

I immediately read everything I could find about the case, which was compelling in its own right: an elderly housekeeper is murdered, the house itself is ransacked, but nothing is reported missing from it.

Why?

I knew I wanted to write about it, but I didn't know enough about the time and place in which the original case occurred to do the story justice, so I moved it closer to home. That helped, but I still had to do a great deal of research.

Though an attorney, I'm not a litigator, and I was unfamiliar with many aspects of turn-of-the-century criminal procedure. That was where I began. Did they hold inquests for suspicious deaths? Where were they held? Were juries involved? That sort of thing. Beyond the legal framework, I had practical questions that needed answers. How did poorer families cook? How was laundry managed in winter? Which hotels were fashionable, and which restaurants signaled status?

I found a lot of great historical sites online that helped with that — finding and reading old menus was particularly fun. I also spent a great deal of time reading archived newspapers from the exact days in which the novel is set, not only the major articles but also the advertisements, legal notices, and reader input. Reading those papers gave me a sense of what people were worried about, what they valued, and what sort of gossip was being traded over the hedgerow.

I also read less celebrated fiction from the period to get a sense of social mores and underlying beliefs — something you can often see more plainly in pulp writing than in "literary" works.

All of this helped me to set the stage, but the story I wanted to tell could have been set almost anywhere, as it revolves around fundamental questions.

How do we, as a society, respond to people who are neither wholly good nor wholly bad? How does perspective — shaped by forces we rarely see and never fully control — determine what we accept as truth? And how quickly do we decide who is deserving of our compassion, and who is not?

These questions are more than intellectual abstractions. They are often asked explicitly in courtrooms, and implicitly in the media and on the street. And they are tested every time a single circumstance or event is used to define an entire life.

I think it is often easier for us to sort people into categories than it is to sit with contradiction. Easier to decide that someone who has done wrong deserves whatever follows. Easier, too, to assume that vulnerability is, in itself, a kind of virtue.

Fiction gives us room to slow this sorting process down. To examine the impulses that lead not just to the crime, but to the verdict.

That exploration is the driving force behind The Green Baize Door. My aim was not simply to imagine what might have happened to the housekeeper, but to explore why it could have happened, and how a man who was not "innocent" might still not be guilty.

The Green Baize Door by Eleanor Birney is published by Parlor & Dock Press and is available now. For more information, visit eleanorbirney.com.

Book Description

An atmospheric historical mystery where every character has their own agenda, and their own truth.

In the fashionable mansions on Chestnut Hill, a simple green baize door separates the masters’ world from the servants’. That door is thrown wide when an elderly housekeeper is found brutally murdered on the first day of the new century. Marie Chevalier, the housekeeper’s poor but ambitious granddaughter, and James Lett, the mansion owner’s kind but indolent son, suspect the killer is connected to one of their families—but which one?

From drawing rooms to alleyways, their separate investigations lead them through the sometimes lavish, sometimes brutal, landscape of turn-of-the-century New England. When long-buried secrets begin to unravel the fragile threads that hold both households together, Marie and James must find a way to bridge the gulf between them—if only to prove that the murderer belongs not to their own world, but to that strange and foreign land on the other side of the green baize door.

Inspired by real-life events, The Green Baize Door is a richly layered historical mystery that explores themes of class identity, family loyalty, and the sometimes blurry line between virtue and vice.

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Author Bio:

Eleanor Birney Author

Eleanor Birney writes historical mysteries about class, moral ambiguity, and people who aren’t satisfied with life on their side of the green baize door.

She received a BA in History from UC Berkeley, and works as a legal research attorney, a day job that feeds her love of precision, research, and puzzles.

Growing up in foster care gave her a lifelong fascination with the way society steers people into assigned places—and how some of those people refuse to stay in them.

She lives in Northern California with her family. The Green Baize Door is her debut novel.

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