Bookseller’s Girl Waits With Gun Makes It Big With Indies

Bookseller/author Amy Stewart’s new historical novel, Girl Waits With Gun (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), recently hit the Indie Bestseller List, following its selection by her fellow booksellers for September’s Indie Next List.

Stewart, who co-owns Eureka Books in the small town of Eureka, California, with her husband, Scott Brown, recently spoke with Bookselling This Week during a stopover on her book tour in North Carolina’s Raleigh/Durham area.

Girl Waits With Gun is based on the true story of a young woman and her sisters who fought for justice against an unscrupulous factory owner in early industrial era-New Jersey. The book is Stewart’s seventh since 2000, and a follow-up is already scheduled for publication next fall. Her earlier works of nonfiction, all published by Algonquin Books, concern the wonders and perils of the natural world. These include The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World’s Great Drinks (2013); Flower Confidential, about the global flower trade (2007); Wicked Plants (2009); and Wicked Bugs (2011).

Taking place in 1914, Girl Waits With Gun tells the story of 35-year-old Constance Kopp, who is swept up in a harrowing fight for justice when rich, greedy silk factory owner and gin smuggler Henry Kaufman refuses to pay for damages after he crashes his car into the buggy Kopp is riding in with her two sisters.

The conflict turns violent — there’s blackmail, a shooting, a kidnapping, and Kaufman’s eventual trial — but quirky, indefatigable Constance and her sisters, all young, unmarried, unemployed, and selling off pieces of the family farm to get by, stand up for themselves in a time when women were still denied the right to vote and to own property. 

Stewart, who has written for the New York Times and the Washington Post and is a busy public speaker with engagements at garden clubs, trade shows, and bookstores around the country, said she came upon the idea for the book while doing research for The Drunken Botanist. Readers she has met on tour have likewise become enamored of the Kopp sisters’ story, she said, in which Constance is named one of the nation’s first female deputy sheriffs.

“It has a crime that is at the heart of it, but it is not a straight whodunit. What I am finding is that readers are very interested in the time period because it’s before the Roaring Twenties and it’s before World War I began, which is not a period of time that has been explored as much,” Stewart explained.

The book’s afterword includes newspaper articles and other documentation that provided Stewart with details about the actual event as well as her notes explaining the places where, and the reasons why, she used her imagination to fill in details or invent a plot line or character.

Stewart noted that while people are connecting to the time period — the American labor movement in Paterson, New Jersey, site of the famous Paterson silk strikes in 1913 — they are also really connecting with these three sisters and are excited to see what happens to them next.

“Each of the sisters was interesting in their own way,”  said Stewart, whose research on Constance, Norma, and Fleurette Kopp involved trolling Ancestry.com, combing through old census records and city directories, and tracking down the family’s living relatives.

The book also carries a feminist message, she said. None of its three main female characters wanted to get married and have children, and they were determined to maintain their independence, all in an age when it was difficult for women, married or not, to participate in civic affairs, get an education, or get a job outside of the home.

“I have been so gratified that a few people have said, ‘Oh, I’m so glad it’s not a love story.’…  It’s women doing something that isn’t sitting around talking about their boyfriends. That’s been great and so rewarding because that is what I personally loved about them,” Stewart said.

On her current book tour, Stewart has returned to many indie bookstores she has visited on previous tours. Since her first title, From the Ground Up: The Story of a First Garden, was published in 2001, many of their owners and staff members have become great friends, she said.

Over the course of touring for her previous books, Stewart has become adept at promotion: While touring for The Drunken Botanist, she created a signature cocktail for bookstores to serve during her events. For Girl Waits With Gun, Stewart has created another drink she calls “the New Jersey Automobile,” which is equal parts gin, sweet vermouth, applejack (a New Jersey spirit), and blackberry jam, topped off with sparkling wine.

“I learned very quickly on that book tour that if you serve cocktails at your event people will totally show up, and so I said, ‘Alright, we’re just going to do cocktails with every book from now on. I don’t care what the book is about, lesson learned,’” said Stewart, with a laugh.

When she is not writing or touring, Stewart is working at her own bookstore in Eureka, where she helps to organize author events, manages publicity, and works behind the counter.

Stewart expressed gratitude to her fellow indies around the country who have made her book a success in their stores.

“It’s tough competition and there are so many big books that come out in the fall,” she said. “Of course, what independent bookstores do is read with a lot of discernment. We read carefully and really think about what our customers want, and that’s how books that don’t have the name Stieg Larssen attached to them stand a chance,” she said. “And I’m just so grateful for that.”