Interview with J. D. Solomon

The Tinen Killings: A Novel of Civil War Veterans
J. D. Solomon
BookSurge Publishing (2008)
ISBN 9781419689260
Reviewed by Ron Standerfer for Reader Views (12/08)

Today, Tyler R. Tichelaar of Reader Views is pleased to interview J.D. Solomon, who is here to talk about his new book, “The Tinen Killings.”

J.D. Solomon is a graduate of Wesleyan University. He holds a Master’s degree in journalism from Boston University and a Master’s degree in marketing from Fordham University. He has served as an adjunct professor of business communications at the Graduate School of Management at Rutgers University. With nearly twenty years of diverse experience in marketing and business communication, as well as a personal background in entrepreneurism, J.D. Solomon offers specialized marketing expertise to start-up and growing businesses.

Most recently, Mr. Solomon is the author of “The Tinen Killings” (BookSurge 2008), a novel about one of his wife's ancestors, an Irish immigrant who served as a Union officer in the Civil War. He is also the co-author of “Overcoming Macular Degeneration: A Guide to Seeing Beyond the Clouds” (Avon, 2000).

Tyler:  Welcome, J.D. I’m excited to interview you today since I am an author of historical fiction myself, largely based on my own family stories, including Civil War Veterans. So my first question is will you tell us about your wife’s Civil War ancestor and what you found so fascinating about him that inspired you to write a novel about him?

J.D.:  Thanks, Tyler. My wife’s great-great-grandfather, Patrick Sherman Tinen, was born in Ireland in 1835—on March 17, incidentally, which I suppose made the choice of his name a foregone conclusion. His family managed to escape the Famine and settled in Philadelphia, where as a young man he became actively involved in an Irish militia group. When war broke out in April 1861, Tinen’s quasi-military experience, along with his role as a recruitment ringleader and his popularity as a bartender, qualified him as a second lieutenant in what would become the famed Pennsylvania 69th, an Irish regiment from Philadelphia that fought in almost every major battle in the east. Tinen’s leadership qualities, and, no doubt, his luck in avoiding death in those terrible battles, enabled him to rise in the ranks to major, and he commanded his regiment late in the war. He had five children, and tragically, all of them predeceased him, as did his wife, who died when Tinen was in his early fifties. After the death of his adult son, Tinen raised his two young grandchildren, one of whom would become my wife’s paternal grandfather. One of the things that always intrigued me was that while Tinen demonstrated great intelligence, courage and leadership during the war, he spent the rest of his life drifting at odd jobs—a part-time bartender, an assistant paperhanger, a night watchman. Yet photographs of him after the war depict a proud, well-dressed man, and I know that people referred to him as “Major” throughout his life. He lived until 1921, until the age of 86, and during his long life he participated in and witnessed truly transformational events—the Civil War, of course, but also the expansion and close of the Western frontier, industrialization, the First World War, and the inventions of electric power, the telephone and the airplane. I would very much have liked to talk to him about his life, to learn about his experiences, his observations, his accomplishments and his frustrations.

Tyler:  Of course, you learned about Tinen first through family stories. Can you tell us what the first story was that you remember hearing that made you interested in this person?

J.D.:  My future wife and I had been dating for just a month or so before she took me to meet her parents. On the way, she warned me that her father had his quirky side. For instance, she said, he often found it convenient to be cleaning his handgun just when she was bringing home a new boyfriend. Well, I found him charming—no pistol in sight—and we were chatting about my work as a reporter. Then, kind of out of the blue, he said that his great-grandfather fought in the Civil War and that there was a statue of him at Gettysburg. I chalked that up to quirkiness, but about six months later Maureen and I were traveling in Pennsylvania and stopped to visit Gettysburg. Well, of course we found no statue of Patrick Tinen, but we did learn about the important role his regiment played in the battle, and so began my interest in learning about his life.

Tyler:  Will you tell us about the mystery aspect of the novel? What is the mystery, and is it also based in historical fact?

