Katrina Carrasco is the author of The Best Bad Things. From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:Q: How did you come up with the idea for The Best Bad Things, and for your character Alma?--Marshal Zeringue
A: Alma is the product of my personal interests combined with historical details. I wanted a queer main character through whom I could explore gender and sexuality in the 1880s, and a female character who was unabashedly physical and hungry — for food, sex, violence, etc. (In fiction — as in life — women are often constrained in terms of what they can do and the desires/emotions they can express.)
On the historical side, I was interested in the disbanded Pinkerton’s Detective Agency Women’s Bureau. For a time the agency employed female spies, but when it was decided spying was not “women’s work,” the female agents were dismissed.
What would happen, I thought, if several highly trained female spies were suddenly out of a job and not too happy with how they’d been treated by authority? Alma came out of a mix of all these factors.
Then I needed to find a setting that was as interesting as she is — and my research into the real-life opium smuggling and related corruption in Port Townsend showed me it was...[read on]