Lawrence.com

There's a new crime fighter prowling the streets of 1939 Kansas City. Dorie Lennox is young, pretty, tough and smart. She can roll with the punches and is fast with a quip � and she carries a wicked switchblade knife.

She's also the newest fictional character from the mind of mystery author Lise McClendon, a Montana-based mother of two who just happens to write books filled with double-crossing crooks, suspense and murders.

Her latest alter ego has to survive in a rough-and-tumble environment of Mafia gangsters and corrupt city bosses, and McClendon wouldn't have it any other way.

"Any time a mystery writer can have a setting back in the 1930s, then it's just rife with possibilities, though it was a long road to get there," McClendon says during a recent phone interview.

McClendon will be at The Raven Bookstore at 7:30 p.m. today to promote her new book, "One O'Clock Jump," featuring the Lennox character.

Choosing Kansas City as the story's backdrop also proved irresistible to the writer, whose other works include the sleuth character Alix Thorssen.

"I lived in Kansas City, and I always thought the place was a great place for the novel, but I wasn't interested in a contemporary setting," she says. "I always wanted to write books set in Kansas."

Her lead character, Dorie, is a young woman, but tough and worldly wise. She's had an education in the school of hard knocks. She's lost most of her family and had her own bouts with the law as a teen-age criminal.

Wising up, she travels to Kansas City to live with her uncle, who is a member of the police squad. There she begins her career as a fledgling detective.

By placing the time frame in 1939, McClendon is able to take readers through an action-packed plot that has several interesting back-stories. World War II is just breaking out in Europe, and on the Midwest scene, McClendon is able to incorporate local political bosses as characters, and even touches upon an actual 1934 murder of a crooked political underboss that in real life was never solved.

"I solved it," McClendon says with a laugh.

To recreate Kansas City meant that McClendon had to do a fair amount of research. She visited libraries, read books based on the period and referenced old chamber of commerce maps.

"I don't consider that a lot. Research is the fun part. Then the work is the writing and deciding what to integrate into the story," she says.

Her technique gets results. "One O'Clock Jump" practically crackles with energy, as the characters' attitudes set the pace of the story. It's easy to visualize the action, which is what McClendon wants the readers to do.

"They're visually-based, and I'm a big film buff, so I'd love it if it were made into a movie," She says.

She's not expecting Hollywood to come courting anytime soon, though, because McClendon points out that historical novels could be costly to adapt to the screen.

"Those things are difficult," she says. "Kansas City of 1939 would be unrecognizable today."

Ironically, McClendon got started writing while taking classes in TV and film. She wrote a screenplay, found that she liked the suspense parts of the script the best and taught herself to write novels by adapting those parts of the script into a traditional narrative format. And a mystery author was born.

McClendon writes what she would like to read, and she's finding out that many readers share her taste in stories and characters.

"What I like to read and write is something that's both enjoyable and entertaining," she says. "And I like to learn as I read, about some part of the world people don't really know about."