Amy Stewart on her Kopp Sisters novels

Feature by Annie Rutherford | 06 Jan 2017

Lady Cop Makes Trouble picks up the story of the three Kopp sisters after their debut in Girl Waits With Gun. Amy Stewart talks about filling the holes in fact with fiction and reflecting modern feminist issues through these 1920s crime fighting sisters


It can be hard to find stories about adult sisters, as novelist Amy Stewart points out. Once we’ve outgrown Little Women and Dodie Smith’s glorious coming-of-age novel I Capture the Castle, the best we can hope for is perhaps Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility, which are more interested in the sisters’ relationships with their Willoughbys and Wickhams than with each other. Yet for many of us, our relationship with our siblings is one of our most enduring ties throughout our lives, surviving rivalries and tears at which friendships might flounder and offering support, inspiration and wisdom which we might not seek from our parents.

It is this cocktail of stubborn loyalty, heady admiration and more than occasional frustration which made sisterhood into one of the leading metaphors behind the feminist movement. And so it is a joy to come across a series of books which follows three sisters as they live and work together – all the more so given that Constance, Norma and Fleurette Kopp were real people whose lives played out in the early years of the 20th century, as the first tentative steps towards women’s rights were being taken.

Amy Stewart’s first book about the Kopp sisters, Girl Waits With Gun, appeared in the UK in 2016 and transports the reader to New Jersey in 1914, to a small town as yet seemingly unruffled by the onset of war across the Atlantic. When Constance, Norma and Fleurette’s buggy is upturned thanks to some unconscionably bad driving on the part of a local silk merchant, it is an incident that has unlikely consequences. The driver refuses to pay for the damage caused and instead starts terrorising the sisters, who see bricks thrown through their windows, kidnapping threats and arson attempts. In response, the town sheriff fits the women out with guns and teaches them how to shoot. These first, startling lessons prove to be the start of a long career in law enforcement for Constance – the oldest sister and Stewart’s narrator – who went on to become one of the first female deputy sheriffs in the USA.

“Constance was really a misfit,” Stewart points out, as she explains what first drew her to the Kopps. “She didn’t want to get married. At the age of 35, nothing was really going on in her life. And then this one event happened and changed everything. That doesn’t happen to most people; our lives change gradually.” She laughs, “That’s why no one would write a novel about my life.”

The idea for the books grew out of a moment of serendipity: Stewart had been researching a gin smuggler when she’d come across a newspaper article about the Kopps’ accident and its aftermath. “Just yesterday a similar thing happened,” she remarks. “You just find these weird, wonderful stories when you’re researching. Yesterday I came across something, stuck it in a file, and thought, someday I’ll have to write a book about this.

“With the Kopp sisters, rather than just save a couple of things in a folder and go back to what I was doing, I lost the rest of the day searching for more information about them. It’s such a long and really interesting story. I thought, this isn’t just a novel, it’s a series of novels, it’s a TV series! There’s a run of about 15 years of the sisters living and working together in law enforcement.”

The second book about the Kopps, Lady Cop Makes Trouble, is just out in the UK and picks up a few months after Girl Waits With Gun leaves off, with Constance working as a deputy for the wonderfully drawn Sheriff Heath. Like the first book, it’s both a gem of rediscovered female history and a pleasingly page-turning crime novel. When a prisoner escapes on Constance’s watch, she takes herself off to the streets of New York to bring him back, often going against her superior’s orders to do so. Constance’s contested position as a deputy is at stake: while a law had recently been passed allowing women to serve as police officers, to be a deputy you had to be eligible to vote – which women weren’t.

As with Girl Waits With Gun, the title and (beautifully designed) cover of Lady Cop Makes Trouble is inspired by newspaper articles from the time, of which there are a wealth about Constance and her sisters. “At first I was surprised that there were so many articles about the Kopps – but then I realised that anything women did which was out of the ordinary made headlines,” Stewart remarks. “One newspaper from the time reported on two women who’d decided to have a race. They made the paper just because they did some running!” And there’s no denying that the Kopps were out of the ordinary. Constance did in the end get her deputy’s badge – and in the 1920s the sisters went on to open a detective agency, a development to be covered in later books in the series.

If this sounds a bit too like Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, think again. Stewart’s books are steeped in the atmosphere of the era (“the time periods are so interesting,” she exclaims, “there’s always so much done with the 1920s, but the 1910s are really fascinating too!”), but never in a way which treats the time period as a clichéd or glamorous backdrop. Rather, Stewart’s background as a non-fiction writer serves her well and the novels are meticulously researched, without the research ever getting in the way of the stories. These are novels, not biographies, and where Stewart’s research comes up against blanks, she fills in the gaps with fiction, but notes at the back of each book give curious readers the chance to fact check.

“Sometimes authenticity is about dropping little details in,” Stewart considers. “There’s an important scene set in a New York subway station towards the end of Lady Cop Makes Trouble, and I actually went to New York and walked all around the subway station, figuring out which bits were old. There’s also a museum of the New York subway – it’s the most fascinating place in New York! They even have subway cars from that time which you can sit in. The seats in the subway cars are made of wicker, which would never have occurred to me. It’s great to be able to have those details.”

With their cast of idiosyncratic characters and a healthy dose of humour, the adventures of the resourceful Constance, the dramatic Fleurette and the contrary Norma offer some much needed escapism from the shadow cast by 2016. At the same time, however, Stewart points out that, “It’s amazing how similar the political situation now is to back then,” and this is subtly woven into the novels. Concerns about immigration were growing, fuelled in part by the European war. Globalisation was becoming a concept to be strived for.

In some ways the books are a rallying cry to arms. Constance knows well that if anyone is to protect her sisters or defend her status as a deputy, that person is her. As Sheriff Heath is fond of reminding his colleagues, when things go wrong we can’t be defeated but rather we have to “get back to work.” It is a call reminiscent of the feminists, activists and other glorious people rallying out there at the moment to stand fast, stay strong and regroup.


Lady Cop Makes Trouble is out 12 Jan; Girl Waits With Gun is out now. Both titles published by Scribe, £8.99 RRP

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