Gloria McMillan

By: Gloria McMillan

The Blue Maroon Murder ($15 – Click to Order, ISBN: 978-1-937536-06-0, Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-68114-181-7, PS3613.C585395 B57 2011, 202pp): What is happening in the land of the “Maroons,” historic Midway University on Chicago’s south side? A famous campus figure is found blue in the face after some terrible accident─or murder.

Gloria McMillan weaves an engrossing tale of the swirling ambition and intrigues that draw in Dinah Cassidy, a 30-year-old literature grad student, who recently lost her young husband in a fatal bicycle accident.

Dinah’s fellow grad student Jerry Mason tells her that a mystery document has surfaced in the university’s rare books Library that may prove a love affair between Theodore Dreiser and Jane Addams!  Just as Dinah lets this momentous news sink in, she learns that an ambitious and womanizing literature professor has been found dead outside the Theoretically Spring conference.  Has somebody in the English Department turned to crime?  Signs point to an inside job.

Dinah becomes an unlikely sleuth as she begins to put two and two together in the manner of other university sleuths such as Homer Kelly in Jane Langton’s New England novel Emily Dickinson is Dead and Kate Fansler in Amanda Cross’s Death in a Tenured Position, set at Harvard.  But this is Chicago and nobody knows its rules better than Dinah and her grief counselor mentor Harry Wilton.  Harry used to be a detective on the Chicago police force before turning Unitarian campus minister in his retirement.  Dinah and Harry must outwit the cleverest South Chicago denizens before more of the English Department are blotted out.

Children of Steel: Short Fiction from Our Historic Steel Mill Towns (Softcover: $20, 228pp, 6X9”: ISBN: 978-1-68114-605-8; Hardcover: $25: ISBN: 978-1-68114-606-5; EBook: $2.99; LCCN: 2023921865; Books—Literature & Fiction—Short Stories & Anthologies—Short Stories; Release: February 25, 2024) collection shows that engaging fiction of place is possible even for what some call less “scenic” places. But these places have heart! This collection is a way that people from steel mill communities share fiction based upon lives that they, their parents, and grandparents have known. In some of the stories in this collection, the steel mills are highlighted. In other stories, the mills may only be a constant part of the surroundings and a backdrop. But in all cases, these are stories that only can come from those with direct experience of being the children of steel. These contributions are from Jeff Manes, Joan Paylo, Kathy Bashaar, Karen Banks Pearson, Patrick Michael Finn, Sharon Hale Hotko, Curtis Mazzaferri, Barbara Dubos, Joseph S. Pete, Kurt Samano, John Szostek, Hardarshan Sing Valia, Connie Wachala, Alice Whittenburg, Stacy Alderman, Robert McKean, Phyllis Woods, Bianca Roman, Jane Ammeson, and Gloria Ptacek McMillan.

Gloria Ptacek McMillan, the Editor, was born and raised in East Chicago, Indiana. She received her MA in English from Indiana University and Ph.D. at University of Arizona. She has published three books: The Blue Maroon Murder, Orbiting Ray Bradbury’s Mars, and The Routledge Companion to Literature and Class. Her play Universe Symphony (about modernist composer Charles Ives) was performed at the Flandrau Planetarium in Tucson, Arizona. She leads a Zoom Tucson Hard-Science Science Fiction Group and writes articles to bring science into better communication with the arts and humanities. She has lived in Tucson since 1973 with her patient family (husband Bob and now Los Angeles-based son Chris). She visits Chicago and Northwest Indiana, sites of her steel mill town childhood.