Melissa Lenhardt Rocks Google

DEBORAH CROMBIE:  I don't know about you, but I could use a boost this week. And here it is, provided by my Dallas coffee-shop writing pal Melissa Lenhardt. She's got great female characters, and she's made me feel a lot better about my own research rabbit holes...

Isn't that a fabulous cover?

Here's a snippet about Melissa's new book, HERESY:  

They were the first and only all-female gang in the American West. Though the newspapers refuse to give them credit, their exploits don’t go unnoticed. Now, they’ve got a rival male gang on their trail and an old score to settle.

Margaret Parker and Hattie LaCour never intended to turn outlaw.

After being run off their ranch by a greedy cattleman, their family is left destitute. As women alone they have few choices: marriage, lying on their backs for money, or holding a gun. For Margaret and Hattie the choice is simple. With their small makeshift family, the gang pulls off a series of heists across the West.

Though the newspapers refuse to give the female gang credit, their exploits don’t go unnoticed. Pinkertons are on their trail, a rival male gang is determined to destroy them, and secrets among the group threaten to tear them apart. Now, Margaret and Hattie must find a way to protect their family, finish one last job, and avoid the hangman’s noose.

And here's Melissa to tell us more--

Hello, my name is Melissa, and I’m an incessant Googler.

Right now I’m listening to Edward Rutherford’s novel, New York, a non-fiction history of New York City that is thinly veiled as fiction. That isn’t a criticism in the least. I’m the type of historical novel reader who will stop in the middle of a paragraph and google something to learn more about it. Call me weird, but I don’t just read for enjoyment, I read to learn something. Which is probably why I love historical novels in all their forms – Westerns, mysteries, romances, literary, women’s fiction.

When I’m writing my historical novels, I assume my readers are incessant Googlers, like me. On the one hand, that’s more than a little terrifying. What if I get something wrong? (I’ve been lucky so far; only one person has dinged me for an inaccuracy, and no one has caught the rather glaring anachronism across all three books in the Sawbones series. No, I’m not telling.) On the other hand, incessant Googlers are my peeps, and I want to be sure to give them enough fodder to go down at least two or three historical rabbit holes per book. Here are a few things I think HERESY readers might Google.

Garet Parker & Hattie LaCour/All-Female Outlaw Gangs in the American West

Did Garet and Hattie exist? Was there an all-female outlaw gang in the West? The answer is no, and no. But! Since women have been pretty much written out of history, there’s no proof there wasn’t, either.

Colorado Suffrage Amendment, 1877

Yes, Colorado voted on women’s suffrage one year after becoming a state, but it lost handily. The suffragists reorganized and in 1892 it passed.

Brown’s Hole

It’s a real place in the northwestern corner of Colorado, near the Utah and Wyoming borders! It is remote and difficult to get to, which is why Butch Cassidy and his gang (and many others) used it to hide from the law in the 1880s and 1890s.

WPA Slave Narrative Project

One of the POVs is told through an oral history given to a WPA writer in 1936. The slave narrative project is real, it’s fascinating, and it is available in full on the Library of Congress website.

Female Pinkertons

You might know there was a Women’s Bureau of the Pinkerton Detective agency through reading Greer McAlister’s historical mystery, Girl in Disguise. If you haven’t read it, I recommend you do.

Are you an incessant Googler, too? If so, what is something you googled while reading and were surprised by what you learned?

Melissa Lenhardt is the author the Sawbones historical fiction series as well as the Jack McBride mystery series. Her debut mystery, STILLWATER, was a finalist for the 2014 Whidbey Writers' MFA Alumni Emerging Writers Contest, and SAWBONES, her historical fiction debut, was hailed as a "thoroughly original, smart and satisfying hybrid, perhaps a new sub-genre: the feminist Western" by Lone Star Literary Life. HERESY is her sixth novel.

DEBS: This topic practically has me hyperventilating--you would never guess that I have Edward Rutherford's LONDON on my permanent bookshelf. Or that, back in the day, before we went all digital-ish, I  had a complete set of Encyclopedia Brittanica. I am crazy about research. Too crazy, my editor would probably tell you...

REDS and readers, what's the most fun thing you've Googled lately? (I'm saving mine for the comments.)

Melissa Lenhardt--The Feminist Western

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Having grown up in Texas, with an uncle who was a famous Texas writer and historian, I rebelled by turning all my imaginative passion to the other side of the Atlantic. I didn't read westerns, or watch westerns, and am abysmally ignorant about John Wayne movies. And I'm ashamed to admit that I'm probably the only person who neither read nor watched Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove.

