Katy Green is a working musician in the years leading up to World War II, struggling to make a living in tough times. But her gigs lead her into adventures with murder and mayhem.

Katy is what mystery writers call an accidental detective: someone who does not seek out mysteries to solve, but is nonetheless drawn into them. She has a quick mind, and a rudimentary skill in ju-jitsu, which she acquired to fend off “wolves.” But sometimes these are mixed blessings: the former leading her to jump to conclusions; the latter making her think she’s stronger than she really is.

Katy tells her own stories; and first-person narration is intimate, allowing the audience to listen in as Katy works her way through the clues, and deals with threats. But it also risks allowing her mistakes to carry the same weight as her insights.

In Too Dead to Swing she joins an all-female Swing band on tour in California, only to discover that someone is killing off her bandmates. In A Fugue in Hell’s Kitchen, Katy helps a friend who’s accused of stealing a rare manuscript from a classical music conservatory in New York City’s roughest neighborhood. And in The Last Full Measure, Katy joins the dance-band on the S.S. Lurline, en route to Hawaii on the eve of Pearl Harbor.

Writing in a woman’s voice is challenging, for a man, but it is a lot of fun. Doesn’t everyone like to pretend, sometimes, that they’re somebody else? I feel it helps to make Katy more vivid in the audience’s mind. And I have been widely praised by reviewers, colleagues and fans for authentically rendering Katy’s voice. In writing historical fiction, an author will always take a few liberties with “actual” history, even if only by inserting fictional people into real events. But I do not rewrite history to suit my plots, nor are my stories counter-factual in any important aspect. I owe it to my audience to set the stage realistically.

I was born just after WWII, but I was fortunate in being able to ask my mother, born in 1907, about women’s life-experiences during the 1930s and ‘40s. So I was able to have Katy born in 1907 too. And I am friends with many younger women who are members of Art Deco Societies, in California and New York. They shared with me details of what women of that era wore, how they spoke, and even how they were likely to think and behave in ordinary – and extraordinary – circumstances. Katy's professional life as a musician also rings true, because I am also a musician who performs the hits of the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s.

Katy’s work life is based on that of real contemporaries, who played in all-female Swing bands and toured the country as Katy does in Too Dead to Swing. New York also has several classical music conservatories; I worked as assistant librarian in one of them. Hell’s Kitchen is a real neighborhood in Manhattan that was still home to violent youth gangs when I was a boy. And I lived in Hawaii for a long time, working as a newspaper and television reporter. The deck-plan of the S.S. Lurline hung on my office wall while I was writing The Last Full Measure, so I could accurately depict how long it took to go from place to place and deck to deck, aboard ship. And the Lurline did sail to and from Hawaii in the week before Pearl Harbor was attacked, so I could realistically plunge Katy into mortal danger on December 7th.