Q. Do you consider what you’re writing Historic Fiction?

A. Yes. Definitely Historic Fiction. And it is fiction. The stories are the primary thing, but I try to make it historically accurate and from a progressive viewpoint.

Q. When you wrote the first book, did you know that it would take this long to get the stories out or have they just naturally progressed so that when you got to the end of one there was more to tell? 

A. What usually happened is that I would get to the end of one, I would go to the Oregon Historical Society and start reading newspapers to get an idea for the next one. Then I would start researching it and that’s kind of how it happens.

A. lot of time, ideas come either from the Oregon Labor Press (they’ve been publishing forever) or from The Oregonian. The one about the bridges falling down [Dry Rot] was an article from October of 1902. All these bridges in Portland started falling down and at the time there were 65 bridges  and I thought ‘What the heck is happening? All these bridges were falling. And these were bridges over ravines, not over the rivers… We used to have a lot of ravine bridges… I just kind of go from one idea to the other .

Q. Is there a continuity from one book to the next?

A. Yes. Not all the characters are in all the books, but characters do reappear. In the book that has to do with shanghaiing [Land Sharks], a character in there appears in the next book. There’s a character in the third book, [Dry Rot]; the character is a ragpicker poet who was based on a real person that was here in Portland. He doesn’t appear in all the books but he pops up. He’s not in Slow Burn, but he’s been in most of the other books.

Q. You’re talking about the history of the Pacific Northwest that is not often reported or long ago forgotten.

A. Yes. When I started this, I never realized what a journey it would be into the history of a town where I grew up. It’s changed how I see the town. A lot of people who read these books have the same reaction: it’s really enriched their understanding of Portland.

Q. So when you wrote the first Adair book, what was your motivation? What had you written up til then?

A. Before I started writing fiction? I was in college, and they would give me a choice of taking a test or writing a paper, I always wrote the paper. I wrote about the history of Seattle, the history of neighborhood organizations… I’ve always been a research writer person, so I did that. Then I went to law school and did a lot of brief writing. So I had always written either historical or nonfiction.

Although I’d read fiction incessantly, I never really thought about writing it but I had come across a story about these guys that traveled on the trains and protected hoboes from really violent railroad bulls.

I was working for a union and I realized from talking to people in the union they had little to no idea about the history of the union movement or the achievements of the the unions and the progressives in the early 1900s.

I thought how am I gonna get these folks who ordinarily wouldn’t read nonfiction history to learn about themselves? And that was the first thing I did – I wanted to tell the story of these guys who rode on trains and protected people. They were Wobbly people – IWW people. So that’s what started the whole thing and I discovered I loved it. It was a great escape from reality in a way.

Q. Were you involved in the formation of ONI (Office of Neighborhood Involvement)?

A. Well… it was called the Organization of Neighborhood Associations and there’s a real interesting story behind that. My friend was hired by the City Council and the Bureau of Planning to go out and interview neighborhood organizations about what it was they would like to do. I was in the Corbett Terwilliger Lair Hill neighborhood association and planning committee.

She went out and interviewed every neighborhood association and came back with the recommendation that the city be divided up into districts and that neighborhood associations be empowered to make the decisions that affected only their neighborhood and then, at a higher level, that the district, which would be comprised of those representatives from each neighborhood association, to make decisions.

The city’s response to that was one of horror, and they quickly came up with the Office of Neighborhood Associations whose real goal was to bring these rowdy neighborhood activists under control. When we first started in Corbett Terwilliger, the city bureaucrats did not know how to deal with neighborhoods. They hadn’t developed their techniques for channelling and controlling neighborhood involvement and so we got lots of things accomplished.

That’s when they were putting John’s Landing in there along the river and we designed the park and we forced them to provide access to the river. We just did all sorts of things like that and were able to get the city to agree a lot of stuff. As time went on, the bureaucrats figured out how to channel neighborhood involvement…

Q. Do you know how your writing process works as you weave all the disparate elements into your next tale? 

A. You know it really evolves as I write it. I don’t outline. I don’t know how it’s going to end. The story just sort of tells itself. I’m as eager as the next person to know what’s going to happen next. I usually write a chapter at a time.

The beauty of doing the research is there are so many gems out there, that once you start researching it, it just kinda tells itself.. There are things you want to share, and then you have to figure out how to put those things in. It’s not that hard… of course now that I say that maybe in the next book I’ll be struggling…

Q. Well if you got through seven of the books by now, you’re doing great… I like the idea that what happened a hundred years ago is still relevant now. People freak out about what’s happening now but it’s not anything new. 

A. It isn’t …It isn’t… and its the same battles that we’ve fought and have won before, and now there’s been some slippage and we need to fight again, and on a global scale.

That’s what exciting… before, during the Gilded age, the struggle was pretty much centered in this country, for us anyway. But now the same progressive values are again being asserted, only now it’s global and I think that’s exciting.

Q. It’s interesting to me to think of the early 1900’s version of the 1 percent, because that’s the time when the Federal Reserve was created, and the stock market crash happened and for similar reasons as now, and we have to see it as a pattern instead of isolated instances.

A. That’s true and I think Robert Reich did a short movie on that very topic. It’s cyclical on a table, with a peak and a trough and a peak and a trough. He also thinks we are on the verge of a paradigm shift…

Q. Maybe it will all evolve… it would be nice if there was some kind of understanding and respect between nations…

A. I think the UN is consensing on what is a crime, saying phosphorus bombs are criminal; land mines are criminal etc,… so I think that is starting to happen.

My next book is probably going be about child labor and how it was addressed by the progressives. I think that’s another thing the UN is starting to focus on – child labor.  Southeast Examiner

The Sage Adair mysteries are crafted around heavily researched historical facts. That may sound like the books are summaries of a dry, historical treatises, but the author rolls these facts out within the context of a fast-paced story that includes incidents of arson, murder, kidnapping, and false accusations. There’s nothing more satisfying than reading a great mystery while painlessly learning Portland history.

In 2018, the Southeast Examiner had a visit with author SL Stoner and the conversation was kaleidoscopic, like the Sage Adair books.