Erin Bledsoe was told in middle school that her essay on Marie Antoinette showed promise, fueling her dream to write about historical women, particularly the ones that behave badly. When she’s not writing, she’s wrangling children, exploring nature, or rolling dice at a table with friends playing Dungeons & Dragons. She lives with her husband and children in Michigan, where she’ll occasionally have her coffee outside just to watch the deer.

This is such a fun topic, but it’s so much harder than I thought it would be. When I first started researching Alice for The Forty Elephants, I cringed a little reading about all the things they did. The gang, made up of young women, was ruthless. They didn’t just steal from department stores; they tore through them, targeting owners, rival gangs, and anyone who got in their way. Their tactics were violent and designed to match, if not outdo, the aggression of their male counterparts. They had to be, in a time when London’s underworld didn’t take women seriously unless they were just as dangerous.

At first, I struggled. I kept asking myself, “How am I supposed to write about a woman like this?” I was a young mother at the time, writing during naptimes, soaking up the Michigan summers with my feet in a kiddie pool. I worked from home, made dinners, cleaned the house. My world was warm, domestic, and mostly quiet. Alice, on the other hand, was not. She was reckless, she made bad calls, and frankly, I didn’t see enough redeeming qualities to carry her as a main character.

Historical fiction, at least the novels I always loved, tended to center on remarkable women doing remarkable things, not bad girls doing bad girl things. I knew I was stepping into territory that would bend the genre a little, and I had to be careful with how I did it. What if readers didn’t like it? I knew some wouldn’t. But what if I couldn’t get enough readers to rally behind the idea of exploring women like this?

But then I paused and took a step back and really tried to rethink my approach. I was raised in poverty. No, I didn’t steal from shops or run with a gang, but I remember the fear in my mother’s eyes when the bills piled up and there was nothing in the fridge. I remember the panic during those in-between paydays, when every decision felt like survival.

Then, I was able to really think about women in the 1920’s. What choices did they have, really? For working-class girls, especially those raised in the slums of London, life was brutal. If you weren’t born into privilege, your future was mapped out before you, factory work or domestic service. And the double standards were everywhere: men could build empires from crime and be called legends; women who did the same were labeled whores, criminals, or worse.

And honestly, that struggle isn’t so different now. Women raised in poverty today still face those same impossible choices. The jobs have changed, the language has changed, but like my mother, there’s plenty of women working two jobs and still coming up short. How far would I go to feed my children? To give my family a home? If I had no choice, what would I do? That’s where Alice came into focus for me, not as a villain, but as a woman trying to claw her way up in a world that gave her nothing. A survivalist.

Virginia in Mob Queen was even easier to write. Let’s return to my mother, shall we? She also left an abusive marriage with very little to her name. The story goes that her ex-husband even burned down his own garage, with all her belongings inside, just to make a point. But my mother was the Queen of new beginnings. There wasn’t a place she couldn’t walk into and walk out of with a new friend, a new job she wasn’t technically qualified for (which she’d inevitably crush), or a whole community she built from charm and grit alone. She knew survival like the back of her hand, and I saw that same fire in Virginia.

How Virginia got her start, her determination to rise, I understood that completely. The hardest part of writing her wasn’t the crime, or even her decision to stay deep in that world. It was coming to terms with something a little more personal: the realization that most of us, at some point, have dated or loved a narcissist. That’s what made Virginia’s story hurt in places I didn’t expect. And I’m here to tell you, there’s so much healing that goes into surviving a narcissist, so much unlearning.

Ben is the extreme version of one I can only hope most women are lucky enough to avoid, but some haven’t. Some of us have met our own Ben. I dated my own narcissist, who made me question everything I thought I knew about myself. My memories, my instinct, my worth. One minute, I was the best thing that ever happened to him. The next, I was too emotional, and too dramatic. I didn’t see it at first, the way he pushed me away just to pull me back in, over and over, until I couldn’t tell the difference between passion and manipulation.

Getting to write Virginia overcome her own trauma with bad men healed some of my own. I’ve found that even when these women are objectively labeled bad girls, there are still so many ways I see myself in them, so many moments where I understand their choices, even if I wouldn’t make the same ones. And that makes writing about them not just easier, but deeply satisfying. It feels like holding up a mirror to the darker parts of myself and my past, and choosing to see them without shame.

Mob Queen by Erin Bledsoe

Step into the gritty and dangerous world of secret meetings and Mafia crime bosses set in 1930s Chicago. After moving to Chicago and feeling isolated by her husband, Virginia Hill meets Madeline, a fast friend who gives her the courage to leave her abusive partner. From there, she becomes a server with Madeline at a restaurant frequented by the Mob. One day, Madeline goes missing, and it is up to Virginia to find her. As she digs deeper and deeper, she finds herself moving up ranks in the Mob and gaining more power than she thought possible. But is all the power worth the woman who changed her life?

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