Spartanburg
This novel tells the story of a brave sheriff, denied help by the city mayor and the state governor, fighting to protect his prisoner from the mob with the help of a few deputies.
Retired CMU math prof Fleming dives into historical fiction
Richard Fleming, a retired mathematics professor at Central Michigan University, has written two historical novels and has another planned.
On the heels of the release of his second book, retired CMU professor Richard Fleming looks to his childhood as the inspiration that pushed him into historical fiction.
Fleming was 7 when his older brother excitedly read him a passage from a Zane Grey western novel, sharing that the character Lewis Wetzel was a real person.
“That stuck with me,” Fleming said this week. “He’s not well known now, but in his day he was fairly well known.”
Fast forward almost 70 years.
Retired since 2007 and still fascinated by the long-forgotten frontiersman, Fleming drifted from his lifelong passion and vocation of mathematics to research and author an historical novel.
Fleming’s protagonist would be Wetzel, the character his brother had introduced in the 1940s.
Wetzel was an early settler and an Indian fighter along the westward-pushing edges of the early United States – a man of questionable character once considered a hero whose image has tarnished with the years.
“(Modern historians would say) he was a rogue at best, a murderer at worst,” Fleming said.
Fleming spent seven years researching and writing, making trips to West Virginia, where Wetzel was born in 1763 and to Ohio and Indiana, among other places, and exchanged more than 40 letters with a historian who has studied Wetzel extensively.
Fleming, a former chair of the Central Michigan University mathematics department who taught there 25 years, also made trips to the Library of Congress along with his wife, Diane, former associate director of financial aid at CMU.
“We went to the area where he was born,” Fleming said. “We found the farm where he grew up and the area where a lot of his life happened.”
His first novel, “Wetzel” was a mix of fact and fiction – a book with historically appropriate characters made up to move the story along, but sticking to verifiable factional material.
It runs 946 pages, the last 100 explaining in detail what is factual and what is fiction in the book.
Spartanburg
While the book was finished, Fleming was not.
An obscure reference in the book “The Greatest Game Ever Played” prompted Fleming on his quest to write a second historical novel.
“Spartanburg,” which he started in 2015 and was published earlier this year, recounts William James White, a South Carolina sheriff in 1913 whose advocacy and willingness to stand up to literal lynch mobs helped acquit a black man accused of raping a white woman.
“He first got him out of town with a mob after him and protected him until his trial a month later,” Fleming said. “That’s an anomaly; it just didn’t happen. In fact, there’d been a lynching just a few weeks before.”
Confronted by a mob of some 1,000 who blew up the jail’s gate, White stood up for the suspect, William Fair, who was later found not guilty by an all-white jury.
“You’re my friends, but I will kill the first one of you who comes through,” White told the throng.
Wife Diane also accompanied Fleming on “Spartanburg” research, including trips to South Carolina and poring through old newspaper accounts.
Two down, more to go?
At 80, Fleming isn’t done.
Next up, he wants to tackle perhaps the king of American frontiersmen, Davy Crockett.
And maybe some mathematics.
“I want to write one more technical research paper in mathematics,” Fleming said. “I’ve been published in mathematics in six decades, one more would make it seven.”
Fleming’s books are available from numerous sellers online, including Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
