I created this graphic to promote my true-crime fiction HARMON CREEK. The story is written around a true event, the death of my wife Gretchen’s great uncle in 1930. Earl Swanger was a candidate for DA in a rural Texas county when he died mysteriously two weeks before the primary.
The death was officially declared an accident within 48 hours despite the three stab wounds found during the autopsy. He was found in his wrecked car near a bridge that crossed Harmon Creek.
Her family was devastated and always felt it was murder. The novel gives a fictional explanation for the events I uncovered through my research, as I attempt to answer the many unanswered questions that arose while reading the newspaper accounts
With the holidays approaching, I’m reminded of a bit of family history I read after the book was published. Gretchen found a family letter, written by Earl’s sister Pearl to Lily May Swanger, Earl’s widow. Pearl considered her sister-in-law to be her sister for the rest of their lives.
This letter was written Christmas Eve 1930, not six months after Earl’s death. Like most letters of the time, it’s full of chatty nuances about seasonal preparations and news of family members. But a few times she mentions the death.
Once, it’s to say she tries not to dwell on it and they shouldn’t mention it, evoking Depression-era stoicism. But she goes back to it again. A neighbor graciously lent her family a radio while the neighbor was out of town. She mentioned listening to a spiritualist’s radio show, and wishing she could contact him to ask him about Earl.
She then says something startling.
“I don’t think it was that woman at all, I think it was all political.”
In my research, one fact stood out. There was a woman mentioned, having at one point been in the car shortly before the ‘accident,’ but, she says, she got out to ride with another friend she realized was following them. Well, that was the first story. It changed two more times.
This woman is never mentioned by name, but one thing is obvious: she and her ‘friend’ were the last people to see Earl Swanger alive. Pearl’s little statement, validated my fictional premise, although in extension I figured the woman and man were players in the political intrigue that resulted in Earl’s death. That’s how I wrote it.
So this season, I’ll be thinking about Gretchen’s grandmother and great aunt’s continued grief during that 1930 Depression Christmas.
What really happened down by Harmon Creek? Read the book.
On July 9, 1930, an apparent one-car accident resulted in the death of a local attorney in Walker County, Texas.
At the time of his death, Earl ‘Buddie’ Swanger was a candidate for district attorney in the upcoming primary election. His death was officially declared an accident within forty-eight hours, despite the medical examiner’s mention of stab wounds and reports of the mysterious involvement of a woman and man, both unnamed. The woman had apparently accompanied Swanger as he traveled to a campaign event. The woman admitted she had been a passenger in his car because she needed a ride. According to her first statement, she requested Swanger stop and let her out when she became aware her original ride was following them, but her story changed several times. Later statements involved alcohol and accusations of impropriety.
Swanger’s body was discovered in his car, which had rolled down an embankment on the approach to the new bridge spanning Harmon. Creek. This bridge was still under construction and stood adjacent to the old bridge. The local sheriff theorized the ‘stab wounds’ were the result of protruding nails from a smashed railing. The medical examiner begrudgingly changed his determination of murder under protest.
Although this candidate’s death generated a lot of statewide news interest, and the state dispatched a Texas Ranger to investigate, the woman and man were never named, and their changing stories were never fully corroborated. The news story lingered for a couple of weeks, then died just as surely as poor Earl Swanger had died on that steamy July night.
Earl Swanger was my wife’s great-uncle and this story never left his family’s memory. Earl Swanger doted on his wife and was a chaste and sober man in all respects. Family letters confirm this. The presence of the woman in his car was out of character for him so there must have been some seemingly innocent explanation. Family letters also point to political intrigue and the family had no qualms about calling this a murder. It was 1930 and there is no reason to doubt the local political machine was corrupt and this was what had prompted Earl to run for office. But people in this time also didn’t push back as much as they do now. Life went on, with or without justice.
My novel HARMON CREEK takes a new look at this incident, creating a fictional backdrop to explain many of the questions that arose in my mind while researching the news accounts of the day. My fictional premise revolves around motive: I think the murder was likely an incidental result of a different plan entirely, a plan that went very wrong. In this fictional account, the corrupt incumbent, intent on holding onto his personally lucrative office, sought to subtly discredit his opponent with an illusion of impropriety, recruiting a small-time petty crook to do just that, lured with the promise of deferred prosecution.
