Q&A with the author of Kentucky Choirboy
May 17, 2025, St. Albans, VT
Q: What attracted you to this story?
A: The St. Albans raid is unique in the history of the Civil War. Twenty Confederate soldiers attacked the border town of St. Albans in October 1864. They looted the three banks holding the citizens captive for less than an hour before fleeing to the Canada. The extradition trial of the 14 raiders in Montreal is not well known, so I thought this would be a great story idea. The raiders were welcomed like heroes by the public when they arrived in Montreal, but denounced as mere bank robbers by the Vermont press. After hearing testimony, the raiders were released by Judge Coursol in December without charges and allowed to keep the money they stole from the Vermont banks. Under great pressure from President Lincoln, the Governor-General for Canada tried to recapture the men and send them back to prison, but first, he had to chase them down in the snowy Quebec countryside.
Furthermore, the character of Lt. Bennett Young is exceptional. He was born in Kentucky to a religious family and he believed strongly in the Confederate cause. Later in life, he was an attorney in Louisville and president of the Louisville Southern Railway. He was a leader in improving race relations in Louisville and was concerned with the legal rights of African Americans, sometimes offering his services pro bono if they were too poor to obtain his services. He sued the Ku Klux Klan for burning down the house of the ex-slave George Dinning. He was a Southerner with great moral standing in the community. He always tried to do the right thing over a very long career.
I thought this story was particularly interesting today, when Americans are so caught up in the debate over slavery and reject any story about the Confederacy.
Q: What was the hardest part for you to write?
A: I needed to bridge the extradition trial in Montreal and the escape across Quebec with the later career of Bennett Young as a railway magnate and lawyer. So I needed to add a lot of other layers to the story. It took me a full year to write including the historical research. I added young Iris, a ten-year-old wild child who meets Bennett in Frelighsburg, Quebec, for the first time when he knocks on the door of her aunt’s farmhouse. She was staying with her aunt because she had been born out of wedlock and her family didn’t want to confront the disapproving Catholic priest in the small Quebec town of Lac Brome. Iris discovers Bennett’s stolen loot on the farm and hides it so that her uncle can’t steal it. And later, she saves Bennett and his girlfriend Eliza’s lives when they are pursued by a killer looking for the loot. Bennett and Eliza quickly become attached to Iris, who adopts Bennett as a father figure.
Another major character in the novel is Byron, Eliza’s brother, who returns home to St. Albans after the war is over with a missing leg. Iris stays with the Miller family in St. Albans and helps Byron calm his phantom limb pain by placing her hands on the stump. Iris goes on to train as a nurse at America’s first nursing school in Boston. Her work at the New England Hospital for Women and Children takes the reader through the whole spectrum of 19th-century disease, and later, when she confronts the terrible yellow fever scourge in Hickman, Kentucky in 1878. And then there is the lawsuit against the KKK, which occurred at the turn of the century in Louisville. Bennett Young won a huge settlement for the ex-slave George Dinning.
Q: What is the bigger message you’re trying to get across?
A: The thing that jumps out at the reader is the precarity of life in the 19th century with smallpox, typhus, yellow fever, cholera, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, etc. Life was short and often brutal. We are talking about terrible diseases like yellow fever that wiped out large swaths of population in towns like New Orleans, Memphis, and other cities. Cholera outbreaks killed huge numbers of people. There was no treatment for many of these diseases. This was in the time before antibiotics and penicillin.
The story of Iris’ training as a nurse is extraordinary. This was the first training school for nurses in North America. Nursing didn’t exist as a profession before 1872. Ward maids looked after patients, but had no training. Iris discovers the importance of keeping a file on patients. In her free time, she takes notes about her patients and their treatment. The doctors were astonished and they soon adopted the idea of a patient file that anyone can consult. Until this happened, only the doctor knew anything about the treatment of a patient. Talk about the blind leading the blind.
Then there was the horrific number of deaths of young women due to puerperal fever, which is an infection of the female reproductive tract. It was called childbirth disease and was the single most common cause of maternal mortality. Some 20% of birthing mothers died from the disease. In the 1840s, a Hungarian doctor, Ignaz Semmelweis, discovered that the disease was found more frequently in hospitals than in the home, and he presumed it was caused by the doctors themselves carrying the infection from one patient to another. The Doctor Plague theory was not very popular among his colleagues, and the poor man was chased out of Vienna by the medical staff and ended up in an insane asylum. Unfortunately, his theory about doctors carrying the infection from one patient to another turned out to be true.
