Photo courtesy Douglas Armstrong
Douglas Armstrong
Douglas Armstrong
In 2010, Douglas Armstrong’s Even Sunflowers Cast Shadows won the Council for Wisconsin Writers Award for Best Novel. It was his debut novel, but his byline was familiar to Milwaukeeans through his many years as film critic and business writer (among other beats) for the old Milwaukee Journal.
Since 2010, Armstrong published two novels set in the newsrooms of times past. With his latest, Sun Dog Memory, he returns to the Kansas setting of Even Sunflowers Cast Shadows but with a different cast of characters. Sun Dog is primarily set in the early months of the Great Depression and the last years of Prohibition. The struggling protagonist is a mail clerk on a postal train rumbling across the prairie—he will be accused and pursued for a crime he didn’t commit. The novel digresses in time, by two decades, for context and family history as homesteaders in Kansas.
Armstrong began writing fiction during his tenure at the Journal, selling stories to Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. “I turned to book length fiction after leaving the paper in 2000,” he recalls. “It took several attempts before I could write something of that length that worked. Curiously, the novel that got set aside at that point is the story in this book, Sun Dog Memory, which I revived all these years later.”
'Sun Dog Memory' by Douglas Armstrong
Armstrong’s grandfather, William, provided the inspiration for Sun Dog Memory. He describes it as “a fact and fiction hybrid. I used specific facts about my grandfather’s experience (time, place, and work activities) to form the framework, particularly his years as a railway mail clerk. The rest is my creation. But I depended on what I could from his life. The timetable of the train that the story's protagonist (Jed Albright) works on is the exact timetable of the train my grandfather worked.”
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The Suggested Reading list appended to the novel points to the extensive research behind the story’s details. “Although I never spoke to my grandfather about farming land outside Rolla, Kansas, I found a great deal of information about other people who also farmed there in that period in accounts compiled by the Morton County Historical Society in Elkhart, Kansas. The details of specific events—wildfires, community dances, feuds—were all imagined by me after absorbing what I could from these histories of the early homesteading days.”
Armstrong will read from his new book and narrate a slide presentation, 6:30 p.m., Oct. 5 at Boswell Books.
