It is 1933, midway through what historians would record as The Great Depression. Newly elected President Franklin Delano Roosevelt is trying to spark economic recovery with a dynamic series of progressive policies to reverse the laissez faire governance that has proven wanting amid financial mismanagement, environmental disaster, crop failures, and the joblessness that has idled a quarter of the America's workers. FDR's proposed New Deal included Social Security, unemployment benefits, federal work projects, rural aid and infrastructure development. Florrie and Lavinia, "The Porridge Sisters," and their circle of friends, The Fayette Freelancers, guided by farsighted Barney Devin, had invested wisely. Indeed, there had been little upheaval in their lives since the 1928 Murder at the Majestic Theatre. Lavinia welcomed the peaceful pattern of their lives, but Florrie, a doughty 80 years old, longed for a final adventure. She got her wish with the burglary ring bedeviling Beacon Hill and Back Bay and the discovery of the mummified remains of a Murder at Keith's Memorial Theatre.
About the Author: Over their fifty years together, Frank Cullen and Donald McNeilly have partnered in many theatrical ventures, most notably in the 1982 founding of the American Vaudeville Museum, vaudeville.org; the research, writing, design and publishing of forty issues of Vaudeville Times (1998-2008); and their landmark, two-volume, sixteen-hundred page, Vaudeville, Old & New: An Encyclopedia of Variety Performers in America published by Routledge Press in 2007 to laudatory reviews. In 2006 they left Boston with their equally elderly feline companions, Pip, Doris and Lulu (aka Velcro). They now reside in the East Mountains of New Mexico and write stories about the Boston they left. Pip and Doris had a few more good years before they died. Frank, Donald and Lulu were joined in 2013 by Jake and Jessie who had somehow heard there was upholstery in those mountains. Last summer, Lulu died peacefully at home, at the ripe old age of eighteen. Frank and Donald continue the process of shipping AVM's extensive collections of showbiz and vaudeville memorabilia, books and recordings to the University of Arizona where they become part of one of the largest collections in the country and available to students and researchers for the future. The online collections can be viewed at: http: //138.197.11.108/ or http: //speccoll.library.arizona.edu/collections/vaudeville/ The Theatre Museum of New York honored their work in 2011 with the Excellence in Preservation of Theatre History Award.