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A Conversation with Amy Stewart
Miss Kopp Just Won't Quit
This is the fourth book you’ve written about Constance Kopp, a real-life deputy sheriff who worked in Hackensack in the 1910s. Is it also based on actual events, or have you run out of historical records?
Miss Kopp Just Won't Quit
This is the fourth book you’ve written about Constance Kopp, a real-life deputy sheriff who worked in Hackensack in the 1910s. Is it also based on actual events, or have you run out of historical records?
I actually had more real-life cases than I could use this time around! This novel takes place in fall 1916. Constance had been a deputy sheriff for over a year, and many of the cases she worked on were written up for the papers, which gave me lots of material. I did shift the time frame around, moving cases from the spring to the fall so that I could put together a sequence that better suited the shape of a novel.
This novel takes place in the fall of 1916, which was an election season, both for Sheriff Heath and, on a national level, for President. Did you see any parallels between the politics of 1916 and 2016?More than I would’ve liked! It was a complete coincidence that I started to write this novel the day after the election. That just happened to be the first day I was free to put aside my other obligations and begin a new book. After the election, I woke up to a very different world than the one I’d been expecting. I didn’t want to do any kind of work, but I thought it might distract me. I dragged myself upstairs to my office and sat down with all my notes about Constance Kopp's real life. Suddenly, those actual events looked very different. What I had before me was a true story about a woman doing a man's job who was the target of vicious, misogynist attacks during a contentious election year. I'm always thinking about the parallels between the Kopps' world a hundred years ago and today, but that was more apparent than ever this time. It’s subtle—you won’t have to re-live the 2016 campaign if you read the novel—but if you’re looking for the similarities, you’ll find them.
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