Show notes
Amy Harmon grew up in a remote Utah valley, very close to where the famed outlaw Butch Cassidy really lived. Quite a few years before her, of course. The folklore surrounding his Robin Hood reputation has always fascinated her.
She’s far too young to have seen the famous movie starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford first time round, but she’s excavated the history and shed a whole new light on the story and her latest book, The Outlaw Noble Salt.
Hi, I’m your host, Jenny Wheeler, and in this week’s Binge Reading episode, Amy talks about the mystery surrounding Robert LeRoy Parker, better known as Butch Cassidy, the American outlaw, train robber and leader of a gang called The Wild Bunch. It’s officially recorded that he died in a shootout with local authorities in Bolivia in 1908. But did he really? Amy’s book is a fascinating and heart-touching re-imagining of the story.
Mystery and Thriller Giveaway
Our Giveaway this week – We always have free books to Giveaway -. is Mystery Thriller And Suspense Freebies.
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And the range is huge with something to suit every taste ,from historicals like Poisoned Legacy, Book One in my Of Gold& Blood Gold Rush romance series through to cozies and contemporary psychological thrillers.
Find the link to download these books in the show notes for the episode on the website. The Joys Of Binge Reading.com.
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Before we get to Amy, a reminder. You can help defray the costs of the production of the show by buying me a cup of coffee at buymeacoffee.com/jennywheelx. And if you enjoy the show, leave us a review, so others will find us too.
Word of mouth is still the best recommendation and the way for others to find the show and discover great books they will love to read.
Links to items mentioned in the show
Movie: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064115/
Folklore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butch_Cassidy
Eliot Ness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliot_Ness
Gladys Knight: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladys_Knight
Books Amy has loved in the past or is reading now:
Louise L’Amour – Western classics: https://www.louislamour.com/
Lucy Maud Montgomery: https://lmmontgomery.ca/about/lmm/her-life
Anne of Green Gables: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Anne-of-Green-Gables
Baroness Orczy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scarlet_Pimpernel
Paullina Simons The Bronze Horseman: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/47499.Paullina_Simons
Susanna Kearsley: susannakearsley.com
Poets:
William Butler Yeats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._B._Yeats
Emily Dickinson: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Emily-Dickinson
Introducing author Amy Harmon
Amy Harmon: re-imagining the Burch Cassidy story
But now here’s Amy. Hello there, Amy, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.
Amy Harmon: I am so excited to talk to you, Jenny.
Jenny Wheeler: You’ve written more than 20 books and the most recent one is The Outlaw Noble Salt, and it retells the Butch Cassidy and the Sundance story, The Wild Bunch Story. If we are of a certain age, we saw the movie years ago, so it’s well known. What did you feel you could bring new to it?
Amy Harmon: I have always been drawn to the story, and I think it’s because I grew up in a valley, just north of the valley where Butch Cassidy, who wasn’t known as Butch Cassidy in his early years, he was Robert Parker, lived. He was born very close to where I was born, a hundred years apart. We were born in small town Utah at the end of the Wild West era.
He was the last of this very short time period that defined in the West. And I have always been interested in him. I’ve always felt a connection to him. Beyond just of course, the movie which came out in 1969, which predates me a little bit. I didn’t grow up with the movie, but it was very much the Western lore that is part of this place where I grew up, and so I think I’ve always been drawn to him.
Living near the Butch Cassidy valley
Every year my family goes through that valley on our way to California. It’s our family reunion trip. My parents were both raised in California, so we all gather there and every year I hit that valley about the same time coming home.
The valley has called me and probably two years ago coming through it, I just felt called to it and decided was I was going to answer the call and start looking more into the story of Butch Cassidy and what I could add that was beyond maybe what people thought they knew. Because there’s a lot more to him than I think people know.
Jenny Wheeler: Did you feel that, Butch’s reputation needed rescuing or that the image that had been left of him wasn’t quite true to what you think he deserved?
Amy Harmon: I think Butch’s reputation was a mixed one, In Utah he had quite a good reputation. And that comes through in the story. Even though he was an outlaw, he had this Robin Hood reputation, this Gentleman Outlaw if you will. He was very, respected in some quarters because he lived with a certain ethos of ‘do no harm.’