But these things are never quite as simple as they seem and after the woman managed to get into Swanger’s car using some ruse, something went wrong. Prostitutes of the time were often armed with ice picks. They were small and light, easily concealed, and easy to use. The DA’s coercion was a strong motivator, so fear of failure would have been enough motivation for her to panic and then threaten Earl to keep driving, then to lash out at him when he balked. This certainly would have caused Earl to swerve and stop. Her boyfriend, part of the conspiracy and following closely behind, would have stopped as well and it is easy to assume a confrontation ensued. Of course, it did not end well for poor Earl Swanger, leaving these two with one more problem: What do they do now?
Stage a wreck and then drive off, of course
The thing about conspiracies is the fact that what the planners want most of all is to cover their tracks. Complications must be dealt with. The actors are criminals after all, and more crimes are the most expedient solution to criminals, especially regarding loose ends. And they didn’t even know about the eyewitness. Yes, there was an eyewitness, Claude, a local black man, who was a recent client of attorney Swanger. When the two murderers drive off Claude rushes to aid the mortally wounded Swanger.
Before he dies, Swanger implores Claude to protect his wife, and to keep quiet about what he saw, because he’ll be blamed for the death if he comes forward with what he saw.
This is where the story in HARMON CREEK really takes off: the death of Earl ‘Buddie’ Swanger was a catalyst for what was to follow. True crime or crime fiction? How about a little of both?
HARMON CREEK is available in all eBook formats and is also available in paperback. Look for it on Amazon or you can get your favorite bookstore to order it.
First things first. I realized after pushing out my last post that I neglected a few things about web site development. I’m trying to remember the first web site I created, but it was way back. 1992 or 1993. You read that right. I had a web site before most people knew the wide wide world of webs even existed. I created it by hand. I remember a colleague who I shared it with asked me “what book did you use?”
I blinked. “Book?”
Anyway, using tools to build websites is a new thing. And moving to a single page format like my cheap new web hosting site requires a bit of tweaking to get it right. But I can use things through links. Like it links this blog just great. And I have a perfectly good Amazon Author Page out there, listing all of my books. They pay developers six figure salaries to do a better job than I could ever do with my multiple book pages on my old site.
Enough about that. Here I am a little more than five weeks out and I am slowly gearing up my massive marketing machine. That’s how it feels sometimes. I often tell people that writing a novel is hard, revising the manuscript is harder, and marketing the sucker kicks me in the ass. Yet, with this being my sixth novel, I’ve learned a few things.
There are plenty of people waiting in the wings just dying to take my hard earned money and help me market my new release. I call most of them “preaching to the choir” services. They prey upon authors and, sadly, most of their focus is to other authors. Now, don’t get me wrong, I know that in order to be a good author one must read a lot. But in my experience, most newer authors don’t read very much in the realm of other newer authors. Some do, (and I love you very much) but most don’t.
Then there is the whole eBook/print book thing. My small press is geared primarily toward eBooks, although print books are available and, more recently, available at places beyond Amazon. More on that later. I still don’t understand the aversion to eBooks. I’ve actually read more since I embraced eBooks than I had for years. My Kindle App is loaded on both my tablet and my phone, and it keeps my place on both. If you’ve ever been stuck waiting some place and wish you had something besides a two year old weathered magazine to read, well, pull out your phone and you can just start reading.
Anyway, the key to actually making money in the book biz focuses on getting your books into bookstores. It’s a tough nut to crack for unknown authors. I worked in scholarly publishing for 20+ years and can tell you this: you have to be able to carpet bomb them and that takes capital. See, when bookstores order twenty copies of your book in the hopes that it will sell, they expect that they will be able to return the unsold stock for full credit if the books don’t sell. Huge publishers absorb this cost of doing business. For every best seller they likely have dozens of not-so-best-sellers. Small presses and Indie authors can not compete on a national level so we have to resort to … well, whatever the hell we can.
Here. Now. Me. This. This is what I am doing here, trying to entertain you in a lame attempt to get you to remember my name and even better, my new release, HARMON CREEK. See what I did there? I put in a link. New authors take note. EVERY TIME YOU MENTION YOUR BOOK, put in a link. I don’t have a sales link yet, so I put in a link to a book page I set up on my old website. I have lost count of the book tweets and Facebook posts with authors mentioning “my new book” and they will say “available at Amazon” … yet NO LINK! I should already be navigating there. I guess I should search for you or your book? Really?
