I take considerable pleasure as a novelist in creating what I hope are captivating characters with audacious goals, plopping them smack down in the middle of engrossing settings and then placing perilous challenges in their way. That’s the essence of good fiction, isn’t it?
I’m doubly blessed, though, to write stories blending fiction with facts. It’s an opportunity to make stories not only more compelling, but also more believable. To make the impossible seem plausible.
As it turns out, life often imitates this kind of art.
The latest example surfaced in news coverage of a recent auction at which a single dime sold for $1.25 million. One of the protagonists of my mystery series risks her life to recover two dimes manufactured the same year at the same mint. Spoiler alert: Before the novel ends, she auctions off one of the dimes for even more money.
By way of explanation, let me introduce Billie Brownwell. She’s a brilliant and beautiful history professor obsessed with finding a cache of stolen loot buried by the outlaw Butch Cassidy more than a century ago in the rugged northwest corner of Colorado. She’s convinced the cache includes two dimes minted in 1894 in San Francisco — among the rarest and most valuable coins in existence.
There’s a mystery within the mystery involving the manufacture of dimes in San Francisco. Only 24 dimes were minted there in 1894, an infinitesimal number compared the nearly 2.5 million dimes minted a year earlier. Why so few? In part because a depression dubbed the Panic of 1893 slashed demand for coinage. Some numismatic sleuths believe the 24 dimes were minted as presentation pieces. Others believe mint employees struck 24 dimes to round end-of-fiscal-year records to an even amount, never imagining they wouldn’t make more. One way or the other, they realized they had a rarity on their hands.
John Daggett, superintendent of the San Francisco Mint at the time, supposedly gave three of the dimes to his daughter, Hallie, and told her to put them away until she was older, when she could sell them for a good price. She followed her father’s advice and nearly 60 years later sold two of the dimes to a California coin dealer. One of the so-called Daggett specimens subsequently sold again for more than $1 million. Hallie admitted she spent the third dime her father gave her — on a dish of ice cream.
Today, only nine examples of the 1894-S dime are known to exist — most of them held by wealthy collectors for decades at a time.
All that’s factual, as are the accounts of Butch Cassidy and his gang robbing trains in Wyoming. Not to mention Cassidy hiding his loot in northwest Colorado and nailing horseshoes on trees to mark the spots.
But what if? That question constitutes the mother of fiction, doesn’t it?
What if two 1894-S dimes were mailed to Philadelphia — purportedly for assay testing to ensure they met manufacturing standards, but more likely to surreptitiously send valuable coins to the mint superintendent? What if Cassidy stole the express mail shipment in the train robbery and stashed the dimes with the rest of his share, unaware of their value? Most important, what if an ambitious history professor deduced that outcome from her painstaking research of the post-Civil War West?
There’s more to my novel in my other protagonist. Meet Tucker Preston, a newspaper journalist who settles for a job as editor of a small town weekly in northwest Colorado after layoffs at the Denver daily where he worked. He seizes an opportunity to resurrect his career in investigating the disappearances of both an environmental lawyer and elderly cattle rancher. He uncovers a plot involving betrayal, murder and plans to dam a scenic river and sell the water to downstream interests.
Billie and Tucker meet, of course, and join forces. They soon face a series of threats first to their livelihoods, then their lives. In the midst of the desperate search for treasure and truth that ensues, they discover newfound love.
I’ve combined in my novel elements of a treasure hunt, murder mystery and romance. But don’t forget the facts. Like those rare dimes minted in 1894 in San Francisco.
If it turns out you can’t dig up one from a buried cache of outlaw loot, you can always buy one at auction.