Historical Worcester and I need your help!!

Over the past year or so I've been trying to gather up reference material of Worcester Massachusetts circa 1920's for my next installment of The Adventures of Polly and Handgraves...

...and yes. I'm aware of the fact that I've been taking about doing a follow-up to A Sinister Aura for roughly a year more now. The script is written and all I need to do is get my rear in gear and work on the pages.

Other projects had kind of gotten in the way of that. And apart from page one, I am completely dissatisfied with the pages I've created for the story thus far.

So, I'm starting from scratch and I'm thinking doing something a little bit different with this project and perhaps the rest of the series after the second book.

But more on that at a later date...

...as I was saying one of the things that has been my top priority in getting this next project going is gathering pictures of Worcester.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with both Worcester and it's history, Worcester was a really fascinating place at the turn of the century...

...I speak of the turn of the 19th to the 20th Century and not the 20th to the 21st Century...

To be honest, when I was working on the first Polly and Handgraves tale I'm not sure if I had put a lot of thought into it becoming a series. I think I knew the characters were good enough to become a continuing series but it was mostly a vehicle to tell my twist to the Hammond/Prouty Murder.

But I think as I got closer to the end of that story, the more I began to think about how it would be great to create a series of mysteries based primarily in Worcester and around Worcester County.

I think what also helped was basing Polly's character on my pal Rori.

Rori is funny, witty, kind, moody, clever, outgoing, bubbly, talented and everything else that makes for a great crime fighter and main character in my opinion.

And Worcester County has all these quirky places that I think make for great mysteries.

Well, that's where you all come in. If you happen to have any photographs of downtown Main Street, especially a few more like the ones above, please e-mail them to me.

The one thing I want to do with this story that I really wasn't able to do as well with the last one is both let people who are unfamiliar with the city a feeling of it being a real place. And I want to give people who do live around and about Worcester a little bit of a thrill to look at a building in the book and say "I know that place!!"

I believe my e-mail address is on my profile so feel free to contact me either through the blog or via e-mail.

I already have some photo references from a couple books. One being the fantastic Worcester 1880-1920 from the Images of America series. But the more photo references I can obtain the merrier!! Many thanks :-)