Another thing that helps is catchy graphics. Believe it or not, that was originally the purpose of this post, to illustrate the importance of catchy graphics. I’m a writer, not a graphic artist. I do, however, have visual representations that pop into my punkin haid from time to time. All of my book covers were first conceptualized by me. Thankfully, all but one were actually designed by someone who knew what they were doing. The lone cover I designed myself is my free cookbook (companion to my adventure mystery series) and it shows. But I think it matches the cookbook itself, which was designed to mimic the type of local self-produced cookbooks one might find in a rural cafe in the 1980s. I collect vintage cookbooks, I know that genre well. What I came up with, in my lame and crude attempt at design was this:
My book cover, surrounded by true life headlines relating to the primary subject matter of the book itself. Not too bad but I knew it could be better. Enter my awesome and talented daughter Audrey. Dancer turned social media expert that she is, she took my photoshop file and made it into something truly inspiring:
Same cover photo, same headlines, but she knew how to do things I did not and she made it both visually stunning and, well, amazing.
So, basically, what I wanted people to know was that the book is based on a true story. It’s personal to our family as well, the subject was her great-great uncle, her mother’s great uncle. I’ll be sharing more about the back story in coming posts, so stay tuned.
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Thomas Fenske is an author living in North Carolina. More information here: https://tfenske.com
Okay, tomorrow is the big day! I know, I’ve bothered you all week, but I just wanted to be sure I got the word out.
This will mark three books published in 10 months. It’s not quite as amazing as it sounds. For one thing, for a number of reasons I had a three-year-hiatus in publishing, well, except for my companion cookbook. So, this pretty much puts me back on track for a book a year. It amounts to the four books of the Traces of Treasure Series, and the stand-alone historical novel The Hag Rider (my other Summer of 2020 release).
I managed to cobble Penumbra together in a little over five months, from the first page to the final revision and signed contract. My first book, The Fever, took close to three years. Writing is like any other journey. There are left turns and right turns, and any number of hard stops. One encounters bumpy roads and pitfalls. Actually, in writing, we create a lot of bumpy roads and pitfalls.
Anyway, thanks for coming along for the ride. There will be more to come, most certainly. I have assembled quite a crew of characters who are meant to take this series forward, but I probably won’t feature ALL of them at the same time as I did in Penumbra.
Look for Penumbra on Amazon tomorrow, in Kindle, KindleUnlimited, & paperback. I’m working on getting copies into some bookstores as well but with my small publisher, this is a work in progress.
There are two days until the release of Penumbra!
It is the fourth book in my Traces of Treasure Series.
I guess it is time for another review! Bonnye Reed is another prolific Goodreads reviewer with almost 2900 reviews posted. She’s reviewed several of my books and I am gratified that she has so far liked my work:
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I am pleased to refer Thomas Fenske to friends and family. He writes a tight, intriguing story set in the desert southwest – or as we know it, God’s Country. His characters are contrary but honest, and his background and scenic descriptions are spot-on. The addition of mystical and possibly unhappy spirits is an added bonus. I have enjoyed everything I have read from Thomas Fenske, and this is another five-star effort.
Penumbra is stand alone, the fourth in the series Traces of Treasure. Sam and his girlfriend Smidgeon along with several of their friends get drawn into another intriguing search for missing treasure. They travel over the desert SW, driving from Van Horn, TX north into the White Mountain Wilderness north of Ruidoso, NM, and back around and through the Mescalero Reservation and Tularosa, Alamogordo, and several trips through Roswell – back in the age of payphones and Roswell without aliens everywhere. It was a good trip, very nostalgic and satisfying. It was also back in the ago of mandatory 55 mph all across the US, but the drudgery of travel in that time period is left out thank goodness. Most of us remember that all too well. .
Mixed into Penumbra is a posse of good friends, conscientious law enforcement, polite, helpful people, and excellent food – I enjoyed that part of traveling back in the day. You will, too. And the bad guys are satisfyingly bad. Definitely a win-win novel.
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I am blushing when I read such high praise. You can judge for yourself.
Penumbra will be available on Amazon Saturday, August 1, in Kindle, KindleUnlimited, and Paperback. Pre-order Kindle NOW at Amazon!
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Thomas Fenske is a writer living in North Carolina.
You can find more information about him and his writing at http://thefensk.com
Okay, tomorrow is the big day! I know, I’ve bothered you all week, but I just wanted to be sure I got the word out.
Scratching the Surface 