• When Joyce Carol Oates, with her habitual generosity, asked me for a story for the anthology Cutting Edge, I sat down to write one for her, and “Miss Martin” appeared quite fast on the page, though I had to go back and revise somewhat, of course.
As so often with stories, there are some details from life: a house on Long Island with a loft above the dining room, which we built for grandchildren in the summer. Even the fall occurred to my poor husband, who went up the ladder that a workman had propped up carelessly against the wall and punctured a lung. I wanted to change the usual triangle here, with the “wicked stepmother” turning out in the end to be of help to my young protagonist. Here too, I have been a stepmother in life, and of course I do come from South Africa. I asked my husband, a psychiatrist, what a father could do that might merit punishment, and his response came fast: “Incest,” he said.
Jake Lithua was forever corrupted at the age of five, when he discovered his father’s Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set. Ever since, he has been interested in telling stories of heroism and courage, fantastical or real-world. His short story “The Most Powerful Weapon” was first published in The Odds Are Against Us; his novella “Trust” is included in Ye Olde Magick Shoppe, published in 2018. He lives far too close to Washington, D.C., for anyone’s good.
• Ariya, or a character like her, has been bouncing around in my head for a long time. She began her conceptual life as a teenage American mercenary, a cold-blooded, traumatized survivor of war crimes who sticks out like a sore thumb among the relatively ordinary students at her boarding school. Then ISIS exploded onto the world scene in 2013 and 2014; with the savagery of their crimes, and especially their treatment of the Yazidis, it made sense to have the character who would become Ariya be a Yazidi herself, an enslaved child bride.
I don’t remember why I chose the name Tristan for the American Green Beret. Maybe I had James Herriot’s books floating around in the back of my head. But I like the idea of introducing Tristan, making it seem like he would be the white knight, and then pulling the rug out. Still, he plays an important role: he teaches Ariya that she is not just a victim, that she too can act. It is a lesson that we all can learn a little better, I think.
The anger that Tristan expresses at the Americans leaving is mine as well; in a sense, the story was motivated by my fury that we had abandoned people who had risked so much to ally with us and allowed ISIS to run rampant for over a year. Beating an ISIS mujahid to death in fiction doesn’t accomplish much in the real world, but it certainly felt good.
After twenty-five years in federal law enforcement, Rick McMahan retired as a senior special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) in 2017. Currently he is a law enforcement instructor for Kentucky’s Department of Criminal Justice Training. Rick’s short stories have appeared in various publications, including twice having the privilege of being published in Mystery Writers of America anthologies (Death Do Us Partand Vengeance). “Baddest Outlaws” appeared in After Midnight, an anthology by the Writers’ Police Academy.
• The idea for “Baddest Outlaws” came from a real-life cop story told to me by my former coworker and friend Shawn Morman. Before becoming an ATF agent, Shawn was a Kentucky state trooper. Now, in Kentucky, Kentucky State Police is known as a no-nonsense agency enforcing the law in many remote counties. In some parts of the state officers are working where their nearest backup (if any) is a half hour away. KSP instills a distinct confidence and attitude, along with the sharply creased uniforms and polite conversation (No, ma’am, Yes, sir).
The way Shawn told the story was that when he started policing, several of the more experienced troopers warned him not to go on any call having to do with a certain family without several more officers (not just one!) as backup. Like a line from my story goes, when Kentucky state troopers leave their academy, they think they’re ten feet tall and bulletproof. I wondered what kind of dangerous criminals would make them be so cautious. He said that the family, every last one of them, was combative with law enforcement. Then Morman told me that the family known for fighting police were all “little people.” At that point I knew I had just found the nugget of a story that I needed to write.
I guess it’s because Kentucky has had some memorable and colorful crime groups that I wanted to make the criminal family more than just a family of ne’er-do-wells. Marion County’s Cornbread Mafia was a group of marijuana growers who instilled respect and fear among their own and other criminals. In fact, Johnny Boone ran the Cornbread Mafia with a very strict code of silence. During his first stint in prison, Boone had omerta, the Italian Mafia’s word for its code of silence, tattooed across his back. Over fifty members of the Cornbread Mafia were prosecuted in federal court, and not a single one agreed to cooperate with the government and turn state’s witness. Boone himself fled before trial and for several decades eluded police.
Another unique crime group was Drew Thornton’s cocaine-smuggling crew, made up of ex-military members and ex-cops, all criminals, as chronicled in the book The Bluegrass Conspiracy. They flew cocaine from South America into the southeast United States. They claimed to be working for the CIA. Of course that was never proven and denied by the government, but they sure had a ton of weapons they moved around. They had connections to politicians in Kentucky, some rumored to be as high as the governor’s office. As the crew became more brazen, law enforcement took notice and began investigating the group. As criminal investigations grew, the crew began to unravel. Several members went to prison, for everything from stealing classified government equipment to drug trafficking as well as murdering a Florida judge. However, Drew Thornton’s end wasn’t in a courtroom; rather, his demise played out like a scene from a bad spy movie. While flying back with a load of cocaine, his plane was being targeted by Customs aircraft, which he couldn’t lose. In an attempt to get away, Drew put on a parachute and jumped. However, he had strapped several duffel bags of cocaine along with a silenced pistol to his body, overloading the chute. He plummeted to his death, and was discovered when a homeowner walked out to his driveway to get his morning paper. Before jumping from the plane, Thornton and his copilot had shuffled more duffel bags out along their route. One of those floating parachutes full of cocaine landed in the Smoky Mountains National Forest. A curious black bear got into the duffel bag, and before his heart exploded, the bear consumed several pounds of Colombian powder. The Cocaine Bear is stuffed and on display in a museum in Kentucky.
With such colorful (and, never forget, dangerous) criminal organizations in Kentucky’s history, I wanted the Creeches to be just as unique. In deciding where to set the story, I used the imaginary Clement County, a place invented by my writing mentors Hal Blythe and Charlie Sweet. Many of their own mysteries, published under their pen name (Hal Charles), are set in Clement County, so I decided it would be as good a place as any for the Baddest Outlaws of Kentucky to call home.