Steeped in History
Her long-standing interest in the past compelled Sandra Dallas to produce 10 works of nonfiction before sharpening her pencil on fiction.
Even a failed, three-way collaboration and later a manuscript’s rejection didn’t scare this journalist away from storytelling.
Over lunch, Dallas and two friends plotted, divided up and crafted characters for a book later abandoned when their day jobs got in the way.
Later the fledgling novelist resurrected and rewrote a post-college manuscript only to receive the dreaded rejection letter from her agent.
Hooked on fiction, Dallas persevered eventually producing Buster Midnight’s Cafe,
Steeped in history from an early age, Dallas covered the Rocky Mountain region as a staff writer and the first female bureau chief for Business Week magazine.
Schooled daily in Virginia’s past by her mother, Dallas and her siblings toured Washington’s Mount Vernon and Arlington House, residence of Robert E. Lee as children.
But a 1945 move to Denver opened up the west for a writer who never ventured back east again.
Subjects ranging from copper mining in Butte, Montana, and polygamy in Utah, to the role of women in business and sexual harassment provided future background for Dallas’ fiction dominated by female characters.
Set in Nalgitas, New Mexico, in the 1860s, The Chili Queen follows the life of 
Addie French, a con artist turned madam.
Returning by train from Kansas City, Addie befriends a prim and proper lady traveling west as a mail-order bride. But when Emma, the spinster, is jilted, she seeks refuge in Addie’s ‘boarding house’ and life at the brothel is never the same again.
This psychological thriller cum detective story takes the reader on horseback through the plains of New Mexico and Colorado as the con men/women try to out run the person they swindled. Through Dallas’ words, one can feel the wide open spaces and sniff the sweet-smelling air of the old west.
Just after the infamous attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt signed an act forcing all of California’s Japanese Americans into internment camps.
When Dallas’ pen hits paper, this relocation to Tall Grass (Amache) produces an fearful atmosphere ripe with paranoia in Ellis Colorado, a small town of sugar beet farmers.
From the viewpoint of Rennie Stroud, 13, the reader watches as the bigoted townspeople heap blame on the nearby Japanese when a crippled girl is found brutally murdered and raped.
Often compared to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird
Discussion questions can be found here.
In the post-civil war era, the stigma of being a spinster compels Mattie to accept an impromptu marriage proposal and accompany her new husband by wagon train to the western territories.
While Luke battles to shape the frontier into a homestead, the lone female endures hardship, frugality, betrayal, infant mortality and drought along with the constant threat of Indian attack.
In Mattie, Dallas gives us a woman of courage and faith in the treeless, inhospitable landscape of Eastern Colorado.
Don’t forget the Persian Pickle Club, another Sandra Dallas favorite.
A list of nonfiction titles can be found here. Fictional titles here:
