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.)