I went on the North Shore Book Trail bookstore crawl yesterday with a dear friend and my husband. One of the shops is a delightful used book store, the kind of place I spent my childhood yearning to visit. The sort of place that still has a rack of red-covered Happy Hollisters books, Hardy Boys novels all in a row, and the Star Trek novels I binged as a tween.
Some of the best finds though were some of my great aunt‘s books, four of her Shirley McClintock books: “Death Served up Cold”, “Death and the Delinquent”, “Dead in the Scrub”, and “Deservedly Dead”. She was a notable writer for her work in the 1980s feminist science fiction scene, with award winning novels, but she used pen names for works in horror and mystery, in the era when grocery store mass market paperbacks were in their prime and separate branding was critical for their commercial success.
What’s fascinated me though is that while we weren’t close — I visited her ranch a few times with my parents, and that’s it — so much of her style is deeply familiar. I vaguely knew she was a writer, but didn’t have any real idea what that meant at the time. I was probably eight or nine or so, and the ranch had been sold by 1992 when “Deservedly Dead” was published and the author note said she moved to Santa Fe. The book is nakedly autobiographical in places: the main character, like my great aunt, raised Belted Galloway cattle on her ranch, mostly as a hobby rancher. The book’s plot hinges around a new rancher and neighbor to the main character from back East destroying the landscape and not understanding the fragile Western ecosystem. I wonder very much if this is what prompted the sale of the my great aunt’s ranch in Colorado and the move to Santa Fe. Destruction and the deep love of a place that would feel deeply violating when it is developed or stripped bare is a feature of psychology that I deeply share, and most everyone in my family does. It’s not uncommon in the culture where I’m from to have these sentiments: the land in the West is fragile, an arid ecosystem of careful balances, and unlike anything in Europe. There’s an inherently un-European worldview that comes from beginning to love these places, and a lot of sentiments inherited from the peoples the lands were stolen from, the Diné (Navajo), the Zuni, the Arapahoe, the Ute, and so many others, are shared more generally. This is the land of Rosemary Trommer and Terry Tempest Williams too. Generations of writers have loved these landscapes and fallen in love with them.
I can’t figure out which parts of the story are autobiographical. The main character in these stories, is a familiar persona: she’s written as a somewhat conservative (in the Western US sense), cantankerous, matter of fact older woman, and very self-possessed. So many of her views are things we’d now associate with progressive politics, but in 1992, were not so clearly. Politics in the West are not aligned the way they are in the East and on the coasts and one day I’ll write more in depth about that. My great aunt’s politics were staunchly feminist, if rather Second Wave: I’d like to think she’d have come down on the right side of things with regard to transgender people, though I’m not positive. She was the head of Planned Parenthood in Colorado for a long time, and I suspect in solid Second Wave feminist ways, wrote off racism in ways we’d now find a bit regressive, though also perhaps pleasantly tractable rather than the entrenched battle lines we have right now in 2025. Some of these views come out in the character of McClintock. I don’t think the choice of name is accidental either, a first name that is a close cousin to my great aunt’s, and yet another Scottish surname like her pen names are. I think the autobiographical nature is only thinly veiled.
That particular brand of ‘conservative’ is something I usually just called ‘cussedness’, a mule-like stubbornness to changing views until they actually make sense, both emotionally and factually, and there’s a sort of arid West cultural trait of being somewhat sparse with words and yet keeping one’s finger on the pulse of one’s emotions. Hotheadedness is not appreciated there, and speaking honestly is appreciated — if it’s both relevant and needs saying.
The character has a tendency to rant polemic (which sets her at odds with the more reserved characters) and to obsess over facts not fitting (which I read as being tacitly appreciated, if impolite). These are traits I share.
It’s fascinating being able to analyze an author like this more closely than usual. I do have special knowledge of who she was, though none of it particularly intimate, it’s a bit more specific. I fault literary criticism that doesn’t take the author’s nature into account as fatally incomplete. No work exists in a vacuum, and hastily produced commercial genre novels especially leave a lot of marks on the page that come straight from the author’s interior, and not a calculated meaning external to them. We like to think of literature as divorced from authorship, every choice made deliberately and in service of the story, but none of us is so omniscient even of ourselves as to be able to do that. It’s a useful lens for some analysis, and it’s good to be able to separate any particular notion from its author to examine it, but that’s one tool in the kit and not the entire toolbox.