Women on writing: turning to crime for a fresh start

What in the world would make three law-abiding Texas women turn to crime – writing, that is, audiences at the 2017 Dallas Book Festival wanted to know about authors Kathleen Kent, Melissa Lenhardt, and Lisa Sandlin.

(l-r) Sandlin, Lenhardt & Kent

In two cases, crime writing was something of a second act. Dallasite Kent hit the New York Times bestseller list as a writer of historical fiction with her debut novel, The Heretic’s Daughter, a based-on-real-life narrative about the Salem witch trials, and followed it with more historical novels before making a sharp turn with her latest, The Dime, a contemporary mystery set in Texas. Sandlin made her mark as a writer of literary short fiction (In the River Province: Stories, and others), then made the jump to crime with The Do-Right. Anomalous Lenhardt alternates her own genre of “feminist Western” (the Sawbones series) with mysteries set in contemporary Texas (the Jack McBride mystery series).

But what, besides Texas settings and strong women characters, do the books of Kent, Lenhardt and Sandlin have in common? And why did the authors choose murder and mayhem to showcase their writing?

“All of us love strong women protagonists,” Kent said. And “crime gives you a chance to push people to their limits of depravity, but also to the limits of human courage.”

Also part of the why, for the two most literary members of this deadly trio, the answer was a challenge and an unexpected brush with the noir genre.

It started, Kent said, “with someone I know calling for Dallas authors to contribute to an anthology called Dallas Noir,” from Akashic Books, publisher of noir series set across the world, and featuring authors from each city or country.

Despite being steeped in the nefarious deeds of earlier centuries, Kent has never written contemporary mysteries, but asked if she could, “like any good fiction writer, I said yes.” Her agent pronounced her short story contribution, “Coincidences Can Kill You,” as potential for a novel, and the character of Brooklyn to Dallas detective Betty Rhyzyk was born.

As Kent credits her mother with remarking about an ancestor hanged as a witch in Salem, “There are no witches, only ferocious women.

“I’ve got the same story as Kathleen,” Beaumont, Texas, born Sandlin said: another call from Akhasic Books, this time widening its net for the whole state of Texas with Lone Star Noir.

“I thought I had to have a detective (so) I came up with a private investigator who was the opposite of Sam Spade.” She soon decided that the neophyte PI’s secretary, Delpha Wade, was the stronger character of the anthology story, “Phelan’s First Case,” “and that became the core of the book.” Who needs a detective when he’s got a tough but tender secretary who’s more than decoration, and just released from a long prison stretch for killing her rapist.

Along the way, Sandlin exercises her literary talents and quirky sense of humor for a decidedly un-Spadeish crime story. “I have a gunfight with no bullets, parrots and pirates, but not in the same scene,” as well as a victim whose family is holding his artificial leg hostage.

Lenhardt’s start in crime came from an inspiration as literary as either Kent or Sandlin – with a twist. A self-proclaimed “romantic at heart,” she began her first-published novel, Stillwater, “as a retelling of Jane Austen’s Persuasion,” until in walked agent Jack McBride. As a big city ex-FBI agent, McBride finds himself baffled in the small Texas town of Stillwater (which strangely resembles Lenhardt’s hometown of Winnsboro, Texas) until local Ellie Martin takes him under her wing, and into her bed.

Far from ending with a kiss and a fadeout, to Lenhardt’s mind, the conflict only starts once the relationship has begun, and continues with Jack and Ellie’s second fling at crime, The Fisher King.

And although Stillwater was her first book to be published, she had already written the first volume of her Western series, Sawbones, with two more historicals due out later this year. “But no, I’m not through with Jack McBride.”

(Next: writing craft, agent tips, and results of the dreaded gong show, from the upcoming DFW Writers Conference)

Adventure classics -- Capturing the plague at war's end

Pale Horse, Pale Rider

by Katherine Anne Porter

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I’ve gone back and forth this year about which novel to include from the woman who may be the best writer ever to come out of Texas. Should it be 1962’s Ship of Fools, the best seller that finally brought popular acclaim and financial stability to Katherine Anne Porter? Or Pale Horse, Pale Rider, the April 1939 publication The London Times Literary Supplement recommended as a “first choice” of novels? (Porter’s home state of Texas was less impressed. The Texas Institute of Letters passed over Pale Horse later that year, awarding its annual prize to folklorist J. Frank Dobie.)

I hadn’t read Pale Horse, Pale Rider (actually, one of three short novels published in a single volume), so one afternoon this past week I decided to leaf through it. I couldn’t stop reading, blitzing through in less than an hour (it only runs about fifty pages in Katherine Anne Porter: Collected Stories and Other Writings). Despite its literal description of the protagonist’s delirium during a near-fatal bout with the 1918 influenza, Pale Horse, Pale Rider is a far more accessible story than Ship of Fools. Still better for this centenary year of the beginning of World War I, Pale Horse, Pale Rider is one of the few literary depictions of a pandemic that took more lives than the war did.

Porter contracted the virulent influenza strain in early October 1918, while she was a reporter for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, Colorado. She was so ill that her colleagues had her obituary set in type, preparing for the death which sometimes occurred within two days of the flu’s onset.

The experience “simply divided my life, cut across it like that,” Porter would later write. “So that everything before that was just getting ready, and after that I was in some strange way altered, really. It took me a long time to go out and live in the world again.”

During the course of the disease, her thick black hair fell out. When it grew back, it was completely white. She was twenty-eight years old.

“The road to death is a long march beset with all evils,” Porter’s protagonist Miranda dreams between her periods of delirium. “The heart fails little by little at each new terror, the bones rebel at each step, the mind sets up is own bitter resistance and to what end? The barriers sink one by one, and no covering of the eyes shuts out the landscape of disaster, nor the sight of crimes committed there.”

Porter rendered the symptoms of her disease so precisely that the Centers for Disease Control discussed her book in its April 2013 publication, “Emerging Infectious Diseases: Emerging Viruses.” As John M. Barry writes in his 2004 The Great Influenza, the disease’s victims “came with an extraordinary array of symptoms, symptoms either previously unknown entirely in influenza or experienced with previously unknown intensity. Initially, physicians, good physicians, intelligent physicians searching for a disease that fitted the clues before them--and influenza did not fit the clues--routinely misdiagnosed the disease,” as dengue, malaria, cholera, typhoid.

Barry writes as a testament to the collision between modern science and epidemic disease. Porter writes as a testament to the strength of one woman’s spirit, and to the ability of art to transmute horror. It was a lesson the world would soon need again. Five months after the publication of Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Hitler invaded Poland. The next world war had begun.

Porter’s and Barry’s books are readily available. For the text of the CDC article, see
wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/19/4/ac-1904_article.htm/.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics continues a June of stories by Southwestern authors with Tony Hillerman’s The Great Taos Bank Robbery and Other Indian Country Affairs.)