Q: There is a wonderful father-daughter relationship in your book. What inspired you to tell this story?
A: I have an adopted daughter whom I met for the first time when she was only three years old. So I realize the importance of fathers in the lives of young girls and how important they are. Fathers help shape a young girl's self-esteem, her sense of self-worth, and her future relationships with men. Born out of wedlock, ten-year-old Iris is a wild child living with her aunt and uncle in a small border town in Quebec. Her mother can’t keep her because the Catholic priest in the village disapproves of the family keeping a child born out of wedlock. Iris soon starts calling Bennett “papa” and adopts him as a father figure. Bennett contributes to pay for her education and encourages her, as does his wife Eliza. This leads to a wonderful father-daughter relationship, especially when Iris suffers from melancholia in Boston and Bennett goes to fetch her and brings her home to Kentucky.
Iris is an interesting character. She is gay and unconventional at a time when society is very rigid and judgmental. Women struggled to find a husband after the Civil War, but Iris showed no interest in men, so her co-workers often considered her a freak. Bennett and Eliza loved her just as she was and never put any pressure on her to marry. This caused major strife with her real birth mother, who comes to visit from Quebec and tries to put things right, but Iris resists. She refuses to dress properly and continues her work as a nurse.
Q: Does the title have any special significance?
A: Kentucky Choirboy describes Bennett Young’s religious beliefs and his desire to do good in the world. He founded the Colored Orphans Home Society and the Kentucky’s Confederate Soldiers Home in Pewee Valley. He was an abolitionist at heart, and even worked pro bono for his black clients.
Q: What do Dr. Scylla and Dr. Charybdis have to do with the treatment of yellow fever?
A: In the 19th-century there was no cure for yellow fever. It was a horrific disease with a fatality rate of some 50%. A New Orleans physician once reported seeing “a patient mired in black vomit, with profuse hemorrhaging from the mouth, nose, eyes, and even the toes. The victim's eyes were prominent, glistening, yellow, and staring, the face with an orange and dusky red color.”
Dr. Scylla and Dr. Charybdis refer to a joke among the nursing staff at the Louisville Hospital. In Homer’s Odyssey Odysseus and his crew must travel through a narrow channel with Scylla, the man-eating monster, on one side opposite Charybdis, the whirlpool sea monster. The idiom "between Scylla and Charybdis" means being forced to choose between two similarly undesirable outcomes, similar to "between a rock and a hard place".
In 1793, there was a terrible yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia. Some 5,000 people died of the disease between August 1 and November 9 in a city of 45,000 people. It was the first major epidemic in the nation’s history and one of the worst outbreaks of the disease in the United States. Benjamin Rush, a Philadelphia physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence, was highly regarded for his work during the 1793 epidemic. He favoured a treatment that involved copious bloodletting, blistering, purging, and sweating to shock the body back to health. These aggressive therapeutics became known, not always favorably, as “heroic medicine.” Across town, a French doctor, Dr. Jean Deveze, who had trained in Santo Domingo, was put in charge of a hospital in the city. He favoured the gentler ‘French cure’ which treated patients with stimulants and quinine. He refused to believe that yellow fever was contagious, and he disapproved of Rush’s heroic medicine.
So in my novel, there are these two doctors working the yellow fever wards at the Louisville Hospital during the epidemic of 1878. One ward is headed by a Baltimore doctor employing Rush’s methods and the other ward had a doctor employing the ‘French cure’. After a week of bloodletting, blistering and purging, Iris decides she has had enough working under Dr. Scylla, the nickname for the Baltimore doctor, while upstairs her colleagues toil under their Dr. Charybdis. After two weeks of treating patients, Scylla and Charybdis wait with bated breath to show how successful they have been fighting the disease, but as it turns out, both wards suffer the exact same number of fatalities. Neither treatment proved to be useful in treating the disease.