So he robbed, but he gave his winnings to the poor and he didn’t harm anyone and he didn’t hurt anyone. It was this part of his personality. That was also interesting to me, that he had these lines that he drew for himself. What I wanted to resuscitate or what I wanted to maybe explore was the way that Butch Cassidy felt about himself.
And the more research I did, the more the sense of regret that I felt. And I think there’s a bit of channeling that happens when you really dig deep into someone else’s life. You start to feel the way they may have felt. And I really felt his regret. I think he got pulled into a life that he didn’t realize he was being pulled into.
Butch Cassidy – living with regret
And that sense of that it was too late really came through. When I went through his history, I really felt like he regretted the choices that he made as a young man and then could never quite get out of the life and that he’d made for himself. And so, this was my chance to give him a different ending.
And I felt that sense of euphoria or this sense of maybe I gave him some redemption that life didn’t give him.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes, and in the book, it comes through that I believe that he committed virtually no murders himself. He got into The Wild Bunch gang as they were called, and there were some mean-spirited men there who killed without too much conscience, and of course he was associated with those men, is how you see it.
Yeah, he was associated. I don’t know that the things that even The Wild Bunch that the men he was associated with, I don’t think any of those things happened when he was with those men. That was a line. and he’s adamant about that, the people he was with or got wrapped up in, as far as the robberies he was pretty adamant about that.
When he was on a job that those things didn’t happen. And of course at the end of the Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the movie, there’s a shootout and if you’re shooting, somebody’s gonna get hurt. I don’t know how much he can really claim that he didn’t hurt anyone.
Amy Harmon: But that was the reputation, that he never killed anyone.
Did Butch die in a Bolivian shoot out?
Jenny Wheeler: In the book he’s got a brother who also causes him some difficulties. Did he have a brother? Is that a true part of the story?
Amy Harmon: He, Butch Cassidy or Robert Parker, was the oldest of 13 children. He had lots of brothers and lots of sisters, but there was a brother named Dan that wanted to follow in his brother’s footsteps and he ran him off. He was adamant about his brother not getting involved. And so it was from that I then took the inspiration for the character Van.
I didn’t want to make a villain out of a real person. And I do think that Dan Parker went on and made good. He struggled a bit and got involved with things he shouldn’t. And like I said, Butch Cassidy had to run him off.
But it gave me some inspiration for some characters that were fictionalized in the story.
Jenny Wheeler: As you mentioned, in the movie, sadly I’m old enough to have actually seen that movie when I was a younger person, but in the movie, they do die in the shootout in Bolivia, and that’s a long standing point of discussion whether that really did happen or not. I read a little bit online and one of the thoughts was that they have since exhumed bones down there and found that they were not Robert Parker’s bones.
Tell us about that strange, ambiguous ending.
Amy Harmon: It’s a strange ambiguous ending. I actually think the movie is a great movie. I think the movie captures the sparkle and the wit and the personality of Butch Cassidy. I really think it was well captured. And I think the ending was perfectly ambiguous because we really don’t know.
It was believed that for a long time that he was that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid were killed in Bolivia, in a shootout. There are have been so many people that have (investigated,) that are still Butch Cassidy hunters, still are obsessed with him. They and have gone on these long, treasure hunting, treasure seeking journeys.
Family insists Butch came home
But his family, his youngest sister, insists that he came back to the little valley in Utah that’s just over the hill from the valley I grew up in. She insists he came back, which is pretty hard evidence. And it is believed that he is buried on the family’s property. They all went to their graves keeping that secret. If he is buried there, no one knows where.
And it makes sense that they wouldn’t want anyone to know because there would be no way that he would be left to rest in peace. So that is the belief that his family, members of his family had. And that is kind of testified to, but as far as hard evidence, bones or remains or anything like that, there have been no remains found in either place.
Jenny Wheeler: You can understand how the family, it would become some sort of tourist destination. So you can understand why they would keep it quiet. Give us an insight into your writing process. This book, it might have changed as you, developed over your 20 books, but with this book, how did you tackle it?
