The Midland Authors presents:
Susanna Calkins and Robert Archambeau on Historical Mysteries
6 p.m. on Monday, Nov. 16
at Secret World Books, 1774 Second St., Highland Park, Illinois
Free and open to the public.
Note that the Metra UP-N train’s Highland Park stop is walking distance from the bookstore. Ample municipal street parking is in front of and next door to the bookstore.
At this event, authors Susanna Calkins and Robert Archambeau will talk about writing historical mysteries.
Calkins became fascinated with history while pursuing her doctorate at Purdue University. Her first historical mysteries, the seven-title, award-winning Lucy Campion Mysteries, are set in 17th century London. Her second series, the two-title, award-nominated Speakeasy Mysteries, is set in a Prohibition-era Chicago speakeasy. She serves on the Mystery Writers of America national board and is the former president of the Sisters in Crime Chicagoland Chapter. Her fourth Lucy Campion mystery, A Death Along the River Fleet (Minotaur Books, 2016), is on display at the London Museum Docklands exhibit.
Archambeau’s passion for art led to his first novel, Alice B. Toklas Is Missing (Regal House Publishing, 2023), where the drama of a literary kidnapping takes place amid the artistic tumult of Paris in the 1920s. His ingenue protagonist, Ida Byrne, returned to make her way through Gothic chills and literary farce in The Bloomsbury Forgery (Regal House Publishing, November 2026), where Ida leaves Paris behind for the England of the Virginia Woolf circle.
Archambeau pursued graduate studies in English at the University of Notre Dame. While studying for his Ph.D, he got married on a sailboat in Chicago’s Burnham Harbor and worked as a clerk in a secondhand bookstore. Sitting at the long counter in the Aspidistra Bookshop, he wrote his doctoral dissertation on Wordsworth, as well as many of the poems that would make up his first collection of verse, Home and Variations (Salt Pub, 2004). He became a professor of English at Lake Forest College in Lake Forest, where he now chairs the English Department. He has taught 19th century British literature, Irish literature, creative writing and literary theory – taking time when he could to co-teach interdisciplinary courses with colleagues in the art and history departments. He also founded and edited a poetry magazine called Samizdat.
Archambeau lived for a year in Sweden, where he taught at Lund, a medieval university in a cobblestone town a hovercraft-ride away from Copenhagen. While in Lund, he met the Swedish writer Göran Printz-Påhlson, whose uncollected works he edited after the writer’s death. Back in the United States, Archambeau wrote two scholarly studies of poetry: Laureates and Heretics: Six Careers in American Poetry (University of Notre Dame Press, 2010) and Poetry and Uselessness: From Coleridge to Ashbery (Routledge, 2020).
He also wrote two collections of literary essays, The Poet Resigns: Poetry in a Difficult World (The University of Akron Press, 2013) and Inventions of a Barbarous Age: Poetry From Conceptualism to Rhyme (Madhat, 2016), and another collection of poems, The Kafka Sutra (Madhat, 2015). He also has written art criticism, primarily for Hyperallergic, and he became a semiregular contributor to The Hudson Review.