At about 6 p.m. on Aug. 4, 1889, a fire devastated the downtown area of Spokane, Washington (known as Spokane Falls at the time).
There was no water pressure when the fire started because of a faulty pump station. Firefighters tried to control the fire by blowing up buildings with dynamite. As the winds calmed down, so did the fire. But it was too late. By then, almost all of Spokane's downtown was gone.
Only one person was killed. Nobody ever figured out what caused the fire. This lingering question inspired Leyna Krow to write her debut novel, "Fire Season." It’s a riveting, propulsive story focused on three intriguing characters whose lives intersect in the aftermath of the Great Spokane Fire — a banker, a con artist and a woman with the ability to see the future.
Krow lives in Spokane. After she finished graduate school there, she worked for a summer as a city tour guide, where she frequently told the story about the great Spokane Fire that devastated the city's downtown, she told WPR's "BETA."
"And it was really a pivotal event for the city. But a funny thing about it is that nobody can agree how it started. There's no factual, historical record. They know where it started, they know when it started, but nobody knows what caused the fire."
Krow said that she considered this to be "an interesting door to walk through as a fiction writer."
Krow decided that she would try to tell the story of somebody who tried to exploit the fire to benefit himself. That somebody would be Barton Heydale, the manager of Spokane Falls' only bank. As the town's citizens rush to the bank to cash out their insurance policies and take out loans, Barton discovers a way to have the power that he yearns for.
Krow originally conceived of "Fire Season" as a novella rather than a novel focused on Heydale. But she said that was unsatisfying, so she opted to add other characters in and flesh out the rest of the story.
Heydale's nemesis is a professional con artist named Quake Auchenbaucher. The Spokane Falls police chief hires "Inspector" Auchenbaucher to investigate what caused the fire.
Krow does a great job of taking the reader inside Quake's brain to paint a vivid picture of what goes on inside the mind of a con artist. How did she do this?
"I think that's sort of the luxury of writing about a kind of person in a period of time that very much does not exist anymore," Krow said.
"We're very much living in an age of con artists, but I think they're quite different from Quake. So he was a lot of fun to write, and I felt this freedom in him," she said. "I think that there's just something about the human desire to take what there is to take that's very accessible. We all probably feel that to a certain degree."
There's a very interesting dynamic between Quake and banker-turned-con-man Barton, as Krow explained. Barton was at one point an upstanding, honest man. He turns himself into a con artist by using the fire to "get the better of people."
And for Krow, two con artists are better than one: "So if you have one con man, why not have one even connier so he can just show up and do all the cons way better."
Krow said that she doesn't really like the idea of a nemesis relationship where one person is pitted against another person. In her story, Quake becomes sympathetic toward Barton, and a "rocky friendship" develops.
"I wanted that complicated nature because I feel like that's how real relationships in the real world most often are," she said. "If you're a person at all, you almost always find empathy for the people you're around, even when they're driving you bonkers."
In "Fire Season," Krow also explores the greed and misogyny of the American West in the 1890s.
"I think that just as a woman in the world, you're kind of always thinking about greed and misogyny," Krow said.
The role of misogyny in the West is told through the story of the third main character, Roslyn Beck — a sex worker who is a lifelong alcoholic and really down and out when the fire occurs.
"It's impossible to tell her story without looking at the role that men have in her life and how what she has to do in order to live the sort of life that she wants and how much easier everything would be for her if she was a man. I feel like that's an element of the time that I was writing about, but it's also an element of now. It's an element of everywhere all the time."
Roslyn possesses magical abilities that she, up to this point, has been using for her own survival.
"She winds up using her magical abilities to become the ultimate con man and get the better of both of these other dudes," Krow said.
Image courtesy of Jon Merrill.
That theme of using magic to shape events is not original to "Fire Season." In fact, a short story that Krow wrote for a fundraising event in Spokane called "Sinkhole" featured a magical sinkhole in a family's backyard that could transform any broken object thrown into it into something brand new.
"And then the question becomes, what happens if you put a human into the sinkhole?" she asked.
There was a bidding war and several offers to turn that story into a film. Eventually, the film rights for the story were optioned by Universal and Jordan Peele's production company, Monkeypaw. So why did Krow choose Jordan Peele and Issa Rae?
"I thought that they were going to make something really cool out of it, and also that it would move the story beyond what I had written in a really interesting way, because the work that they do is so different even from the genre that I was writing in," Krow said. "I thought it would be cool to see the story have a life so far beyond anything that I could have intended for it."