Amy Harmon: Oh, every book is so painful and I think that’s a hard thing for. early writers that are just getting started. I don’t know how to do it without really going deep as far as character studies. And you never know where this story’s going to lead. For me it’s always a really painful, it’s glorious, but it’s painful.
It’s like having a child, that’s the only thing that’s the closest thing I can compare it to. Having had four children and having written 20 books, there’s this sense of laboring and giving birth to, a new being.
And this one was no different. It was being pulled along and following the trail of breadcrumbs or the trail of history and digging and excavating and trying to really discover what it is that you want to say and what story you want to tell.
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The painful process of creation
And you just have to follow that process and stick with it. For me, it’s always really painful right up until the end. I never have that sense of always knowing where I’m going or having it be easy or having it just flow for me. It’s always painful. It’s always a process, but there’s nothing like having written.
I’m not the first one to say that. I don’t necessarily always like writing, but I love having written. I love the whole process when it’s all said and done. There’s really nothing like it. For me, it’s just that sense of having faith and sticking with it and just continuing to chip away and tell the story I set out to tell that I feel like I’ve actually accomplished something.
Jenny Wheeler: And do you do all of your research before you start writing a word?
Amy Harmon: I don’t think there’s any ending or beginning to the whole process. You have to do enough research that you have a foundation and that you have an idea and that you know your characters and you know the setting. But there’s just no way to not stop all the way through and your mind and the book itself will lead you into new areas that demand that you stop and you familiarize yourself.
The research goes on all the way through and you just have to allow for that.
Jenny Wheeler: You have some wonderfully creative devices that lift the story into the realm of myth. And I guess this is a story that lends itself to myth because already there is quite a sense of myth around those figures. One of the elements that you use is introducing these haiku poems, and every single turn of the plot really is influenced by a poem of some kind.
Just those five line poems, a thread through the story, where did that idea come from?
How haiku poems slipped into the story
Amy Harmon: It is really hard. I was thinking about that. I thought, where did it come from? Inspiration is such a thin thread that then you start to pull on it and you don’t always remember what the first thread was. But I do think in this case, there are a couple things. One of the things when I read the autopsy – for be for lack of a better word – the evidence that was purportedly found on Butch Cassidy.
They said that he had a little notebook and a small pencil in his breast pocket when his body was discovered in this shoot after the shootout in Bolivia. Again, this is all from the time what was listed. And we don’t know now if that was actually him or what.
But that little notebook and that small pencil were very interesting to me. I thought, why would he carry around this notebook? As a writer, I carry around notebooks. I have notebooks and pens stashed everywhere. And it made me think that Butch Cassidy had a little bit of writer in him and once that got into my mind I thought it was just a small notebook, there wouldn’t have been room to write big journal entries or draw big pictures. It was that this little notebook in his pencil started me thinking.
And the simplicity of haiku, the syllables and the simplicity of the poetry suited his personality to me. And then along with that there’s a rich heritage in this state that he grew up in and that I’ve grown up in. Mining was a big part of what brought people to the state and it was a big part of the diversity of this state.
There was a huge Japanese contingent, whole towns that were settled by Japanese immigrants that came to work in the mines. And Butch Cassidy for a small time worked in one of these mines that was populated mostly by Japanese immigrants. And so it gave a little bit of color to the setting and a nod to Utah’s heritage to include that.
To include haiku. It was very much it made sense to me. It felt right as I came across that, and I thought that works with his personality. And I just loved it. It became addicting. I still do it. I’m still constantly writing these little haiku in my head and anybody that reads the book will find that for a few days after, you’ll be composing haiku.
Combining hope and tragedy
Jenny Wheeler: It’s a wonderful playful element and it really helps lift things, that is imbued right through the story because you keep on thinking, how can this have a happy ending? How could it be redemptive?
Now, we’re not going to give anything away, but with this book and other books of yours, that sense of both tragedy and some light redemptive quality, you managed to combine those two things well.
Is that a sense you have of life in general that, it can be hard, but you’re looking for a redemptive aspect?
