Notes on the Names, Sources & Geography Behind Spanish Fly

From Will: I’m not sure if this is of interest to anyone or not, but I know I’m always curious about how an author names his characters, how he crafts the world they inhabit. Here then are some notes about Spanish Fly. You don’t need to know any of this to enjoy the novel, but I thought it might be of interest to a few of you anyway.

 

The novel was originally titled “Jack’s Wager,” but it soon became Spanish Fly. From the start I wanted to tell the story of a young man who has the head of a con artist, but not the heart. I wanted it to be about deciding whether you’re a beetle or a fly. (The message that is hidden in the text of the novel, alluded to in Virgil’s claim that he can read the first two words of each section in a book and tell you what it’s about, underlines this.)

The story of Jack McGreary takes place at the southernmost reaches of the dustbowl of the 1930s. The area around Jack’s hometown is based on that of the Salt Flat region of Texas. But Paradise Flats itself would have been farther east, in the plains near Odessa.

Silver City is up the Texas panhandle, roughly where Amarillo is located.  I had planned on making Amarillo the actual city that Virgil and Rose used as their base, but I wanted the freedom to rearrange streets and invent industries and not have to worry about making it fit an actual place, so in the end I changed the name to Silver. (I also picked the city up and moved it sixty miles west so that Rose could send their blackmailers across state lines into New Mexico near the end of the novel. If you try doing that with a real city it doesn’t work.)

The geography and history of the region is real: the abandoned farms, the shelterbelt forest, the smells and distinct colours the dust storms brought. But the novel itself takes place in Purgatory -- “You’ve got Heaven and you’ve got Hell, and somewhere in between. . .”  -- and the names of the places where Virgil, Miss Rose and Jack stage their main cons are taken from those of ghost towns.

• Cuthbert, Texas (where they run the bank inspector scam on poor Mrs. Pegler)
• Talmo, Kansas (where Jack hustles pool and breaks that man’s face)
• Boulaye, Louisiana (where Jack is arrested)

 . . . are all named for actual ghost towns in those states. (Fort Boulaye in the case of Louisiana.) These would have been boarded up and abandoned, emptied of souls, when Virgil and Rose came through. I liked the idea of them playing their cons in phantom towns. I wanted that sense of the three of them moving through a shadow world, mirages made of dust and smoke.

Fallbrook, where Iron Balls Dicannti is from, is a ghost town in Pennsylvania. The Boracho River referred to early on is named for a ghost town as well.

• Gran Quivira, New Mexico (where they pull their pedigreed pooch scam)

. . .  is a mythical city, the El Dorado of the plains that early explorers went searching for in vain.

There are several ghost towns named Silver City, as well, but that name actually comes from a locale in an earlier novel of mine titled Happiness.

Paradise Flats, meanwhile, is based on Radville, Saskatchewan, where my father grew up, and Rapid City, Manitoba with its grand, crumbling library, where my Dad spent his final years. (Rapid City, a small town north of Brandon, was named as such in a failed attempt at luring railway speculators, in much the same way that Paradise Flats was named.)

My father, Jack Ferguson, grew up in the northen reaches of the dustbowl, and he told me about eating road harvest weeds and then throwing them back up on the way to school. My grandmother was from Norway. And yes, she had red hair. My grandfather fell in love with her from the side of a train.

As mentioned in the notes at the end of the novel, the great con men Virgil tells Jack about are real: Yellow Kid Weil, Canada Bill, The Deacon, Count Lustig, Chicago May and the rest. The airmen who escaped from a Turkish prison in World War I by playing mad are real as well.

The character of Rose was originally named Billie Scheible, after a renowned brothel-keeper of the day who ran a well-oiled Badger game on unsuspecting marks. I was never happy with the name “Billie” though. Billy was the name I grew up with before becoming Will, and I found that distracting when I was writing dialogue. I had wanted to change her name to Lily, but that was the name of my grandmothers on both sides, neither of whom were outlaws (as far as I know). So, with a slight tweak in follow-up drafts of the novel, the character  became Lydia, shortened to Liddie.

