Fox29 reporter Gerald Kolpan has struck a deal with Random House for a work of historical fiction.
Etta, which he's been writing for several years, is the made-up life of Etta Place, mysterious girlfriend of the turn-of-the-20th-century "Wild Bunch" bandit known as the Sundance Kid. "Nobody knows where she came from and what became of her after 1907," says Kolpan, whose 20th anniversary on WTXF will be marked by the station tomorrow.
Kolpan casts Place as a deb-gone-wild - growing up proper-like in Philly, heading out west, moving to New York (where she meets Eleanor Roosevelt), and following Butch Cassidy and the Kid to South America. "Train robberies, sex, a lot of action," is how he describes the plot. Early readers deemed it "too dirty, so I made it more subtle."