Cause of Trouble: A Novel
Maybrook, New York • Summer 1913
Based on true events
“Two Girls From This City Said to Have Been Cause of Trouble.” — Middletown Daily Argus, June 21, 1913
The newspaper said almost nothing. This novel says everything else
In the summer of 1913, Nellie and Hattie travel by train from Middletown to Maybrook — a railroad boomtown in the Hudson Valley — on seven consecutive Fridays. On the seventh Friday, a man is dead, another has a fractured skull, and both women are in a jail cell in Goshen waiting to be sent to Bedford Reformatory.
Nellie has had thirty years to work out what she saw, what she knew, and what she chose not to know.
Cause of Trouble is a novel about two women in a world designed to misread them — about Italian immigrant communities in an American railroad boomtown, about the limits of testimony, and about the specific cost of being careful in a situation that has already decided what you are.
Told in a voice of precise, quiet power. Based on true events
About the author
Carmen Delessio
Carmen Delessio grew up in Maybrook, New York — the village at the center of this novel. He was, by his own account, a smart, shy kid who stayed to himself.
Genealogy research led him into turn-of-the-century newspapers, which turned out to be exactly his jam.
Digging through census records, he found his great-grandparents listed not as Delessio but as Frank — an Italian immigrant using an alias in a railroad boomtown, with family legends of a murder, multiple marriages, and a bar. Most of the legends didn’t survive the archives. Some did. His great-grandfather Carmine Di Lessio, a blacksmith from Philadelphia, was sixteen years older than his wife and had been married once before. He and his wife Giovani — later Angelina — came to Maybrook around 1908, drawn like thousands of others by the C.N.E. Railroad’s enormous new yard.
A railroad boomtown, one 1905 newspaper called it.
That research didn’t produce a family history. It produced this novel.
Carmen Delessio writes about Maybrook at carmendelessio.com
Cause of Trouble 