Every novel begins with the spark of an idea. For me, those sparks often come from conversations—ordinary chats that land on the extraordinary, a place, a figure, a moment in time.
For example, my father and I shared a love of history. He and my mother had watched the documentary about Annie Oakley on PBS, and he encouraged me to watch it. Later, he said, “You know, you ought to write something about her.” I wasn’t drawn to non-fiction, but the idea stayed with me. What if Annie Oakley became an amateur sleuth, solving crimes while traveling with the Wild West show?
That question became the first book in the Annie Oakley Mystery series.
Another seed of an idea came from a conversation with my former horse trainer. I’d always been fascinated by the Ziegfeld Follies and she casually mentioned that her mother had once been a Ziegfeld girl. That remark got me down an hours-long rabbit hole of research where I discovered the tragic story of Olive Thomas. Her life was a fast-paced rise to fame, and her death was shrouded in mystery. Her story inspired the first book of the Grace Michelle Mysteries about a budding costume-designer, a missing starlet, and a darker world that lay behind the lights of the stage.
And another spark of an idea came from a location. Growing up our family had a second home in Durango, Colorado. I was always fascinated by the Strater Hotel, the heart of the town. It’s a Victorian beauty, built in the 1880s and steeped in ghost stories. One of those legends centered around a man in period dress walking the lobby, then vanishing on the adjacent railway tracks. On one occasion, my husband and I stayed in the “Louis L’Amour” suite, where the author had written many novels. That weekend, the setting, the history, and the tales of past lives came together in the idea of the Pryce of Murder series, my protagonist, Arabella Pryce, and her friend and confidant, a ghost namehttps://karibovee.substack.com/p/how-i-build-a-historical-mysteryd Percival.
Research & Fact + Fiction
Once I have the idea…