Amy Harmon: I honestly think that there is no story without tragedy. every story throughout history, our own, our ancestors, every one of them is imbued with that tragedy. And it is what makes a story. The opposites, the tragedy, and the drama and the romance, all of it works together and plays together and I guess maybe because I am drawn to historical books and historical stories, that sense of tragedy is even more pronounced because history is full of it.
It’s unavoidable and most historical stories have tragic elements, or they have tragic endings, and yet I want to write romance, which demands a happy ending. Anybody that talks about romance demands that you know that they have a happy ending, that’s one of the tenets of that genre.
And so I’ve juggled that, wanting to be true to people’s true stories and to people’s real struggles, and yet have that sense of hope that I think life also has in spades.
Life always has this sense of hope and I think that is an element that runs through all of my stories, that hopeful element that even when things are really dark and even when things don’t have happy endings, which in most cases if you’re working with historical people, they don’t.
So, you have to find a way to flip that on its ear and give the reader that light at the end of the tunnel or that pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. So yes, I definitely have that element on all my stories, and I don’t ever see myself being able to avoid it or even wanting to avoid it.
What happened to Elliot Ness?
Jenny Wheeler: That does bring us to another book that very much parallels. this one in terms of your theme and even your character being a well known. This time, a crime fighter who’s had screen appearances, and that’s Elliot Ness.
You’ve written The Unknown Beloved, which takes Elliot Ness’s story.
Tell us how that one worked out for you.
Amy Harmon: That’s so interesting because Elliot Ness is not the main character in that, he’s a side character which is actually easier for me to do. I did the same, I used the same when I wrote What The Wind Knows. I used Michael Collins, who is a great Irish figure. I used him a side character, and I did the same in The Unknown Beloved with Elliot Ness, because a lot of people know Elliot Ness only through, his crime fighting days in his twenties.
Al Capone and the taking down of the mob in Chicago. I didn’t know the rest of Elliot Ness’s story. I actually came across some of the Mafia elements when I was writing The Songbook of Benny Lament, which was set in the sixties. It had some Mafia elements.
And when I started to dig around in that, I came across what happened to Elliot Ness in his later years, and the main character in The Unknown Beloved was a man named Michael Malone. He’s a real man, a real figure in history who would have known Elliot Ness but he wasn’t as known himself.
I was able to make his story be the main force in in that one. But yes it’s interesting to take real characters and again, turn it on its ear a little bit and say, what if, or here’s another element that you might not have been aware of.
People get these real life stories and these real life people, but then they get this fiction wound through it that gives them the history, but also gives them maybe an alternate ending.
Elliot Nest didn’t have a good ending either. That was an interesting way to wind him in and to further his story, but at the same time not have to focus on his ending, which wasn’t a very happy one.
Writing 700 years of Irish history
Jenny Wheeler: Yes, you do say history is messy and hard and often sad, and you sometimes find it hard to give your historical stories a good ending, so that’s part of the labor process.
Amy Harmon: Yes. 700 years. When I was doing the research for What The Wind Knows, it coves 700 years of Irish history, I’m like, where do I even begin? And it doesn’t end well after the Irish Revolution, which is where I focused that story. You talk to any Irish person of which that’s my heritage.
It didn’t end well. It was very sad. The country was very split and so yes, you have to find where it is that history is hopeful and wind that into the darker elements of human experience.
Jenny Wheeler: In the Outlaw Noble story, you’ve got a wonderful character, a young boy called Augustus, who’s 10 years old, and one of his distinguishing aspects is that he has a birthmark on his face, which is very obvious to everybody who meets him. It puts a bit of a screen between him and other people when they initially meet him.
In the end notes of the book, you mentioned that you used that character because one of your sons had a similar birthmark, and I wondered why it was important to you to perhaps write about this in a book.
Amy Harmon: Yes, my son Sam who’s just turning 14 was born with what they call a Port Wine stain, and it encompasses half of his face. It’s like it sounds it’s wine colored. It’s very thick and dark.