Yellow fever is caused by a virus primarily spread to people through the bite of infected mosquitoes. It wasn’t until the turn of the century that scientists managed to control the spread of the disease, and it took until the 1940s before there was a vaccine.
Q: What about the war criminal Dr Luke Blackburn, who was charged with plotting to infect Northern cities during the war with contaminated bed linens?
A: In my novel Iris travels with Dr. Blackburn to Hickman, Kentucky to fight the yellow fever outbreak. Blackburn was famous for his knowledge of the disease. He had helped eradicate the disease in Bermuda at the end of the Civil War, when the island was used as a base for Confederate blockade-running ships coming from Europe. For his efforts, Blackburn received a prize of 100 British pounds and a commendation from Queen Victoria. His career had started as a medical officer in Natchez in 1848, where he made a name for himself by implementing a successful quarantine against the disease. Yellow fever outbreaks happened almost every year from July through October in the Mississippi towns and in New Orleans, which had the highest number of fatalities (ten percent of the population) and earned the nickname ‘Necropolis’, the city of the dead.
The question for me became whether Blackburn could be both a saint and a sinner. Here was a medical doctor who had sworn the Hippocratic oath and spent his entire career fighting yellow fever. Could he really have tried to infect the Northern cities with trunks of contaminated bed linens, or was this just another Union hate message? In my research, I discovered that two medical students in the 1850s, who were desperate to find a cure for the disease, attempted to self-infect with the black vomit from contaminated bed sheets, but were unsuccessful. It was well known that bed linens contaminated with smallpox could infect people, so people believed the same might apply to yellow fever.
During my research, the truth jumped out at me. Blackburn knew only too well that you couldn’t self-infect from contaminated sheets. His experience in Natchez would have told him this. It was obvious that he was collecting the contaminated sheets in Bermuda to test the theory and to try to convince other medical doctors in the US of these facts. But, of course, no one would believe him. He was on the wrong side of the war. Blackburn became the ‘Hero of Hickman’ and Governor of Kentucky, but he was despised for the rest of his life in the North.
Q: How has the book been received?
A: I have a strong fan base in the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, Ireland and NZ, which really took off after the publication of my fifth novel, White Slaves: 15 Years a Barbary Slave, back in 2023. Sales of Kentucky Choirboy are growing because of renewed interest in the Canada/US relationship during the Civil War.
Q: What are you thoughts on the historical fiction genre?
A: I particularly enjoy historical fiction. I like to fill in the blanks of the historical record. Historical fiction is basing a story around a well-known historical event and filling in the things which aren’t well known. This is what appeals to readers. They get a wider view of what it would have been like to live through the events. If you are a curious person, this satisfies your desire to really get inside an event, to see it from the inside and to know what its implications are.
Q: What are your thoughts on self-publishing?
A: I come from a background where imagery is very important. Movie posters have to attract an audience. The same goes for book cover design. So I have enjoyed designing my book covers and going the self-publishing route. I make more money than in a conventional book distribution deal, and it’s more fun.
I work with one of the best professional book editors in the country. I am not subjected to the additional stress of working with unknown contributors from the book publishing trades. The atmosphere is more relaxed, and we fix the problems faster. We don’t waste time quibbling over the use of a phrase. We make decisions quickly and move on. I have no desire to be published by the big five publishing houses. Traditional publishing is full of surprises, not always good ones. The people in these companies are always changing and publishing companies tend to go out of business, leaving their authors high and dry. I don’t believe committees make for good books. A good novel has a vision. It tells one story. With traditional publishers, the question always arises as to what sort of book we are making. Five people can have five different visions. You automatically waste a lot of time trying to arrive at a consensus.
Q: Which authors inspire you?
A: Hilary Mantel, David Grann, Philip Kerr, Kristin Hannah, John LeCarré, Ken Follett, Umberto Eco, Bernard Cornwell, Robert Graves, Robert Harris, C. J. Sansom, Annie Proulx, Gore Vidal, Ronald Wright, Guy Vanderhaeghe, etc.
Q: Tell me about your current projects?
A: I’m always thinking about new projects and what will work and what won’t. I have a project for a new historical fiction novel, another amazing story based on a true story. I am also planning on publishing a book about my kind of independent filmmaking which I have been doing for the past thirty years.