She was still Liddie when I submitted the manuscript to my publishers. But that didn’t really sit right either, and at the last moment I changed it to Rosalind, which was then shortened to Rose, and I couldn’t have been happier. When a character’s name clicks into place you just know it, and as I wrote the final draft -- with her as Miss Rose -- everything came together. She became more wistful, more wry, more beautiful.

Her real identity, of course, as revealed in the letters that were sent back to her unopened, is Avanna Sherrill.

Avanna Sherrill was a real person; a true-life con woman from that age, a lonely and mysterious figure few people knew much about. (The story of Rose convincing a passerby to steal a car for her is a true tale taken from the life of the real Avanna.)

I always thought of Rose as being Avanna Sherrill, but there is in fact a third way to read Rose: she may actually be Bonnie Parker’s cousin, as Virgil claims all along. Her hometown and background references all line up. (Likewise, the name Jack adopts when they are peddling the money machine -- William Daniel Jones -- is that of a young man that Bonnie and Clyde picked up and took turns with while they were on the road.)

Billy Tipton was real as well: a jazz great who hid a secret, someone who denied who he was at the deepest level. There is a reason Virgil feels a strange affinity for Billy Tipton. It is also another reason I changed Rose’s name from Billie Scheible; that was one too many Billys for any book to carry.

The naming of Virgil was easier. He was always Virgil, right from the start, right from the first draft -- as inspired by a line in “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down:” Virgil quick come see, there goes Robert E. Lee . . . But more importantly, because he is a storyteller. (His last name, Ray, is not a literary allusion, but is purely descriptive of the light he seems to emits.)

Virgil’s true name, as discovered by Jack and exploited by the blackmailers, provides a clue to a very different story running just beneath the surface of Spanish Fly.

Giuseppe Balsamo -- the name that comes back to haunt Virgil in the final act -- is the name of a real historical figure. Giuseppe Balsamo was a counterfeiter and confidence man from Palermo, Italy who, with his love Seraphina, swept through the courts of Europe in the 1700s. An alchemist by trade, Balsamo went by the name of “Count Cagliostro.” He claimed to be immortal, the incarnation of the Wandering Jew. Under the guise of Count Cagliostro, Balsamo sold magical potions and love elixirs -- Spanish fly, in effect. And although condemned to death, the legend lives on that he did not perish, that he cannot perish, that he is in fact eternal, a wayward soul condemned to wander the earth forever. You can cage him, but you cannot kill him.

Is Virgil immortal? An exiled figure, fallen from grace? An alchemist? A Count Cagliostro of the plains? I have my own opinion on the matter, but I may be wrong.

Jack McGreary, meanwhile, first appeared in my novel Happiness, where he crosses swords with a young editor named De Valu. (Any resemblance between the De Valu family and the Du Ponts is, of course, purely coincidental.)

The novel Happiness, a take on our obsession with self-improvement, features a desert showdown in Paradise Flats, gives the true origin of the town’s green rooftops and reveals the sad fate of Rebecca. (Jack’s greatest failing is that he doesn’t go back to rescue her, and by the time he does return to Paradise Flats it is too late.) There is even an allusion to Lila Bauchenmier, the exceptionally talented call girl Virgil tells Jack about in Spanish Fly and the originator of the Li-Bok lovemaking technique.

Happiness is very different in tone and style than Spanish Fly. It could hardly have been otherwise. Happiness is raucous tale about a self-help book that actually works and causes the end of the the world. It is naturally satirical in its approach. Spanish Fly is not, but both novels address the same issues. I think of them as two tracks on the same album.

The main sources for Spanish Fly are listed below. These are the books I read and re-read when I was working on the novel. They contain a wealth of material on con games and swindles, and on the texture of life in those times.

The darkroom scenes come from my own days as a film student, soaked in chemicals, pinning damp, out-of-focus prints on a darkroom clothesline. The fact that when you go to see a movie, you spend half of that time sitting in pitch black is something that still bothers me.