HOWEVER, thanks to Melissa Lenhardt, I am now a western convert!! I am totally hooked on her SAWBONES trilogy. (Maybe the reason I never liked westerns was because none of the main characters were women?)

 

Melissa changes that. Here she tells us what inspired her.

MELISSA LENHARDT:  When I woke up on June 20, 2008, I had no idea my life was about to change irrevocably. It was the next to last day of our vacation in Hawaii, and all we had on the agenda was hanging out on the beach. It was the first day we weren’t scheduled to the hilt, and we were all looking forward to a casual day, and capping off our trip with a luau on the beach that night.

After breakfast, I went to a photo shop. I don’t even remember why, but my boys were nine and six, so I have a pretty good idea why I was taking my own sweet time returning to the room. When I saw my husband on an adjacent trail with a panicked expression on his face, my first thought was the boys. Then he said, “You need to call your mom.”

Let’s be honest; no one ever thinks they’re going to get The Call while they’re on vacation, but we still dutifully give our itineraries to our loved ones and, in my case, call your parents earlier in the week to let them know to call my husband’s phone if they need me because mine wasn’t working. Just in case. You never know.

My dad died suddenly that day. We had no time to prepare, and we didn’t know how to grieve. All I knew is that one minute my soul was full, and the next a part of it was gone, and would never return. I spent the rest of the summer in a fog, watching Westerns on TCM and AMC, trying to touch a piece of him, no matter how ephemeral. Bud Boetticher, James Stewart, John Ford, John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Randolph Scott, and Anthony Mann helped keep the sorrow at bay, at least for an hour and a half at a time. Lonesome Dove was my father’s favorite, and I dutifully watched, then picked up the book for the first time. I loved it, naturally; McMurtry is a master, after all. By then, I’d watched enough Westerns focusing on the men that I was ready for a female-centered story with some grit that didn’t revolve solely around romance. When I didn’t find it in literature (Lord knows it doesn’t exist in the movies or television), I decided to write my own.

Writing was a hobby in 2008. I had no designs on getting an agent, let alone getting published. Lord knows I had no idea this book would get published. I’m a little embarrassed to admit how many iterations this story went through. Sawbones was the book that taught me how to write, how to finish, how to edit, how not to give up. There was something about Laura and her story that resonated with me, so I doggedly kept at it. I’ll confess, as time went on and I read more on women in the West, and their lack of representation in history books, I had a strong desire to shatter a few myths about the West. And, I didn’t want to let my dad down.

Badlands, the third book in the Sawbones series, was released nine years, almost to the day, since my dad died. A decade. Hard to believe so much time has passed. It’s even more difficult to believe the story I started to feel closer to my dad, to honor him, ultimately led to a new career as a professional writer, to meeting so many wonderful writers and readers and publishing professionals. I wish I could have one day with my dad, to hug his neck, hear him call me “Bug." I want to tell him how he’s inspired me, how the memories of his love, his never-ending encouragement, his belief that I could do anything I set my mind to, has led to an exciting new chapter in my life. I can't imagine ever being able to answer, "Which of your books is your favorite?" with anything other than, "SAWBONES, hands down."

DEBS:  Here's how the story begins, in 1871: When Dr. Catherine Bennett is wrongfully accused of murder, she knows her fate likely lies with a noose unless she can disappear. Fleeing with a bounty on her head, she escapes with her maid to the uncharted territories of Colorado to build a new life with a new name. Although the story of the murderess in New York is common gossip, Catherine's false identity serves her well as she fills in as a temporary army doctor. But in a land unknown, so large and yet so small, a female doctor can only hide for so long.

Catherine/Laura's story continues in BLOOD OATH and BADLANDS, and, yes, she does come to Texas in SAWBONES, and I'm now fascinated not only by her story but by my own state's too long neglected (by me) history.

READERS, were you bitten by the western bug? What were your favorites? And did you long to see strong women characters?  

Melissa Lenhardt writes mystery, historical fiction, and women’s fiction. Her short fiction has appeared in Heater Mystery Magazine, The Western Online, and Christmas Nookies, a holiday romance anthology. Her debut novel, Stillwater, was a finalist for the 2014 Whidbey Writers’ MFA Alumni Emerging Writers Contest. She is a member of the DFW Writers’ Workshop and president of the Sisters in Crime North Dallas Chapter. Melissa lives in Texas, with her husband and two sons.