Molly Tanzer’s Creatures of Want and Ruin takes inspiration from F. Scott Fitzgerald and H.P. Lovecraft, but also from crime fiction and crime fact of the early 20th century. Amy Stewart’s Kopp Sisters novels re-create the life of one of America’s first female deputy sheriffs, Constance Kopp. By fictionalizing her real life, and exploring the cases she actually worked on, the novels collectively tell the story of a pioneering woman in law enforcement. Future installments will continue to follow Constance and her sisters as all three of them continued, in real life, to work in crime-fighting and detective work in different ways through the 1920s.
Both Molly Tanzer and Amy Stewart are published by the same house and have become great fans of each other’s work. When asked about Molly’s new book, Amy’s exact words for Molly were “you are goddamn amazing,” which led to the conversation below.
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Amy Stewart: Hey, Molly! I was just thinking: you and I have the same publisher, we have novels coming out around the same time, and we have this other thing in common: Both of us started writing our books after the 2016 election. This fall is really the first season when novels written after the election will be released, so we’re about to see how writers were affected by the result.
What’s so interesting to me is that neither of our books are set in the world of 2016 election politics. Yours is historical urban fantasy set in 1927, mine is historical fiction set in 1916, but we were nonetheless grappling with current events while we were writing. Were you fighting to keep the election from influencing your novel, or did you welcome it?
Molly Tanzer: I tried to strike a balance! I wasn’t interested in trying to write a modern Animal Farm or anything like that, so I did my best to make Creatures of Want and Ruin feel relevant while still letting it be its own story.
But the thing is… the world has a way of creeping in. The 2016 election season was such a fraught time.But the thing is… the world has a way of creeping in. The 2016 election season was such a fraught time. Even before Trump’s victory, while I was doing the pre-writing for the novel (outlining, character sketches, and so forth), the book was already veering in a pretty political direction. But Ellie West—my protagonist—wasn’t always going to have a personal struggle where she felt at odds with her family after their politics undergo an anti-immigrant, socially conservative shift, but after I saw so many of my friends becoming increasingly depressed and panicked as they realized their families were actually going to vote for Trump, I wanted to write a book where someone had to cope with a similar sorrow.
What about for you? When did modern politics start affecting your writing of Miss Kopp Just Won’t Quit? And did anything change about the story say, post inauguration, when things really began to heat up?
AS: Believe it or not, I really didn’t think at all about the parallels between the election season of 2016 and 1916 at all until the election was over. I usually start a new novel in November, after I’m home from book tour, and in 2016 it just so happened that the day after the election would be the first day I had free to settle down and start working. I thought, “Well, I’ll be pretty hung over from my Hillary victory party, but I guess that’ll be OK.”
Obviously, I woke up to a very different world than the one I’d been expecting. Nonetheless, I dragged myself upstairs and tried to focus on my work. It was only then that I realized that I was writing a novel about a woman doing a man’s job who was the target of vicious, misogynist attacks during a heated political campaign, one hundred years ago.
Keep in mind—I’m writing a true story! I didn’t make up these events, but there they were. I absolutely reconceived the novel in such a way that I could shine a light on the politics of 1916 as they compare to our current situation. I might’ve worked through a little of my own misery as well, although I promise my readers that this novel will not feel like one long therapy session.
So—give me an example. What specifically happens in your novel that speaks to the election and its aftermath?
MT: I would say the villain of the book was most definitely shaped by the election turning out the way it did.
Joseph Hunter is Ellie’s neighbor, though she doesn’t know him well. As the book progresses he becomes the Reverend Joseph Hunter, a powerful grassroots community leader who is ostensibly trying to start a church, but who isn’t really actually a pastor as far as anyone can tell. He says he is a man of God, but his theology isn’t familiar to Ellie. Eventually she realizes he’s attracting people to his new “church” by appealing to their fears regarding social change, not their faith.
This is a fantasy novel, so it turns out that Hunter has a supernatural ability to control people’s hearts and minds, but as time passed while I wrote, and I saw the continued support Trump received from his base in spite of any and all allegations that came his way, no matter how disgusting, it felt like a cop out to have Hunter’s power be wholly supernatural in origin. I therefore made it clear that people had to want to believe Hunter’s anti-progressive rhetoric to be affected by his power.
You said you worked through some your misery via your writing. I did too, in several ways—but I’m curious, what was that experience like for you? Did it inspire you and spur you on… or did you end up feeling feel like you couldn’t use your work as an escape from current events?
AS: It was weirdly helpful for me to take current events and turn them into a story. Maybe it gave me some hope that current events, like my story, will come to an end!
