by Leslie Budewitz
Every day, we walk through the past. On the way to work, we pass by a redbrick building with terra cotta trim, and glance up at the ghost signs advertising long-gone brands of cars, cigarettes, and soft drinks. After lunch, we take a walk on a trail that once served as a road, reclaimed by time and trees, with the help of human hands.
And we read books, some set in the past and others, though contemporary, woven through with strands of bygone eras.
Leslie Budewitz
A touch of the past deepens the present. I could not write about modern day Seattle and the Pike Place Market, the setting for my Spice Shop mysteries, without delving into Seattle history. My first standalone, Bitterroot Lake (written as Alicia Beckman), became much richer when I brought in the mysteries of a historic lodge, spent an afternoon in a pioneer cemetery, and prowled around one of the last remaining ice houses in NW Montana.
Even so, I kept my fictional feet firmly on contemporary ground until I began writing about Mary Fields. Mary was born into slavery in Tennessee in about 1832. Eventually, she came to work for the family of Mother Amadeus Dunne, the Mother Superior of the Ursuline Sisters in Toledo, Ohio, and at the convent. In 1884, Amadeus went to Montana with a group of sisters to establish girls’ schools at the Jesuit Missions to the Indians. In March of 1885, Mary came west to help nurse her friend, deathly ill with pneumonia, and stayed until her own death in 1914.
I’d long been fascinated by Mary and wanted to write about her. She first appeared in “All God’s Sparrows,” (Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, 2018), winner of the 2018 Agatha Award for Best Short Story. Two more short stories followed, also published in Alfred Hitchcock, and now, a novella set in 1897 and 1914 that anchors my new collection, All God’s Sparrows and Other Stories: A Stagecoach Mary Fields Collection.
So what do I love about reading and writing historical fiction?
The buildings: We get to live for a few hours in a drafty old English manor house with its long stairways, musty drawing rooms, and kitchens below stairs; in a Crow Indian lodge that can be moved and set up wherever the buffalo roam; or in a late 19th century hotel that housed Seattle’s Chinese and Norwegian laborers, without having to worry about holes in the slate roof or the wonky wiring.
No cell phones. None of us wants to live in the modern world without them, but they do cause problems for writers. How can we find ways to send our sleuth out sleuthing, when she could find much of what she’s looking for with a Google search or a well-targeted text? How can we put her in danger when she could ask Siri to call for help? The dangers Mary faced driving a two-horse wagon along a trail carved through the rocks and scrub sage no matter what the weather—she is believed to have been the first Black woman to drive a US Postal Service Star Route—create all kinds of potential conflict, with the land, the weather and wildlife, and the human inhabitants.
The Sears catalog. Finally, an excuse to get lost for hours in my reproduction Sears Roebuck & Co. 1897 catalog. Men’s shirt collars? Check. Walk-behind plows? Check. Watch charms, doorknobs, locks, corn mills, wagon hubs and buggy spokes? They had ’em. Don’t know what your character needed to fix her wagon and keep the mail running? Don’t worry. Just ask Mr. Sears and Mr. Roebuck.
Fun facts everywhere. How did British women who spoke excellent French become spies who worked behind enemy lines or provided invaluable assistance to the Resistance during World War II? What was childbirth like in late 19th century New York? Life in a logging camp? The pain of a lost child? What happened to women who flouted the social strictures of Victorian England? Or a man who deserted his Confederate Army regiment, or a Black woman who fell in love with a white man in Mississippi in 1964? Who painted those post office murals and the ghost signs that dot walls across the country?
Coming home with a deeper understanding of human nature. The late Victoria Thompson, author of the Gaslight Mysteries and more, told me that the historical is tailor-made for a writer who wants to explore social issues. Frank commentary about racism in a contemporary setting can be uncomfortable; in lesser hands, it can be preachy. But because humans haven’t changed a whole lot—“in every era,” she says, “we kill each other, love and hate each other”—a writer can probe and portray human flaws more easily in a historical context.
And a bonus sixth reason, maybe the best of all: For both readers and writers, historical fiction is fun.
All God’s Sparrows and Other Stories: A Stagecoach Mary Fields Collection, out September 17, 2024, in paperback and ebook (Beyond the Page Publishing)
From the cover: Born into slavery in Tennessee, the remarkable “Stagecoach Mary” Fields was a larger-than-life figure who cherished her independence, yet formed a deep bond with the Ursuline Sisters, traveling to their Montana mission in 1885 and spending the last thirty years of her life living there or in nearby Cascade. Mary is believed to have been the first Black woman in the country to drive a U.S. Postal Star Route, the source of her nickname.
In All God’s Sparrows and Other Stories, Agatha Award-winning author Leslie Budewitz brings together three short stories, each originally published in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, imagining the life of Stagecoach Mary in her first year in Montana, and a novella exploring her later life, including: “All God’s Sparrows,” winner of the 2018 Agatha Award for Best Short Story; “Miss Starr’s Good-bye,” a nominee for the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s Derringer Award; “Coming Clean,” a finalist for the Western Writers of America’s 2021 Spur Award for Best Short Story; and “A Bitter Wind,” a brand-new novella in which Mary helps a young woman newly arrived in the valley solve the mystery of her fiancé’s death and his homesteading neighbors’ bitterness toward him.
Includes an abbreviated bibliography and historical notes from the author.
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