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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