J.D.:  The novel is set in April 1898, at the eve of the Spanish-American War. Major Patrick Tinen, a Union hero at Gettysburg, is sleepwalking through old age at the huge National Soldiers Home in Virginia when his son, a failed Klondike prospector, is murdered in his nearby home after a clumsy attempt to blackmail a powerful financier. Leading the investigation is the local sheriff, Jed Roberts, the son of a Confederate officer killed in Pickett’s Charge. The politically ambitious Roberts has no interest in the past. He wants to run for Congress, but he knows he must solve this brutal crime first. Meanwhile, the financier has his own troubles, caused by decades of financial double-dealing that’s finally catching up to him. Out of options, he turns once again to a dark business he learned from his grandfather years ago—the buying and selling of human beings. Sheriff Roberts enlists Tinen’s help in tracing the crime to Philadelphia, where he gets unexpected aid from the major’s estranged daughter. There they must come to terms with the desperate financier, who has ordered his allies to stop the investigation at all costs. As with all historical thrillers, this fictional plot is supported by factual details, real events and actual people.

Tyler:  While many people are interested in family history, few go on to write novels based on family history. What made you decide to go this extra step?

J.D.:  I’d been digging into the life of Patrick Tinen on and off for nearly twenty years. I always knew I wanted to write some kind of book about him, but he had left no letters or diaries on which to build a biography. I wasn’t really interested in writing a factual account of his wartime experiences based on his regiment’s history, either. Instead, I wanted to write a book that would make him come alive, and I wanted the book to be interesting to people outside the family. Once I came on the idea of wrapping Tinen’s story inside a whodunit thriller, the book almost wrote itself.

Tyler:  How did you go about doing research? Did the story come after the research, or did the idea to write a novel precede a lot of the research that you did?

J.D.:  My research into Tinen’s wartime experiences was conducted over many years, first through military records and later with the generous help of people who are knowledgeable about his regiment, the 69th Pennsylvania, including some of the men who participate in the group that today re-enacts the 69th. Many of these people were thrilled to find out that I’m married to a direct descendant of Patrick Tinen, because he was such a prominent and admired officer in the 69th. At one point I spoke with the chief historian at Gettysburg National Park, Scott Hartwig, about Tinen, and Mr. Hartwig told me that Tinen was one of his favorite officers in the Army of the Potomac, and that he frequently cites Tinen in his presentations as an example of a common man displaying uncommon valor. Mr. Hartwig wrote a lengthy article about the 69th’s critical role at Gettysburg—it was the focal point of Pickett’s Charge. The article included detailed information about Tinen, and it was invaluable in my research. Also key was a recently published history of the Pennsylvania 69th, by Donald Ernsberger, which includes quite a bit of information about Tinen as well.

My research into Tinen’s wartime experiences was largely completed before I developed my idea for the book. The historical detail needed to support the book’s fictional plot came from a variety of journal articles and books, many of them somewhat obscure but nevertheless easily accessible thanks to the Internet.

Tyler:  Did you follow the facts strictly in terms of history, or did you change anything to make a better story?

J.D.:  I used the fictional murder mystery as a vehicle to relate many of Tinen’s experiences during the Civil War. The key facts of those Civil War stories are all accurate. Sometimes, however, I used plausible conjecture to add color, depth and interest to incidents about which the historical record is short, dry or incomplete.

Tyler:  In terms of the mystery then, what were your goals in creating the plot and making it gripping for the reader?

J.D.: I’ve read enough thrillers to know the ingredients essential for success: lurid crimes—in my case murder, prostitution and a financial swindle—lightened with a mismatched-buddy theme and, of course, a romance. Naturally I wanted to make the plot believable, but just as important, I wanted to make the characters believable. There were to be no super-heroes or super-villains. I wanted the good guys to have some irritating traits and judgment flaws, and I wanted to give the bad guys some sympathetic qualities.

Tyler:  Are any of the main characters fictional?

J.D.:  Most of the characters in the story, including the lead lawman and all the villains, are fictional. Of course Pat Tinen, the central character, was real, as were his two regimental buddies in the story, Charles McAnally and Solomon Ahrens. I made a number of secondary characters real as well, to add to the book’s veracity. For example, Philadelphia’s notorious Eastern State Penitentiary plays a supporting role in the plot, as does its warden. I suppose I could have created any character for the warden, but I decided to use the prison’s actual warden at the time. He was a popular man and somewhat of a reformer, and since the plot called for him to be helpful to Tinen, I felt that bringing this real person into the story would add another small dose of believability to it.

