I'm excited to welcome Judy to my travels today with news about a new book, available now for preorder!
Traveling on the T.S.S. Canberra Greek Line
by Judy Penz Sheluk
Okay, I’ll admit it, the title
of this blog post is a bit misleading, since I’ve never personally traveled on
the T.S.S. Canberra, and in fact, the
ship only sailed for the Greek Line from 1948 to 1956. But my mother,
Anneliese, emigrated from England to Canada on that ship in July 1952, ready to
start a new life in Toronto with her fiancé, Anton (Toni) Penz. Both had moved
to England soon after the war ended (my father from Apatin, Yugoslavia, now
Serbia, my mother from Stettin, German, now Szczecin, Poland).
Now here’s the thing: while I
knew my parents had met shortly before my father was set to immigrate, I never
knew what ship either one of them had come over on. They just didn’t talk about
their lives before coming to Canada, and I suppose I didn’t ask. When my father
passed away from stomach cancer in 1970, any stories he had died with him. As
for my mom, she still wasn’t talking.
On September 21, 2016, my mom
died after a lengthy battle with COPD. And there, at the back of her closet,
was a blue and cream leather train case, the sort of case you’d have traveled
with in the 1950s. Inside there were, among other things, immigration papers,
death certificates for her mother, my father, as well as a document from the
T.S.S. Canberra; she’d embarked at
Southampton and disembarked in Quebec City, Quebec, where she took a train to
Toronto.
The writer in me had to learn
more. I began by contacting the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 in
Halifax, Nova Scotia, as well as a good friend, a longtime collector of ocean
liner memorabilia.
Bit by bit, I was able to weave
a tale about a woman named Anneliese Prei who immigrated to Canada in 1952 to
be with her fiancé, only to be murdered four years later. That tale morphed
into Past & Present, the second
book in my Marketville Mystery series, and while it’s a work of fiction, my
protagonist, Callie Barnstable’s, findings and frustrations with digging
through the past come directly from my own research. It seemed only fitting to
dedicate the book to my mother, and to release it on September 21, 2018, the
two-year anniversary of her death. Here’s a bit about it (and yes, there’s also
an Anton in the book):
Sometimes the past reaches out to the present...
It’s been thirteen months since
Calamity (Callie) Barnstable inherited a house in Marketville under the
condition that she search for the person who murdered her mother thirty years
earlier. She solves the mystery, but what next? Unemployment? Another
nine-to-five job in Toronto?
Callie decides to set down
roots in Marketville, take the skills and knowledge she acquired over the past
year, and start her own business: Past & Present Investigations.
It’s not long before Callie and
her new business partner, best friend Chantelle Marchand, get their first
client: a woman who wants to find out everything she can about her grandmother,
Anneliese Prei, and how she came to a “bad end” in 1956. It sounds like a
perfect first assignment. Except for one thing: Anneliese’s past winds its way
into Callie’s present, and not in a manner anyone—least of all Callie—could
have predicted.
About the author: Judy Penz
Sheluk is the author of the Glass Dolphin Mysteries (The Hanged Man’s Noose; A
Hole in One) and the Marketville Mysteries (Skeletons in the Attic; Past &
Present). Her short stories appear in several collections.
Judy is also a member of Sisters
in Crime International/Guppies/Toronto, International Thriller Writers,
Inc., the South Simcoe Arts Council, the Short Mystery
Fiction Society, and Crime Writers of Canada, where she serves on the
Board of Directors, representing Toronto/Southwestern Ontario.
Find her at
www.judypenzsheluk.com.
Postcards from the T.S.S. Canberra (known as the T.D. Canberra in
German)
Thanks for posting with my Travels today, Judy. Good luck on sales for the new novel--it sounds very good!