There are new treatments in the last 20, 30 years that have come around where they can laser the marks and help improve the appearance, but everybody, every mark is different. And Sam has had to learn how to live with that aspect. It hasn’t been pleasant.
It’s a hard thing when you’re born with a very distinguishing thing and it’s called a deformity. I don’t look at it as such. In fact, I find it quite endearing and I think he’s quite beautiful.
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A mother’s keen understanding
But it has been hard for him and (he’s endured )lots of staring and lots of questions and people not knowing how to quite interact with him. I think people, once they get to know him forget that he even has it. You get very used to it. In fact, I forget, and then I will notice sometimes when we’re out in public and I’ll notice people staring and it comes as a shock.
And then I look at him anew because I forget. And so those experiences as his mother wishing that I could take it from him, but then understanding that in many ways it’s a gift. That it has it has forced a character arc in him that he would otherwise not get. And that it’s, like I said, in many ways it’s a beautiful gift, but that experience that he’s had made it very easy and very cathartic for me to write.
In Outlaw Noble Gus deals with the same difficulty, with the same ailment. And it also made for an interesting comparison with a man like Butch Cassidy, who wishes that he could hide from his own identity, from the sense that both have that you can’t hide. that who you are will always be there.
And that you have to live in a certain way that the crosses that we bear or the mistakes that we make that, that those things we will carry and that we can’t hide from them. And who we are matters both on the inside and the outside.
So it was an interesting way for these two people, to bond for this boy, to bond with this outlaw who was in many ways trying to hide and realizes he can’t.
And for this boy that wishes he could hide and can’t. It was an interesting character study.
Jenny Wheeler: Fantastic. When you first started writing, did you have a goal in mind and have you achieved it yet?
Amy Harmon: With this book or overall?
Jenny Wheeler: Overall.
Writing: ‘never about reaching the summit’
Amy Harmon: Overall, I don’t know if I’ll ever achieve it. And that’s good, because it’s never about reaching the summit. It’s never about reaching the peak. It’s always about the journey. And I’m convinced that’s what storytelling is. Storytelling is about the journey. It’s never about the ending.
Although there’s nothing like really nailing that ending or nailing that landing. No, I hope I don’t ever reach the summit because I think that there won’t be any more stories in me. I have to continue seeking. It’s the seeking that really makes for a great story.
And so, I’m looking forward to continuing to seek.
Jenny Wheeler: Let’s talk about Amy as reader, I always like to ask our guests about their reading habits. If they’ve got anything they’d like to recommend to other listeners? Most of our listeners are obviously voracious readers. What are you reading at the moment? Have you been a binge reader in the past? Give us a sense of what you love most about reading books yourself.
Amy Harmon: I would have been a binge reader all my life. It’s actually up until when I started writing and then could no longer binge read. I still have stacks and stacks of books there, but a lot of it is research. I don’t read as much fiction as I used to, but growing up I grew up in the middle of nowhere and my parents let me and encouraged me to read everything and read everything I did. Books were my friends. That was my escape. in many ways, my whole life revolved around what I was reading. And it continues to this day. I’ve been formed by the stories that I’ve read. I still love Shakespeare.
I still love historicals. I grew up reading Louis L’Amour. I don’t know if how many readers are familiar with Louis L’Amour, a Western writer that interestingly enough his agent and my agent are connected.
Amy Harmon’s favourite books
My agent is the daughter of his agent, so it’s really wild that I grew up reading Louis L’Amour and his stories of the West which felt very much a part of my life, and then having grown up and having that connection.
But lots of Louis L’Amour books like Lonesome Dove. I loved the stories of the West. but I love the stories of medieval times too. I loved King Arthur. I loved all of that kind of that sense of, again, mythology and legend mixed with history.
And I think that all comes out in my books. some of my favorite more recent reads are I anything by Susanna Kearsley, my favorite of hers is The Winter Sea.
I love The Bronze Horseman by Paullina Simons.
I love books like The Scarlet Pimpernel
I grew up reading Beverly Cleary and Judy Bloom.
Anne of Green Gables was probably my favorite book. L. M. Montgomery. She would probably be one of my favorite writers and continues to be probably the reason, the most formative writer of my life. And yet, and I also love poetry. I’m a fan of Yeats and Dickinson.
