Rebecca Fraimow

Something I’ve been wanting to do for a little while now is talk about some of the influences that went into the word soup that eventually became Lady Eve’s Last Con — mostly because I remember freezing up completely when I was asked this question during the launch for The Iron Children, and I want to be prepared! — and since the book comes out in One Week (!) I guess now is as good a time as any.

Obviously the kickoff was The Lady Eve (1941), which I saw with my roommate in 2014. If you’ve not seen it, this is a really enjoyable Barbara Stanwyck movie in which she is a con artist wooing a hapless millionaire herpetologist played by Henry Fonda, who never gets a single one over on her. Because she’s Barbara Stanwyck, this is right and just, but because I’m me, I immediately left the theater like “hey … wouldn’t it be fun if her plan got derailed by someone who did have a clue, though ….”

Now, to be fair, in the movie there is in fact someone who has a clue, it’s Henry Fonda’s hard-boiled bodyguard Muggsy, and if I had it to do over again perhaps indeed I would have leaned into the Muggsy-ness of it all instead of inventing a hot sister. The road not taken! However, in 2015, right around the time I started drafting, I read Rose Lerner’s True Pretenses — still one of my all-time favorite romance novels — about an overprotective Jewish con artist who attempts to set his baby brother up for life by marrying him off to an heiress, only to end up accidentally getting into romantic cahoots with her himself. Believe it or not, I was not actually consciously aware how much this influenced me until I looked at my completed first draft of Lady Eve’s Last Con, in which an overprotective Jewish con artist gets into romantic cahoots with the wrong sibling while attempting to set her baby sister up for life, and went “….ah.”

Conversely, I did know exactly how much I wanted to riff on Guys and Dolls when I wrote the book — for a long time, the working title was Luck Be A Lady and I still slightly mourn the loss of it. There actually used to be a lot more Guys and Dolls in its actual DNA (in the first draft, the climactic scene involved a high-stakes underground card game, which has since been lost to the exigencies of plot and rewrites) and what remains is mostly vibes and aesthetic; neither Ruthi or Sol is quite one hundred percent the ideal Lesbian Sky Masterson, but each of them has a couple of her salient traits. (The full powerpoint presentation regarding Sky Masterson: Always Definitely And Canonically A Lesbian can probably wait for another time, but! she is.)

I’d be remiss in talking about influences if I didn’t also pay a quick homage to Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga, especially A Civil Campaign, which left a profound impression on me as a teen as the very first sci-fi screwball rom-com I’d ever encountered. This is another case where I didn’t realize how much Bujold had gone into this book until my crit group politely reminded me that I had not actually bothered to establish any worldbuilding around future reproductive technology, but just unconsciously assumed everyone had read how Bujold did it and went from there.

The last thing I know for sure I directly stole from elsewhere was the kosher duck that appear as a MacGuffin in the middle of the novel. For this, I have to thank Jennifer 8. Lee’s Fortune Cookie Chronicles, about the development of American Chinese food as a specific cuisine in its own right, which alerted me to the Great Kosher Duck Scandal of 1989.

I’m sure there’s more I’m forgetting to talk about that ended up in the book one way or another, but this post is probably long enough as it is now, so I will just close by shouting out Freya Marske’s upcoming Swordcrossed; I don’t think I directly stole anything from Freya, but it’s certainly significantly due to the wordcount emails we were exchanging back during the drafting process that Lady Eve exists at all!