Using Research To Write A Book.
This article comes from historical mystery author Connie Knight. She wrote Cemetery Whites.
Using Research To Write A Historical Mystery Book
I’ve been writing since junior high, but Cemetery Whites is the first novel I tackled and brought into being. It’s a cozy mystery, fun to read and fun to write. I chose the genre I love to read, where some of my favorite mystery writers set standards I aspired to meet. Regional history, vernacular language, large families descended from pioneer settlers, beautiful rural landscape, Texas ranches and farms—these were elements of my story, but not the story itself.
The story is a murder mystery. Two murders are involved, one from 1875 and one from today. The one from today is completely fictional, but the 1875 family secret of a second body in the family founder’s grave is inspired by a story in my Texas family, still not known in detail or freely told.
That’s how some episodes in my book materialized. In Chapter One, Professor Thomas Harrison, a black man from San Antonio, asks elderly Hettie Hargrove Harrell for a ride to her family cemetery deep in the country. Once there, he pulls a small shovel out of his big briefcase and starts digging up the large patch of Cemetery White irises (an old-fashioned flower) at the base of the family founder’s grave. Stunned by his pirate behavior, Hettie pulls her Colt .45 out of her purse and shouts at him to stop. He swats at her gun with his shovel; her grandson Donny tries to grab the shovel, but knocks his grandma down, and her gun goes off. Professor Harrison falls down dead.
She didn’t kill him, though. We know that by the end of the chapter. An observer, with his gun in his pocket, waits until Hettie and Donny run away, then confronts the corpse. Takes the briefcase and tells the professor goodbye—in a mean way.
All of this is fictional, except the double-body grave, which is fictionalized—not real.
Research To Write a Historical Mystery Book
The real things in the background had to be researched or remembered. Several branches of my father’s family settled DeWitt Colony as early as 1825; part of my book was researched and some was remembered. My amateur detective Caroline had just moved to DeWitt County to a little house in Yorktown. She’s a widow, reshaping her life by returning to her father’s family. Her cousin Janet drives them around, and one morning they head for the family cemetery for Caroline’s genealogy research. She can find dates and names from the tombstones. Instead, they find the body, call the constable, and become involved in solving the murder that has ancient roots, and the one from today.
So, to write the novel, I researched Texas history for the Coastal Plains area of Texas which is southwest of San Antonio. When Mexico became independent of Spain, it wanted to populate Texas and make it productive. Spain had been there a long time, but sparsely. There were huge areas, like DeWitt Colony, that were never intruded upon under Spanish rule. American settlers who established more than one colony in 1825 received grants of 5,000 acres, but in taking possession of their land, they routed Comanche and Apache tribes, who fought back.
An element of research that shaped my book had to do with colonization. The settlers of DeWitt Colony, and other colonies settled by Europeans, did not practice slavery. They set up small family farms, like those they came from, along with free-ranging herds of cattle. No fences existed.
Slavery existed in the coastal areas where large plantations were established, and it was legal and could exist on the ranches and farms, but generally did not.
Serving as the family amateur detectives, Caroline and Janet drove to San Antonio several times. Professor Harrison had lived in Dignowity Park, a historic neighborhood. They drove through the neighborhood and found a garage tenant at Harrison’s house. They talked with him and found information. Later, they visited a huge nationally historic cemetery, looking for family graves, and found a grave for Priscilla Gaines. But the grave was in the black section of the cemetery. In genealogy research, Caroline found Priscilla had been a slave in the Hargrove family before the Civil War, and a friend after it. She, and her son Willie, had been sent to Texas from Mississippi when Sarah Gaines married John David Hargrove.
Because of my personal interest in family history and genealogy, I knew how census records, wills, deeds, and other documents could be put to use, so I put those things in Caroline’s hands while researching Professor Harrison’s motive in digging up the grave.
I made several trips to San Antonio to visit places I wanted to write about. The cemetery and the Dignowity Park neighborhood were visited; so was Ellis Alley, an integrated area of small houses post-Civil War, but now almost gone. That’s an element in my book. So is Schilo’s, a German restaurant downtown that’s been there for years. Caroline and Janet met their cousin David there for lunch one day; I ate lunch there, too.
Other elements of personal experience—not recent—include going to a place like Billie’s Bar-B-Que to listen to the band every Friday, and to shoot pool during the band’s break. Billie’s is a fictional place, but Caroline and Janet enjoyed it.
In brief, I researched Texas history for my book in various ways. I have a Texana library, I grew up in San Antonio, I still visit my relatives in DeWitt County, I made trips to San Antonio, and I looked things up on the computer, including census records.
There’s more to the book that came from the research, but the research shaped the development of the mystery. The history in the mystery, you might say.
Check out my blog for another historical book here
Check out this historical mystery author here