Tyler:  What responses have your wife’s family given you regarding writing about one of their ancestors? Were they afraid you would reveal family secrets?

J.D.:  No secrets were revealed, but I suppose that the Tinens of today may be grateful that one ugly family myth can now be replaced by another, less-ugly, myth. As I mentioned, Patrick Tinen outlived all five of his children, and it happens that his oldest surviving son, Thomas, died under mysterious circumstances. The book opens with the murder of Thomas Tinen and his wife, which I described a moment ago as a consequence of Thomas’s misguided effort to blackmail a powerful financier. I suspect that my wife and her siblings may prefer that mythology about their great-grandfather’s demise to the story told to me by their father, which was that Thomas was hanged as a horse thief.

By the same token, the book’s publication has led to an unexpected solution to a long-held Tinen family mystery. For many years after the war, Tinen petitioned the government for a disability pension, claiming that a battle wound he suffered in 1864, in his right arm, left him unable to hold steady employment. His pension records include an affidavit from a Philadelphia paperhanger named John Snodgrass, who claims to have employed Tinen as his assistant for decades after the war, but notes that Tinen was often unable to work because of his injury. I always wondered why this man Snodgrass was so generous to Tinen, keeping him employed at a job that he clearly was not physically capable of doing. I wondered whether Snodgrass was indebted to Tinen for some act of heroism during the war. Well, after the book was published I heard from one of Snodgrass’s descendants, whose detailed genealogical research showed that John Snodgrass was married to none other than Patrick Tinen’s sister. Now, whether Snodgrass was actually Tinen’s employer, or merely a brother-in-law helpfully signing a useful affidavit, is something we’ll probably never know for sure.

Tyler:  What made you decide to set the novel in 1898, so many years removed from the Civil War?

J.D.:  I’d always been interested in the experiences of Civil War veterans, and particularly in Patrick Tinen’s life after the war. Many of those men led extraordinarily successful and dynamic lives after the war. But many others, perhaps like Tinen, drifted and battled personal demons. From my research, I learned that the experiences of Civil War veterans were very similar to those of the men who fought in Vietnam. And by the way, we’re farther away today from the end of the Vietnam War than Americans in 1898 were separated from the Civil War. So setting the novel in 1898 allowed me to explore some of the post-war experiences and feelings of the men who fought the Civil War.

In addition, 1898 was a very interesting time in American history. New technology was transforming our society, and there were big events, such as the Klondike gold rush, which plays an important part in my book. And of course in April of that year, the Spanish-American war began. It was America’s first significant conflict since the Civil War, and war fever was exploding across the country that month. I felt that Civil War veterans, who had witnessed war fever themselves during that same month 37 years earlier, must have had decidedly mixed feelings about the new rush to war. In addition, 1898 marked the 35th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, and in that summer there was a small reunion in Philadelphia between survivors from Pat Tinen’s regiment and survivors from the Confederate forces, which I worked into the plot in a small way.

Finally, the turn of the century was a time of demographic change, when the generation that came of age after the Civil War was ready to take the reins of politics and industry away from the generation that had fought the war, and that’s a theme in my book as well.

Tyler:  Why do you think, nearly a century and a half later, Americans seem more fascinated with the Civil War than any other time in our history?

J.D.:  It was such a defining time in our history, a time of truly big issues and cataclysmic events. And many Americans today, like my wife and now my children, have a connection to that period through their ancestors, which makes it all very personal. It’s not difficult at all for us today to relate to the feelings and experiences of the generation that lived during that time. I think a lot of credit for that goes to the filmmaker Ken Burns and his terrific documentary about the Civil War. For anyone who saw that film, the Civil War was no longer defined by dry text about generals and battles, but instead is about people, whose photographs and letters make it clear that they are not very different at all from us today.

Tyler:  Did you find it difficult to recreate the world of the late 1800s? I particularly feel that writing effective dialogue to suit that time period, while not making it sound stilted to modern readers, is a real test.

