Leslie Karst here. Today the Chicks are excited to welcome to the coop the marvelous Ellen Thompson, with stories about her equally marvelous mother–and the kismet that’s affected both mother and daughter. And there’s a GIVEAWAY! Comment below for a chance to win a hardcover copy of City of Promises by Victoria Thompson with Ellen Thompson.
KISMET
In the 1980s, my mother, Victoria Thompson, was a bestselling historical romance author. Her career flourished until cowboys went out of style in the mid-’90s. She probably thought her writing career was over, but a few years later, her agent told her that publisher Berkley was looking for a writer for a new historical series in which a midwife solves murders in New York City.
Victoria and Ellen in 1982
My mom had written twenty historical novels, she was working with midwives in her job at the March of Dimes, and she had recently visited me in New York City and bought books about the city’s history. It seemed like an opportunity created specifically for her. She wrote a proposal that added a male police detective as the midwife’s sleuthing partner/love interest, and Berkley gave her the job. My mom called it “kismet.”
When I read the first Gaslight Mystery, Murder on Astor Place, I thought my mom had used the last names of my two best friends from high school—Brandt and Decker—to name her main character, Sarah Brandt, whose maiden name is Decker. I asked my mom about it, and she said, no, Berkley had come up with those names. It was just a coincidence!
Ellen and best friend Robert Glen Decker in high school in Pennsylvania in 1994 and recently in Malibu, CA.
Over the next twenty-five years, my mom wrote twenty-seven Gaslight Mysteries and seven Counterfeit Lady Novels. When she was dying of cancer in 2024, she was halfway through a draft of the eighth Counterfeit Lady Novel, City of Promises. She knew she wouldn’t be able to finish writing it, so she asked my sister and me, who are both writers, if one of us would finish it for her. I agreed to do it, not knowing what the book was about.
Victoria and Ellen in Sedona, AZ in February 2020
After my mom passed, I read what she had written, and I was thrilled to have gotten the job. City of Promises is a first-ever crossover with the Gaslight Mysteries, which is already exciting. It’s 1920, and Sarah and Frank Malloy’s daughter, Catherine, is a Broadway actress. I started acting in theater when I was a teenager, and I majored in Drama in college, so it was the perfect story for me to jump into.
My mother had written a proposal, but it only set the story up. As I was figuring out the plot, I realized the pregnant main character, Elizabeth Bates, had to give birth. Based on the previous book, I figured out a date that made sense for her to have gotten pregnant, plugged it into an online pregnancy calculator, and it gave me… my own birthday, March 15th.
All of these coincidences: my mom being in the right place at the right time with the right knowledge, experience, and talent to get hired to write the Gaslight Mysteries, the main character having the same last names as my high school best friends, City of Promises being about acting, and Elizabeth in the Counterfeit Lady Series giving birth on my birthday, well, it seems like kismet.
Readers: Have you ever experienced kismet? Let us know what happened in the comments for a chance to win a hardcover copy of City of Promises!
Ellen Thompson is an award-winning screenwriter and musical playwright. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from New York University Tisch School of the Arts, and she was an actor for nearly thirty years. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and pets, and she advocates for Lyme and other tick-borne disease awareness. Visit her at ellen-thompson.com. (photo: Kobe Levi)
Victoria Thompson is the USA Today bestselling, Edgar® and Agatha Award–nominated author of the Gaslight Mysteries and the Counterfeit Lady Novels. She earned a Master of Fine Arts in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University in Pennsylvania, a program for which she was also a professor for twenty-three years. To learn more, visit victoriathompson.com. (photo: Monica Z)
About City of Promises:
Elizabeth Bates must use everything she knows about the art of the con to stop a fellow scammer in his tracks in this first-ever thrilling crossover in the Victoria Thompson universe, featuring characters from her bestselling Gaslight Mysteries.
Famed former police detective turned private investigator Frank Malloy and his wife, Sarah, go to Gideon Bates desperate for legal guidance. The Malloys’ adopted daughter, Catherine, a burgeoning star of the stage, has announced her engagement to a man she barely knows.
Catherine has recently gained access to her trust fund, and Sebastian Talbot appears very eager to marry her as quickly as possible. As Gideon and his wife, Elizabeth, investigate, it becomes clear that Talbot is not who he says he is. As a former con artist herself, Elizabeth suspects one may be in their midst. Undeterred by her pregnancy, she must pull out all the stops to out-swindle a swindler in order to save another woman from ruin.
“A delightfully amusing story of competing cons with some socially relevant historical tidbits adding depth.” -Kirkus
Chicks on the Case 