Story Behind the Story: No One Can Slay Her

No One Can Slay Her is the only alternate history in 19-Infinity.

All the other stories exist in liminal fantasy settings that are just like our reality except for the magic. No One Can Slay Her takes place in an alternate 1950s where everyone knows magic works and same-sex marriage is just marriage — nobody cares which gender someone’s attracted to.

The inspiration was a post by blogger Foz Meadows (don’t have a direct link, alas) talking about how she’d read an AU Western (I don’t know what it was an alternate of) in which the protagonists are a same-sex, mixed-race couple and nobody cares. That frees them up to have a standard Western, homesteaders-versus-greedy-land-baron adventure, just like a straight couple would. Hmm, I said, that could be fun … and so my protagonists were born. Jennifer Armstrong, a hardboiled PI in 1930s Los Angeles, and her new bride Kate, a female Nisei private eye.

If you’ve read the story already you’ll notice that’s not the characters or the decade of the final draft. That’s because my original concept didn’t work. It involved a Chinese freedom fighter who thinks Kate is a Japanese agent — Japan had invaded China in 1931 — but the plot was clunky and refused to smooth out. Plus Kate didn’t feel at all believable as a Nisei, even a lesbian Nisei mage. A third problem was that after using the hardboiled first-person voice in both my Wandering Jew stories and End of the World on the Cutting-Room Floor (which came out in Space and Time in 2018) I wanted to use a different voice.

The solution to all these problems was to toss the story forward by twenty years. It’s 1957, Kate is white and a Beatnik, Jenny is a wealthy amateur detective, a character type that used to be popular (I suppose ABC’s Castle proves that it still is). The original plot involved the Chinese agent putting a sleeping-beauty type spell on Kate which leads to a confrontation with the mysterious mage Nemo — no relation to Verne’s captain but using the same sort of pseudonym, Latin for “no one.”

In the revised version Nemo herself strikes at Kate, making a poppet with her hair and blood. Poppets are British folk magic that works like a voodoo doll, except it’s real folklore where voodoo dolls aren’t a thing in voodoo practice. Nemo threatens to kill Kate with the doll if Jenny awakens a sleeping god but won’t say more.

Jenny has no interest in waking a sleeping god. She’s cursed with a destiny that guarantees a life of constant turmoil, danger and peril. That includes lovers who’ve kidnapped her, attempted to murder her, sacrifice her to Baal or feed her to the Napa Valley Naga. She’s not used to being in love and having it returned, which makes her protective of Kate but also insecure. When she realizes Kate’s hiding something she has to fight not to assume the worst.

Kate is a professional PI where Jenny’s an amateur. Beat Eye Investigations handles cases for lowlifes, oddballs and losers; it’s not a profitable line of work but hey, losers need a PI too! Where Jenny has almost no magic, Kate has Beat magic, a form of wild powe outside the normal rules. Between them, can the two Mrs. Armstrongs crack the case, particularly when they’re working at cross-purposes?

After several rewrites I had a workable story. Finishing it took the usual polishing drafts, plus three significant changes. First, I had to rework the mystery and the clues so that Jenny can plausibly put it all together. Second, I had to prune off any idiot-plot elements: Jenny’s not going to play a lone hand with her wife’s life at stake so I had to find some way to keep the police out of it. Third, I rewrote the ending in which Nemo explains everything. Yes, she has a reason to keep Jenny talking — she needs to buy time — but it still felt unconvincing. I decided it was better to leave some of her motives blank as the heart of the story is Jenny/Kate, not solving the mystery.

#SFWApro. Cover by Kemp Ward, all rights to image are mine. Available on Amazon in paperback and available for ebook pre-order on some channels (more to follow).