I read everything and was allowed to read everything and I continue to be blown away by. Some of the old books – I go back and revisit them because they really are what formed me and made me a writer.
Anne of Green Gables author ‘formative influence’
Jenny Wheeler: I’m interested in your comment about Anne Of Green Gables being formative. Tell us a little bit more about that.
Amy Harmon: It’s interesting. Lucy Maude Montgomery Did not have a happy childhood. We know that Anne is an orphan and is adopted by a brother sister combo. And of course, anybody that has read those books knows the writer, Lucy Maud Montgomery,
It was her escape, writing. Anne Of Green Gables was her escape. She did not have a good childhood and a good life. It was a very sad existence and there was a sense of her living the life that she didn’t have through her stories. I definitely can relate to that, the sense of writing stories that are very personal and that almost feel biographical, but yet are alternative history or alternative past that maybe we don’t all get to take, we don’t get. We all have struggles and difficulties and yet we can write stories that give us the life that we otherwise wouldn’t have.
I think that’s one of the most beautiful aspects of being writers that we live other lives, and readers do too. But as writers, we get to live all these lives. And so in that way it was formative in that it introduced that to me that idea of living more lives than the one life that I have.
But then as a writer I’ve been able to continue with that journey.
Jenny Wheeler: Fantastic. I must admit I didn’t know that about Lucy Montgomery in her life, so I will look at it with the new fresh eyes now.
Amy Harmon: Yes.
What the next 12 months holds for Amy Harmon
Jenny Wheeler: Tell us about the next 12 months for you. What have you got on your desk for Amy as author? What does the next year hold?
Amy Harmon: I’m thick in it. This time of year is all always the busiest time for me because I have a book that releases, The Outlaw Noble Salt which will release April 9th
That’s around the time where I have my new deadline. I’ve pushed it back away because it was killing me every year to have a book released and also a book deadline in the same month.
So I pushed it into the summer. But the book that I’m working on now has some of that magical realism of some of my other stories. With a very interesting historical period two historical periods. It’s mainly set on the Isle Of White in Great Britain. And as I continue to dig, I’ve fallen in love with this particular time in history.
I’m not going to go into it too much because it’s complicated. And as my editor informed me the other day, I really need to work on my elevator pitch. But yes, I’m working on something now that has history and royalty and British history all wrapped up around this Isle Of White in Great Britain.
So that’s happening right now.
Jenny Wheeler: And which time periods are we talking about?
Amy Harmon’s next book
Amy Harmon: We are talking about 1500 and we are talking about 1900. This 400 year span, we have a parallel storyline which I haven’t done a lot of before. a little but not a full out. Not like this.
And so it’s really my word of the year is excavation because I’m really digging down into some history and it’s challenge to me.
But again, it’s about the journey. And so I’m trying to embrace it.
Jenny Wheeler: And you do have a title yet?
Amy Harmon: I do not have a title. It keeps changing. So nothing yet. I keep thinking the Isle Of White, but I think my publisher’s going to say we need something different than that. So right now, there it is. It is untitled.
Jenny Wheeler: Okay. We always like to finish off and we starting to run out of time, by asking do you enjoy interacting with your readers, and where can they find you online?
Amy Harmon: I love to interact with my readers. I’m probably the most active on Instagram. It’s the easiest platform for me. I find for me it’s the friendliest platform. There’s less drama there, and I definitely am not interested in interacting in on that level. But I find it Bookstagram I find Instagram to be very to be very lovely.
So I’m quite active there. I do have a newsletter and a webpage and I get reader email all the time on my website – authoramyharmon.com. And I always try to answer unless it’s just nasty and then I don’t answer. But yeah I love to interact with my readers and I love when I get reader email from people that have connections to.
Connecting readers and books
Because that happens all the time and it’s lovely to connect with the real descendants of some of my historical characters.
Jenny Wheeler: Give us an example of one of those. What historical characters have people followed up with you on?
