Dear whoever holds this ARC in their hot little hands…
Greg, my editor at HoZ, asked me to write a letter to enclose with the advance reading copies of The Harvey Girl. Here you go, I said.
Hi! I’m Dana Stabenow, author of forty-ish novels so you’d think I’d done enough to be going on with but nooooo, as in I just wrote the first book in a new mystery series about a Pinkerton agent going undercover as a Harvey Girl in the 1890’s American West. I don’t know what I was thinking. Oh wait, yes I do! Read on…
Years ago friends took me to La Posada, one of the few remaining Fred Harvey hotels, this one in Winslow, Arizona (yes, of ‘standing on the corner’ fame). In their gift shop I found a copy of Stephen Fried’s Appetite for America: Fred Harvey and the Business of Civilizing the Wild West—One Meal at a Time. Chapter 12 is titled “Harvey Girls.”
Until that moment I’d never heard of the Harvey Girls. Their story begins with Fred Harvey, a British immigrant to the United States who talked the Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe Railway into bankrolling the construction of Harvey House restaurants along their routes. From the beginning the Harvey Houses were immensely popular, in the American West in part because all those lonely miners and ranchers and farmers and cowboys and lumberjacks got waited on by attractive, educated young women in crisp white and black uniforms. No wonder the Harvey Girls had to sign a contract swearing they wouldn’t get married for at least six months after they were hired. For many of them this was their first time away from home, their first time earning their own money, and their first taste of independence. Heady stuff for that half of the American population that was still 31 years away from getting the vote.
I felt like I’d been struck by lightning and that’s even without taking into account a time and a place unlike any other in human history. It’s 1890, the beginning of the last decade of the Gilded Age, a period of exponential growth, extravagant materialism, and extreme corruption. Six new states have been admitted to the Union in the past nine months, the railroads are laying six thousand miles of new track every year, and the population has increased by almost thirteen million over the previous ten years.
Crime is expanding just as rapidly with payroll thieves, bank heists, and train robberies leading the way, which ensures plenty of work for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. Pinkerton’s newest operative is Clare Wright, 22, an orphan, single, attractive, intelligent, well-educated, and can adapt into any society at need, high or low. She’s been working for Pinkerton for two years and her success rate at catching crooks thus far is a hundred percent.
Clare is at present undercover in northern Mississippi ferreting out the criminal who robbed the local bank. She is called back to Pinkerton’s main headquarters in Chicago for her next assignment, where Robert Pinkerton introduces her to Fred Harvey. He tells them that the Red Mountain Express has been robbed four times in the past six months and that its conductor was brutally murdered during the last hijacking. Fred wants Clare to go undercover at the Harvey House in Montaña Roja in the New Mexico Territory, to stop the robberies and bring the murderers to justice.
Over the course of the first three novels Clare discovers the robberies are more than the simple theft they appear to be and in fact involve a conspiracy to commit treason, and that the conspirators have no problem disposing of anyone who gets in their way, including Clare herself. Good thing she keeps that derringer close to hand. Enjoy!
I’ll be launching The Harvey Girl at the Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Scottsdale, Arizona, this Saturday at 2pm.
If you can’t make it to the event in person the store streams the event live on Facebook Live and YouTube, and later as a podcast on Podbean. You can’t escape me however far and fast you run. It’s almost like you’re one of Clare’s perps. Heh.
And look at this nice Harvey Girl go cup I made on Zazzle.
I’ll be giving one away at the event.
