Guest Post: Dietrich Kalteis on Writing, Research, and his new novel, Under An Outlaw Moon

Please welcome Dietrich Kalteis to the blog today. In addition to the guest post on the blog today, Dietrich will be back on the blog this Sunday with an excerpt from his new book. 

 

Under an Outlaw Moon follows the true story of Bennie and Stella Mae Dickson. He’s reckless and she’s an outsider longing to fit in. When they pull off a bank robbery to celebrate her sixteenth birthday, their lives take a turn that they never could have imagined.

 

While researching for my novel Under an Outlaw Moon, also set in the 1930s, I came upon the story of Bennie and Stella in an old news story, and I was intrigued. They were newlyweds when they committed their first bank robbery in Elkton, South Dakota, right around Stella Mae’s sixteenth birthday. Once in the bank, they drew guns and were faced with the vault’s time lock, having to wait it out for twenty minutes. Without a shot being fired, they ended up getting away with just over twenty-one hundred dollars, driving across the state border hiding out at Bennie’s family farm in Tyler, Minnesota.

 

A couple of quiet months and Bennie was thinking about a bigger heist, promising Stella the good life was coming. Walking into the bank in Brookings, South Dakota, only a few miles from the Elkton robbery, they were faced with another time lock, having to wait this one out for an hour and a half before the vault popped open. Refusing to take off empty handed, Bennie posed as a bank inspector, his shotgun and pistol kept out of sight below the counter, compelling the bank staff to deal with the customers as if nothing was wrong, promising nobody would get hurt. Stella stood like a sentry by the door as over fifty customers came and went, doing their banking. The couple walked out of there with over seventeen thousand in cash, plus another sixteen thousand in stocks. Keeping their cool a second time, they pulled it off without a soul being harmed.

 

The media dubbed them ‘the time lock bandits’. And although they committed just two robberies, and did it without a shot being fired — a far cry from more notorious criminals of the era like Dillinger and the Barrows — the Dicksons ended up at the top of the FBIs most-wanted list. J. Edgar Hoover considered them Bonnie-and-Clyde copycats, and he wanted to stop them from gaining the folk-hero status that other criminals had gained. With considerable influence on the media, he wanted them stopped, putting his agency, resources and manpower behind a coast-to-coast manhunt, wanting the Dicksons brought down dead or alive.

 

In getting to know the couple, I found two beings clinging to each other, one wounded and one misguided, dealing with something they got caught up in. In spite of his past scrape with the law, there was a sense of fairness about Bennie in the way he dealt with people that crossed his path. And in spite of her naivety, there was a growing depth to Stella that went well beyond her years. She came from an abusive home, her father walking out on the family at an early age. After she met Bennie, she saw her way out of her hometown and her past life, looking to a brighter future.

 

Through my research, I came to understand how the hard times shaped them and their choices. In spite of having to run from the law, they remained devoted to each other and there were close ties to both their families. How they were depicted in the media was in sharp contrast to who they really were; and how they were hunted down was brutal and unjust. And that’s what inspired me to want to tell their story.

 

I found out everything I could about the Dicksons, and the way of life during those hard times in the midwest. There were numerous texts, plenty of FBI files from those times, daily newspapers, along with personal accounts and photos. I compiled the details I wanted to include, laying out the sequence of events before I started the first draft. Adding some color and fleshing out the characters, I worked to bring the scenes to life. This was a departure from my usual approach to writing fiction, in which I start with a single idea and grow it into a chapter, researching as I go, and moving on from scene to scene.

 

The story shifts from her POV to his, then back again. As I have in other novels, I used a lot of dialogue to carry the scenes forward and paint the world around them. That was my favorite part of writing the book, getting to know them and writing their words, letting the characters come to life and do their own talking. At times, I felt like I was just typing their words and following their actions.

 

I hope anyone who picks up the novel enjoys it as much as I did while writing it.

 

Dietrich Kalteis ©2021 

Dietrich Kalteis is the award-winning author of Ride the Lightning (bronze medal winner, 2015 Independent Publisher Book Awards, for best regional fiction), The Deadbeat Club, Triggerfish, House of Blazes (silver medal winner, 2017 Independent Publisher Book Awards, for best historical fiction), Zero Avenue, Poughkeepsie Shuffle, Call Down the Thunder, Cradle of the Deep, and Under an Outlaw Moon. His novel The Deadbeat Club has been translated to German, entitled Shootout, and 50 of his short stories have also been published internationally. He lives with his family on Canada’s West Coast. More info at https://dietrichkalteis.com/