Written at the request of Zoe, She Who Must Be Obeyed at Head of Zeus’ promotional department.
- The Harvey Girl is set during the Gilded Age in the New Mexico Territory. What drew you to this particular time and place for your new series?
For one thing, the parallels between that time and this are inescapable. I just read a book by a Stanford professor named Richard White who posits that the robber barons then weren’t all that smart or attractive and that their fortunes were made largely because of government enablement and subsidies. I mean, just look at the oligarchs today, a bunch of homely tech bros toadying to power so the government will fund their pet projects. History always repeats itself. It’s why empires rise in the first place, and why they inevitably fall. In my admittedly small way I wanted to illustrate that. While there’s still time. Heh.
2. The Harvey Houses were iconic in shaping the American West. How did you research their history, and what surprised you most about them?
You mean beyond the fact that they even existed? Because Fred Harvey didn’t make it as far north as Alaska and I’d never heard of him or the Harvey Houses or the Harvey Girls until friends took me to La Posada, designed by Mary Colter, Fred’s in-house architect. He hired a woman as an architect? Women as servers? Later, women as managers? This is not history as it was taught in any of the schools I attended (I minored in history for both my degrees and I find this particularly egregious), so the discovery altered my view of the role of railroads and of women in America in the 1890s.
3. Clare Wright is a Pinkerton agent undercover as a Harvey Girl. What inspired you to create a female detective in this role?
I first heard about the Harvey Girls when I read Stephen Fried’s Appetite for America, but the lightning bolt truly hit when I learned that Alan Pinkerton appreciated the value of female agents and started hiring them almost from the beginning. His first female agent, Kate Warne, served on Abraham Lincoln’s security detail! It seemed only natural for Fred to hire a female detective to ferret out the people who were robbing him and the ATSF.
4. Clare Wright is a fascinating protagonist—resourceful, brave, and undercover. What was the most challenging part of writing her character?
Coming into the series I had this notion that Clare would be fighting the patriarchy as much as she would be apprehending villains, but the truth is it wasn’t that much of a fight. When I stopped researching and started writing she was so involved in doing her job well that she didn’t give a second thought to anyone who might think she should marry herself a man and start popping out babies. And so neither did I. Much.
5. What was the most rewarding part of writing The Harvey Girl? And the most difficult?
The same answer to both questions: Learning that almost everything I thought I knew about the Gilded Age and the Old West was wrong. Just one example: That most men of the Old West were mostly drunk most of the time, which goes a long way toward explaining all the gunfights. Another: I was surprised as hell that rubber condoms had been in regular use for almost fifty years by the time of the novel. Good old Charles Goodyear. Every time I turned around, there was something else that made me go “Whaaaaat?”
6. What can longtime fans of Dana Stabenow/your work expect from this new venture?
A strong, smart female character who succeeds in a time that—traditionally speaking—didn’t place a lot of value on women who were strong or smart or even women. But hey, even a cursory reading of history finds women like that in every era. The trick is in giving them a voice, preferably their own.
Launching from the Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Scottsdale, Arizona,
on Saturday, February 28th, 4pm. See you there!
Reserve your copy of the signed first edition here.
Or in e on
Kindle.US
Kindle.UK
1 Comment Leave a comment ›
Another very interesting person in the old west was Angela Hammer. She was a newspaper reporter and publisher in Arizona territorial days. I had a job one summer as a research assistant to one of my professors who was writing a paper on women journalists in Arizona territorial days. You would be surprised at how many there were. Fun fact: John Clum’s daughter (he was the owner of the Tombstone Epitaph) had her own little paper called the Tombstone Bug Hunter. Her dad printed the papers for her.