Hiya!
It’s been a long time since I’ve been around these parts, and it seems I have missed great things happening in Mormon literature. I’m not sure I can catch up.
Family and plumbing problems have been taking up my time almost exclusively for the last couple of years or so, and my last book came out in early 2017. At the time I was struggling to write the current one, because I had a lot of research to do. A lot. I don’t really like research.
Andrew saw I have a book coming out this week and asked me to write an article, which I am happy to do. However, this is going to be a stream-of-consciousness article, various notes and tidbits because my brain is tired.
I was born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, and I was weaned on a little of its criminal history, namely Boss Tom Pendergast and the Pendergast Machine. It was a unique organized crime outfit that openly flouted Prohibition, which made the region prosper and carried it through the Great Depression better than most other regions of the country. Still today, 100 years later, the metro area can show vestiges of the economic advantages the Pendergast Machine afforded Kansas City.
I never really thought about writing a book set in that era because, quite frankly, the era itself didn’t interest me as a setting for romance fiction. It didn’t feel too much different from contemporary romance (cars, telephones, fashion, appliances), and I could never really get the feel of the time period.
But I had started a family saga and it brought me around (inevitably, I think) to writing one.
Unfortunately, in the middle of writing it, I binge-watched the HBO series Boardwalk Empire, which made me feel utterly inadequate as a writer. Childish. There was so much I still didn’t know about how the mafia and machines worked, the intricate relationships, the double-dealing and backstabbing, the politics—and things I couldn’t express in writing without images. I guess it’s an era best seen and not read.
This was further compounded by the fact that the Kansas City Machine and Mafia, while important to Chicago and the East Coast, was unique in so many ways: the Pendergast Machine (Irish) and the Italian Mafia worked together long before the Chicago and East Coast outfits got together to even talk about banding together. Kansas City was in no way dependent upon the Chicago and East Coast outfits the way they were dependent upon Kansas City. Al Capone attempted to feel it out as a target for taking it over, but was basically run out of town the second he got here (which I think is impressive because … Al Capone, for crying out loud).
In any case, 1520 Main is not really a breakdown of the history so much as weaving it into the romance of the progenitors of my original trio (The Proviso). I struggled to make it more than background noise (as I did for the history in Dunham).
However.
There was one thing I had to do, which was to get the protagonist couple baptized into the church by the end of the book.
So … I took a page out of Las Vegas’s history and the “Mormon Mafia,” interweaving the concept of it into the very real Extermination Order in Missouri, that made shooting Mormons utterly legal (which, by the way, wasn’t repealed until 1976).
I have no idea about the history of the church in this area between the time they were driven out and the 1960s, when my grandfather was the first stake president of the Kansas City stake. There is very little record, my mother didn’t know much, nobody who was alive in that time was still around, and my earliest memories are of the building that was built in ~1914.
With so little to go on, I made up my own history.
Thus, the triumvirate of the Machine, the Mafia, and the Mormons was built.
Content warning:
For those of you familiar with my work, and those of you who don’t want to become familiar with my work because it’s R rated, this one’s a little different in that respect. There is language. Lots and lots of language. They’re criminals. I don’t know any criminals, but I do know non-criminals who speak this way, so it’s not a leap to think criminals will also.
As for the love scenes, generally speaking, I write them to be consistent with the participants’ relationship and personalities and circumstance. Since this was in 1929, with a preacher’s daughter who didn’t know how babies were made, I didn’t feel that writing explicit scenes, or too many of them, was appropriate for the time and societal mores. Thus, in this book, there are only two not-as-explicit-as-usual love scenes. The rest are simply referred to so as to let the reader know the relationship is progressing.
Dunham, my pirate novel, took me 25 years to write because I knew I didn’t have the chops to fulfill my vision. But when I was ready to write it, I did.
1520 Main, on the other hand, took me 3 years, but I still don’t think I have the chops to do it justice. It is the hardest book I’ve ever written, not only because of the history, but because of the main character’s personality. It’s easy for me to write over-the-top personalities, with everything in superlatives: best, most, grandest. It is difficult to write a quiet personality to be interesting and deep, especially when she is young and raised with no encouragement beyond the superficial. Trey is a Dunham, born and raised in superlatives. But Marina … she’s the one I had to get right, to pay homage to the hidden, but very interesting, people in the world.
1520 Main debuted Friday, May 31. If you pick it up, I wish you well. Tin Lizzies make for a bumpy ride.
Moriah Jovan is a writer of romance with Mormons, rather than a Mormon-romance writer. Her goal is to put the language of Mormonism out into the public sphere, rather than keeping it to ourselves.
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This is great. I was just thinking over the weekend that I needed to write you because this long without a book? is Moriah okay?
I’m glad to hear you are.
I’m fine, thanks. This was a brutal book to write, hence why it took me so long.
And what are YOU working on?