J.D.:  Believably transporting readers to another time is a huge challenge for authors of historical fiction. I decided to meet it in two ways. First, I tried to focus on areas of commonality between then and now, because in many ways America in 1898 wasn’t all that different from America today. For example, the rapid technological advances of the time surely must have been as awe-inspiring, and as exasperating, to people then as they are today. And I’m sure human nature was the same then as it is now, so I tried to make my characters believable by letting them find motivation, joy, anger and frustration from the same kinds of situations that would stimulate those feelings today.

My second tactic for transporting readers in time was to recreate the world of 1898 through the use of historically accurate details, rather than with narrative descriptions. Most of the story is set in Philadelphia, so I spent a lot of time looking at photos and maps of Philadelphia at the turn of the century. The geographical landmarks, including streets and key hotel names, are all accurate from that time. Other examples: For scenes where the characters were eating in restaurants I researched menus from the time period. When the characters in one scene are trying to decide what show to see, they are choosing from productions that were actually running in Philadelphia in 1898. In conversations, they reference real current events and people, even, in once instance, down to small-talk about the 1898 baseball season. Sometimes I was just lucky to find a detail that lent color and veracity to the story. For instance, at one point two of the villains need to get cleaned up after a murder in order to get to their next task. Where would they do this? Well it turns out that Philadelphia’s first public bathhouse for the poor was opened in April of 1898, the month in which the book is set. So my villains didn’t just go to a bathhouse, they went to Philadelphia’s landmark bathhouse during its grand opening.

I will say that dialog and dialect posed a tough choice for me. Should I try to recreate turn-of-the-century speech patterns and regional accents or just have the characters speak in familiar language? Ultimately I decided to take the latter approach. First, I’m not sure anyone alive today knows for sure how the typical American spoke in 1898, but I strongly suspect it was not with the pedantic, formal or flowery voice that writers of Victorian-era novels often use. And second, even if I had wanted to recreate turn-of-the-century dialog and regional accents, I doubt I could have done it convincingly. So I just adopted “dialog-neutrality.” Jeff Shaara, the accomplished historical novelist, makes the point that if dialog doesn’t call attention to itself, and if the story and the characters are compelling enough, the reader will “hear” the dialog in the voice that matches his or her conception of how the characters would have spoken during the time in which the story is set.

Tyler:  J.D., would you say you were influenced by any other writers of historical or detective fiction?

J.D.:  I’m a big fan of historical fiction. In addition to Jeff Shaara’s war novels, I’ve enjoyed reading Caleb Carr’s books, especially “The Alienist,” a historical thriller set in New York at the turn-of-the-century.

Tyler:  As a writer of historical fiction, what do you think is the most important thing to remember or attempt?

J.D.:  Plot first, characters second and history third. That, plus tight editing, will yield a good book. I have been told that acquisition editors at mainstream publishers are also looking for a story that is seasoned ever-so-delicately with a historically appropriate literary style, but I concluded that doing that successfully is beyond the scope of most first-time novelists.

Tyler:  What was most difficult about crafting the mystery part of the novel?

J.D.:  The toughest part about writing the mystery was keeping the timelines straight. The entire story spans about three weeks, during which characters from different locations must converge at critical moments. In addition, the story is told concurrently from the perspectives of each of the primary characters, all of whom progress through the plot at their own pace while periodically intersecting with each other. Keeping track of all those time elements was a little dicey.

Tyler:  What’s been the response of your readers when they finish “The Tinen Killings”?

J.D.:  A few people have told me they learned more about the Civil War from my book than they did from their high school history class, which was quite flattering. But the most common response, and the one that is most gratifying to me, has been along the lines of, “Good read!”

Tyler:  J.D., do you have plans to write any more novels, and if so, will you give us a preview of your plans?

J.D.:  Patrick Tinen’s grandson, whom he raised, ran away from home at age sixteen to join the Navy and served in both world wars. Perhaps someday I’ll weave a story around his experiences.

Tyler:  Thank you for joining me today, J.D. Before we go, will you tell us about your website and what additional information may be found there about “The Tinen Killings”?

J.D.: The book’s website is www.thetinenkillingsbook.com. It has a bibliography listing the sources I used in my research. It has a guide, with photographs, to the actual people, places and events described in the book. And perhaps most interesting, there is a blog by Patrick Tinen himself, ghost-written of course, in which he provides an insider’s commentary on the book and offers back-story details on some of the actual events in which he was involved.