Will Ferguson
September 4, 2007

ON LIFE IN THE NINETEEN-THIRTIES

Allen, Frederick Lewis. Since Yesterday: The Nineteen-Thirties in America. Harper & Brothers: 1940.

Bendiner, Robert. Just Around the Corner: A Highly Selective History of the Thirties. Harper & Row: 1967

Boardman, Barrington. Flappers, Bootleggers, Typhoid Mary and the Bomb: An Anecdotal History of the United States from 1923 - 1945. Perennial: 1989

Goldston, Robert. The Great Depression: The United States in the Thirties. Fawcett: 1968

Langworth, Richard M., Graham Robson, et al. The New Complete Book of Collectible Cars: 1930 - 80. Publications International: 1987

McCutheon, Marc. Everyday Life from Prohibition through World War II. Writers Digest Books: 1995

Meltzer, Milton. Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? The Great Depression (covering the years 1929 to 1933). Knopf: 1969

Rhoads, B. Eric. A Pictorial History of Radio’s First 75 Years. Streamline: 1996

Slusser, John, et al.  Collector’s Guide to Antique Radios: Fifth Edition. Collector Books: 2001

Stover, John F. The Routledge Historical Atlas of the American Railroads. Routledge: 1999

Winslow, Susan. Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? America from the Wall Street Crash to Pearl Harbour. Paddington Press: 1976

Wallace, Stone. Dustbowl Desperadoes: Gangsters of the Dirty ‘30s. Folklore: 2003

Wecter, Dixon. The Age of the Great Depression. Macmillan: 1948

Worster, Donald. Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1903s. Oxford University Press: 1979

 

ON CON MEN, CLASSIC SWINDLES & THE TELLING OF LIES

Blum, Richard H. Deceivers and Deceived. Thomas Books: 1972

Croucher, John. Great Frauds & Everyday Scams. Allen & Unwin: 1997

Ekman, Paul. Telling Lies. W.W. Norton & Company: 1992

Faron, Fay. Rip-Off. Writer’s Digest Books: 1998

Fenton, Peter. Eyeing the Flash: The Making of a Carnival Con Artist. Simon & Schuster: 2005

Goldberg, M. Hirsh. The Book of Lies. William Morrow & Company: 1990

Hancock, Ralph with Henry Chafetz. The Compleat Swindler. Macmillan: 1968

Henderson, M. Allen. How Con Games Work. Citadel: 1985

-----------. Money For Nothing: Rip-Offs, Cons and Swindles. Paladin: 1986

Kerr, Philip, ed. The Penguin Book of Lies. Penguin: 1990

Klein, Alexander, ed. Grand Deception.  Lippincott: 1955

----------. The Double Dealers. Lippincott: 1958

Levy, Joel. The Con Artist Handbook. Prospero: 2004

Lindberg, Gary. The Confidence Man in American Literature. Oxford: 1982

McCalman, Iain. The Seven Ordeals of Count Cagliostro. Century: 2003

Maurer, David W. The Big Con. Anchor: 1940, 1999

Norfleet, Frank. Norfleet: The actual experiences of a Texas rancher’s 30,000 mile transcontinental chase after five confidence men. White: 1924

Posey, Carl A. et al. Hoaxes and Deceptions. Time-Life: 1991

Rosefsky, Robert S. Frauds, Swindles and Rackets. Follett: 1971

Schroeder, Andreas. Cheats, Charlatans, and Chicanery. McClelland & Stewart: 1997

---------.  Fakes, Frauds, and Flimflammery. McClelland & Stewart: 1999

Sifakis, Carl. Hoaxes and Scams: A Compendium of Deceptions, Ruses and Swindles. Facts on File: 1993

Steiner, Robert A. Don’t Get Taken! Bunco and Bunkum Exposed. Wide-Awake Books: 1989

Tibballs, Geoff. The World’s Greatest Hoaxes. Magpie: 2006

Whitlock, Charles R. Easy Money. Kensington: 1994

--------- Scam School. Macmillan: 1997

 

–fin--