by admin | Nov 8, 2011 | LadyKillers
I Kid You Not: Children in the Silver Rush mysteries – by Ann Parker Years ago, when I was started writing my Silver Rush historical mystery series, I pondered about the maternal standing of Inez Stannert. Should she have a child? Or not? You see, Inez leads a hard and complicated life. She lives at the ten-thousand-foot mark in the Rocky Mountains, in Leadville, Colorado, in the 1880s. Leadville is a silver boomtown—chaotic, bursting at the snowy seams with men and women driven by greed, desperate to get rich by any means including murder. Not an ideal time or place to raise a child. In addition, Inez’s husband, Mark Stannert, has disappeared without a trace before the first book even opens. Inez has given up hope of finding him alive, although a part of her wonders if her smooth-talking, good-looking gambler husband might have skipped out with a “pretty-waiter girl” or one of the actresses passing through town. In Mark’s absence, Inez manages the Silver Queen Saloon and runs a high-stakes poker game on Saturday nights. And then, “stuff happens.” The mysterious (but incredibly attractive) Reverend Sands comes to town. People close to Inez start to die under unusual circumstances (after all, this is a mystery). Inez investigates (after all, she is the sleuth). I wanted to make Inez a mother, even though I wasn’t sensing a lot of maternal attributesin this poker-playing, whiskey-drinking, pocket-pistol-toting woman of the West. But I thought that Inez would make a fiercely protective, passionate parent. She would do whatever it took to protect her children, if I were to bequeath them to her....
