Author R&R with Betty Webb

 This week's "Author R&R" (Reference and Research) contribution is from Betty Webb, creator of two award-winning series, the Lena Jones books and the Gunn Zoo series. Her latest book, Desert Wind—just released this week—is the seventh mystery starring Arizona private eye Lena Jones and has already earned a starred review from Publishers Weekly.

In Desert Wind, P.I. Lena Jones's Pima Indian partner Jimmy Sisiwan is arrested in the remote northern Arizona town of Walapai Flats, and Lena closes the Desert Investigations office to rush to his aid. What she finds is a town up in arms over the new uranium mine located only ten miles from the Grand Canyon, as well as two unsolved murders. During Lena's investigation, she encounters not only a community decimated by unsafe mining practices, but a connection to actor John Wayne and the mysterious deaths that occurred during the 1954 filming of The Conqueror. 

Betty passed along the following about how she found herself researching John Wayne for the book:

"Although I had enjoyed The Searchers and True Grit, I’d never been a true John Wayne fan, thus I started my research for DESERT WIND, my seventh Lena Jones mystery, with something less than joy. Still, there was no way around it, because the books plot revolved around the many real-life deaths surrounding the 1954 filming of The Conqueror, in which a heavily-made-up Wayne acted the part of Genghis Khan. The movie has become notorious as John Wayne's worst film – can you imagine Wayne as a Mongol invader, or Susan Hayward as a Mongol princess? – but in order to get my facts straight, I watched it five times.

All the way through. Taking voluminous notes.

Most people know that Wayne died of cancer, as did Susan Hayward. What they don't know is that almost half of The Conqueror's film crew died of cancer, along with approximately 100 Paiute Indians who had been cast as Mongol warriors. And across the counties surrounding the Snow Canyon, Utah, film set, thousands of men, women, and children began dying of cancer at the same rate as the Hollywood film people. Before long, the American Southwest had become a cancer cluster. Uranium mining, much of it on Indian reservations, might have played a part, but one important source I happened across blamed a different culprit.

Now, I'm a journalist, and most of my readers know that all my Lena Jones mysteries are based on real crimes. Like any experienced reporter, I've not only learned the danger of relying on one source alone, but the necessity of visiting the actual scene of whatever crime I'm covering. So for DESERT WIND, I drove 265 miles north from my home in Scottsdale, Arizona, to Snow Canyon, where I spent several days climbing the multi-colored mesas surrounding The Conqueror's old film set, trudging through drifts of orange-red sand. Besides visiting the local libraries and museums, I also interviewed several people who had lived in the area when the dying began. They shared eyewitness accounts of what had transpired all those years ago and how they felt about it today. Some of their comments were surprising.

The lengthiest part of my research took place at home in front of the TV, where as a Netflix subscriber, I entered a marathon of Wayne movie-watching. This would have been enjoyable had I been a bigger Wayne fan, but since I wasn’t, I sulked my way through the first ten or twenty films. But somewhere between McClintock and The Shootist, something startling happened.

I fell in love with John Wayne.

Yes, yes, I know. Wayne was an actor, not a real life cowboy or soldier. But the fact remains that — with the single exception of The Conqueror — he was a smart man who chose his scripts wisely. He was always drawn to scripts where one person made a difference, where bravery and endurance mattered, where standing up for something – an idea, a community, or another human being – was the mark of a true hero. In fact, I discovered that Wayne's films reflected the ideals of my own protagonist, private investigator Lena Jones, who is always rushing to the defense of the defenseless, usually women, children, and the elderly. This is why Publishers Weekly called the Lena books, "mysteries with a social conscience."

Once I realized the commonality between Lena and John Wayne, my feelings about the actor changed, which in turn changed the plot of DESERT WIND. Instead of being a mere first chapter walk-on, Wayne emerged as a central character. The only snag was that the major action in DESERT WIND takes place in present-day Arizona, and Wayne died in 1979. But even that seemingly insurmountable problem was easily remedied when I realized that greatness never really dies. It lives on, sometimes in books, sometimes in films, and maybe – just maybe – sometimes as a walking, talking spirit.

I'm not going to say that DESERT WIND is a ghost story, although in some ways it is. What I will say is that DESERT WIND is a mystery novel about an event that victimized hundreds of thousands.

And one of those victims just might have been John Wayne."


My thanks to Betty for her Author R&R. Betty's books are published by Poisoned Pen Press, and she's also a long-time book reviewer at Mystery Scene Magazine and a member of National Federation of Press Women and Mystery Writers of America. To read an excerpt from Desert Wind, stop by Betty's website.

(Snow Canyon photo above copyright David Lee Pruden.)