5 Ways to Live Mindfully in 2025

THE PROCESS

We had the opportunity to chat with Robert Brighton, award-winning author and creator of the Avenging Angel Detective Agency Mysteries and other acclaimed titles. He is an expert on the Gilded Age and avid Blackwing user. We recently teamed up on a Bespoke collection celebrating the release of his book Current of Darkness.

How and when did you decide to become a writer?

Mainly, I think it’s what I always wanted to be—it was a kind of calling, or obsession if you prefer. When I was a kid, books took me to countless places I wanted to go. I suppose as I grew up, I wanted to do for others what all those authors had done for me.

That said, it took many years for me to gain control of this craft of writing (or art, or both) before I was willing to publish a single word. I wanted to set the bar high, because I believe that good books will take readers anywhere they want to go—but great books will take them places they didn’t expect. That was my goal.

What drew you to historical fiction? And why the Gilded Age in particular?

Historical fiction authors can get a little heady about the ‘lessons of history’—and while I do not dismiss thought-provocation as a valuable byproduct of reading historical fiction, to me the author’s primary duty is to tell a good story. And what makes a good story? I tend to think that people read historical fiction to immerse themselves in a different time or place, either as a few hours’ escape from the daily grind or simply because it’s easier to immerse oneself in another era because our modern thoughts about modern life don’t keep intruding on our enjoyment of the story. Thus I feel that a rich and historically sound recreation of the world of the past—with a fictional gloss—provides a very satisfying reading experience. Readers of my books can wander around in the Gilded Age with me for as long as they like, and then come safely home again.

As to the Gilded Age itself, I suppose to me it represents the last gasp of a world now utterly swept away—whether in mindset or simply in the way people lived their lives. In the fifty or so years after the Civil War, most Gilded Age people evolved a belief that the future would be always better than the past. To them, the evil of slavery had been atoned for by the bloodletting of the Civil War; every day brought a new technological or scientific marvel; the last blank corners of the map were being explored. And in only a hundred years since…that sense of optimism has mostly curdled. Humanity cannot turn away from the sinking of the ‘unsinkable ship’, the Titanic; World War I, the Great Depression, the resurgence of the Klan and Jim Crow, World War II, the Holocaust, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot—really, do I have to go on? The short century following the conclusion of the Gilded Age—our century—has been one of nonstop horror. Even all of our modern technical marvels seem only to have deepened the sense of alienation we have from ourselves, our fellow human beings, and from nature itself (I have seen people at the rim of the Grand Canyon spending the whole time on their phones).

As a result, I tend to think that the Gilded Age was a little like those halcyon days of childhood, when we could hardly wait to grow up. Until we found out what growing up means! In the Gilded Age, almost no one could imagine what was just ahead, but man-oh-man were they barreling full-steam toward it! In my own moments of optimism, I like to think that perhaps understanding all that might help us pump the brakes a little. Or not: Human nature hasn’t changed in a mere hundred years, and if there is anything in general about Homo sapiens I can state with confidence, it’s that it is an unusually violent, horny, and greedy species. If this be treason, make the most of it!

What is the Avenging Angel Detective Agency?

The Avenging Angel Detective Agency is a fledgling (fictional) detective agency founded by beautiful young widow Sarah Payne. When Sarah’s intended is murdered at the behest of some very powerful people, the murder is immediately swept under the proverbial rug. Like most of us, Sarah might have gone on with her life with a degree of resignation about ‘the way things are’, but that’s not in her nature. She grew up reading the Sherlock Holmes stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and always thought she’d like to become a detective herself. And so she resolves to do for her dead lover what the justice system could not or would not do—hold the guilty parties to account. To right this kind of wrong, she starts up a detective agency to be a kind of ‘avenging angel’ for people to whom justice has been denied.

Part of what makes Sarah and her detective exploits unusually charming is that, while in deadly earnest about her new profession, she knows absolutely nothing about being a detective—except what she’s read in books. But unlike the unerring, cold precision of her hero Holmes, in her naïveté Sarah makes more than her fair share of mistakes and misjudgments. Even so, and against much opposition, she refuses to abandon her belief in herself, and that women can compete on equal footing with men, which of course was a pretty revolutionary notion at the time. I think all that makes her a very real person, and if there is one word that in my opinion ought to define good historical fiction, it is ‘verisimilitude’. That’s what I aim for; and with Sarah (and her ‘best frenemy’ Alicia Miller) I believe I hit the bullseye. Now there must be truth in advertising, so I must add that while my books do provide a kind of ‘escape’, they are decidedly not nostalgic. They depict the times and the human condition in the way my research has found them to be, warts and all.