I took a perverse pleasure in dropping some of the events and themes of 2016 into the novel. It’s very subtle, and so far, early readers have not necessarily even picked up on them. For instance, in my novel, one politician is very well-qualified but also overly confident: he can’t imagine that voters would actually elect someone who goes around making inflammatory statements and doesn’t know or even care about the actual duties of the office. There’s also a last-minute bombshell in my novel that’s meant to be the Comey letter—a bit of disastrous news that can’t be rebutted so late in the election season. Oh, and someone takes a walk in the woods at the end.
What I realized is that if I could take real events and codify them into a narrative structure, I could somehow turn them into these abstract objects that I could manipulate and examine.I remember, during that miserable winter right after the election, that so many artists said they just couldn’t make their art. They were distracted, terrified, and depressed. I was, too, but at least I got a to-do list out of it. I was never at a loss for a plot point, because I could just rummage around inside my trauma and anxiety and find something that fit perfectly.
What I realized is that if I could take real events and codify them into a narrative structure, I could somehow turn them into these abstract objects that I could manipulate and examine. By putting them at a slight remove, they were easier to deal with. And setting those events in 1916 helped me remember that this, too, shall pass.
So here’s something I wonder, about our novels and all the other post-election novels: What are readers going to think? Is it going to be “Oh, I don’t want to revisit the election in the novels I read” or do you think readers might find it cathartic to see these themes explored in different contexts, with different outcomes?
MT: This is a question that has been on my mind! I’ve doubted myself plenty of times, but at the end of the day, my favorite books are the ones where I felt that on some level the author was looking at me through his or her prose, saying “I know who you are, I see you, and I understand your struggles.”
Depression and anxiety are fundamentally isolating experiences, and I think one of the reasons we’ve seen a massive upswing in the attendance at political rallies/marches, and an increase in the number of people eager to get involved in local politics, is that not only are these things a way to make your voice heard, but they are ways in which we can physically and emotionally come together. Not that it’s easy—in fact, it’s extraordinarily difficult (but crucial) to make sure people feel included and represented by such events. But forging those coalitions is crucial, now more than ever these days, when scrolling through social media or news apps on our phones and worrying until late in the evening has become a national pastime.
My hope is that books like ours, which took some inspiration from our current political situation, will be another way in which we can make each other feel less alone. It’s not the same as that spark of hope after a local election goes well, or the powerful feeling of joining your voice to a chant at a march… but a few moments of escapism paired with hope and recognition can go a long way, in my experience.
You mentioned that you took comfort remembering that “this too shall pass” while writing your book set in 1916. I’d like to take that one step further and ask you where you’re going next? As for me, the themes in Creatures of Charm and Hunger, the third in my series, aren’t that much lighter than those in the second… set at the end of WWII, part of the plot involves an agoraphobic Jewish teenager using diabolic magic to find out if her missing parents have perished in a concentration camp. My quick pitch to my agent was “teenaged witch hunting Nazis,” which, given current-day politics, is sadly more timely than it would have been even two years ago. What about you?
AS: Believe it or not, the overall plot structure of the fifth Kopp novel is entirely inspired by the movie Stripes. Go ahead and laugh. I don’t know whether to be ashamed of it or proud of it. (I’m proud of it.)
It takes place at a National Service School, which was a real military-style training camp for women wanting to join the war effort in 1917. I’m weaving in the true story of a woman who was known nationwide for her part in a scandalous sexual crime and even had to change her name just to get a job or find a place to rent. Her name was as well-known as, say, Monica Lewinsky’s—instantly recognizable. The nature of the scandal was different, but the unwanted fame and negative attention were very much the same.
So I wrote an opening scene in which this young woman loses her job, her boyfriend, and her apartment, and decides to enroll in this National Service School to reboot her life. As soon as I finished it, I thought, “Did I seriously just write the opening scene of Stripes?” I did. That movie was on all the time when I was a kid. I have most of it memorized.
After I realized that, it was pretty easy to weave in a few other references, just for fun. There’s no mud wrestling and no urban assault vehicle, but if you know the movie, you’ll pick right up on it. I hope to inspire other historical novelists to pay tribute to Bill Murray and Harold Ramis in their work—and, of course, P.J. Soles and Sean Young, their female co-stars who didn’t get near enough credit.
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Amy Stewart is the New York Times bestselling author of Girl Waits with Gun and four other novels (so far) in the Kopp Sisters series. The newest, Miss Kopp Just Won’t Quit, will be published on September 11, 2018. Find out more at amystewart.com.
Molly Tanzer is the author of Creatures of Will and Temper and the forthcoming Creatures of Want and Ruin, out November 13, 2018. For more information about her critically acclaimed novels and short fiction, sign up for her newsletter at mollytanzer.com, or follow her @molly_the_tanz on Twitter or @molly_tanzer on Instagram.
