Amanda Flower is no stranger to inhabiting new characters. As the writer of more than 20 mysteries, Flower’s characters range from a widowed Amish matchmaker to an organic farmer to a witty librarian.
In her new book, “To Slip the Bonds of Earth,” Flower, who resides in Tallmadge, turns her attention to a woman from Ohio’s history: Katharine Wright, the younger sister of Wilbur and Orville Wright.
While not as well known as her famous brothers, Katharine was instrumental in the aviation pioneers’ success, from running their Dayton bicycle shop when they were testing their airplane in Kitty Hawk to managing their business affairs to acting as interpreter when they visited France.
Flower’s book is set in December 1903 and begins with the Wright brothers’ historic first flight in North Carolina. Katharine, then a young Latin teacher in Dayton, soon takes on the role of amateur sleuth when a local man about town is murdered and the plans for the brothers’ flying machine go missing.
This isn’t Flower’s first time writing a historical fiction mystery that features a real person. “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” and “I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died” feature poet Emily Dickinson. When Flower’s publisher asked her to write another historical series, she began researching famous Ohioans.
“I was looking at the Wright Brothers, and I was like, ‘Oh, my goodness, they have a sister,” Flower said. “She did all this stuff for them. So it just seemed like the perfect fit.”
What stood out to you about Katharine Wright?
I think what stuck out to me was how loyal she was to her family. She didn’t get married [until] her 50s because she took care of her brothers and her father. Her mom died when she was 15. She was the only daughter to survive infancy, so it really fell on her to be in charge of the house and all that kind of stuff. She took that on, but she still had her own ambitions and dreams.
And she went to Oberlin and graduated, and she was the only one in her family to graduate from college, and she taught Latin. And she did all that stuff because she wanted her own life separate from her family, which in the time period is very admirable, I think.
When you’re writing a work of fiction, but you’re featuring a real person, how do you meld those two worlds?
I do as much research as possible. The story’s set in Dayton, so I went over to Dayton several times researching the book – to the museums and the national parks that are dedicated to the Wrights out there. And obviously book research and archives and things like that. The Wrights’ letters, including Katharine’s, have all been digitized by the Library of Congress, so I can just log on and learn about them that way. So I try to get to the core of who they are and then put them in a mystery setting in a situation that they could potentially have been in.
Why do you think that combination of real-life events and fiction is appealing to readers?
I think because, from what I’ve heard from readers, they learn so much about what’s actually true about the individual. In the case of Katharine Wright, obviously she was never an amateur sleuth, but she did teach Latin at Steele High School, where part of the mystery takes place. She was the most outgoing of the Wright children, so she was kind of the spokesperson once the brothers got famous, because they were really introverted and she was super extroverted. So I think they like getting the essence of a real person from history, and then [putting] them in an extreme situation.
Do you have plans for more Katharine Wright books?
Yeah, the next book will come out a year after this one, so next March. It’s called “Not They Who Soar.” It’s a line from a Paul Laurence Dunbar poem. He was a friend of the Wrights. They published his Black newspaper in Dayton for him that he was the editor of. So he’s going to be in this next book. Katharine went in 1904 with her best friend to the World’s Fair in St. Louis. And so there’ll be a murder mystery there.
Was there a specific moment from Katharine’s life that stuck with you?
It happens later, and it would be wonderful if the series went on that long, but she gets really involved in the suffragette movement in Ohio – to the point that she’s involved with organizing a march.
By this time her brother Wilbur had passed away. He passed away pretty suddenly in 1912. But Orville and her father were still alive, and she got them to march in the march with her. By that time, Orville was super famous, so that’s pretty significant.
She had her own mind. She had her own ideas, and she didn’t really compromise that. Her brother Orville didn’t want her to even get married when she was, I think she was 54. And she did it anyway. She was gonna do what she wanted to do. She put in her time taking care of them, and she wanted to have her own life, so she did it. I just admire her for that.
Was she more well-known during her lifetime?
Yeah, absolutely she was well known when she was alive. When they went to France in 1908 to try to sell their airplane they had then to the French government, she went with them.
She’s actually probably more famous in France today than she is here in the U.S. I would love the series to get to 1908 so I could write about that when they were in Europe. She was a Latin and Greek major, but when she was in France, she got a tutor and taught herself French so she could communicate on her brothers’ behalf. She was like a larger-than-life personality. She wasn’t very big in size, but people took notice when she was in the room.
Flower will be at the Akron Book Fest Saturday at the Main Library. “To Slip the Bonds of Earth” will be released Tuesday, March 26.