Amy Harmon: Oh, I’ve had people contact me that knew Michael Collins or who had parents that knew Michael Collins. And that was really interesting. I had a woman that was married to the nephew of Michael Malone from The Unknown. Beloved. I had many people contact me, about Deborah Sampson from the book, A Girl Called Sampson, about a woman that dressed up as a man during the Revolutionary War and actually fought all the way to the end and ade it all the way to the end without being discovered.
A fascinating woman again called Deborah Samson. And that was 250 years ago, but many descendants, six or so people have contacted me, that are Samsons or descendants of hers. And so that was very interesting.
Jenny Wheeler: Yeah, that’s fantastic. We, mentioned the Benny Lament book. Is there any historical basis for the Benny Lament character?
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Singing in Gladys Knight’s choir
Amy Harmon: No historical basis in the main characters. Benny Lament and Esther Mine are figments of my imagination. Although that book, I think as much as any, has this sense of reality and of realness and rawness, I actually was fortunate enough to sing with Gladys Knight in her gospel choir for many years.
And I got to know Gladys Knight’s story and it was through her that the character Esther Mine was born. I think that sense of reality that really comes through in that book, that sense of real history that comes through, even though the characters are not real people is probably due to my relationship with her.
Jenny Wheeler: How did that come about?
Amy Harmon: I heard about these tryouts for this gospel choir. I was living in Las Vegas, Nevada at the time, which is where Gladys Knight lives. And she put out word that she was doing this large gospel choir and I didn’t know any better. I wasn’t intimidated. I thought the worst thing that could happen was that I could be turned down.
So I went and auditioned and I made it into this choir. And for, like I said, for many years, I traveled around and it was all volunteer members of this gospel choir and, it was just a remarkable experience.
Jenny Wheeler: Were you writing at that time?
The son who helped Amy into writing
Amy Harmon: I was not interestingly enough, it was not until – oh I take that back. I had written my first novel right towards the end of that period when I was in the choir. I had written it over time and, it wasn’t until my surprise baby Sam was born. The one with the Port Wine stain.
He surprised me and took me out of my game and I had to take a look at my life and figure out how to how to do things a little bit differently when he came along so that I could be a stay at home mom. And it was at that point that I dusted off this manuscript I’d written a few years before he was born and figured out how to self-publish.
So all of that was at the same time period. But no, it was Sam’s birth that meant I couldn’t travel with the choir anymore. And it was also Sam’s birth that made me dust off this novel I’d written and look into getting it published. I always tell him he’s the reason I’m where I’m at now, 15 years later.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s wonderful. And do you still sing?
Amy Harmon: I don’t sing as much as I used to. I have some health issues that I’m very hoarse all the time. This is as good as it gets on the voice. So I sing a little bit, but not professionally,
Jenny Wheeler: But just for your own soul.
Amy Harmon: Just for my own enjoyment. Yep. I still sing in church.
Jenny Wheeler: Amy, it’s been wonderful talking. We’ve actually run over time because I just have been enjoying it so much. Thank you so much
Amy Harmon: I appreciate you and this has been a lovely conversation.
If you enjoyed Amy you might also enjoy…
Melanie Benjamin’s historic fiction successfully combines romance with thriller plots and famous real life heroines, so its perhaps not surprising her books regularly grace the New York Times and USA Today best seller lists.
In this episode Melanie talks about her latest book Mistress of the Ritz, a World War II story based in the landmark Paris hotel taken over by the Nazis. It’s a love story and a suspense thriller all in one.
listen to melanie
Next Time on Binge Reading
New Zealand author. Chris Draper fell in love with the Australian Outback. While working in Adelaide, south Australia and decided it was the perfect setting for his fast paced optimistic techno thriller Goodbye Woomera Belle. And it couldn’t be more topical, revolving as it does around artificial intelligence and inter-governmental tensions between friendly and not so friendly powers.
Erin Brightwell is a brilliant young researcher and technician who has done some research that’s essential for national security, being chased by many different entities. It’s a great read and Chris will be on the show in two weeks time.
Remember. Binge reading is now fortnightly, and Chris will be on in two weeks.
That’s it for today. See you next time and happy reading and listening. Bye for now.