One
of the comments I get from time to time about my mystery, The McHenry Inheritance, is that I must have done a lot of research
for the book. That’s a compliment, of course, because it means that readers —
or at any rate the ones who are talking to me — found the book real, at some level
anyway.
Generally,
my response is to shrug and make a vague, noncommittal comment. The real
answer, as they say, is that it’s complicated, but the accurate short answer
would be that there wasn’t that much book research but a lot of field research.
Because
the book is set only a few years in the past, in a time that will be remembered
by even the youngest readers, there wasn’t any need to research it, in the way
that the author of a book set half a century or a century ago would have to do.
At most I had to do a quick double-check on whether a couple of specific things
would have been around then (anybody remember CompuServe?) or whether my memory
was off by a couple of years.
How to Challenge a Will
A
key element in the story, as you might guess from the book’s title, involves a
challenge to a will that was changed at the last minute and cut out one of the
adult heirs to a substantial estate. That, I had to research, but it was
pleasant going.
I
simply called up Bill Locke-Paddon, who is the pre-eminent estate attorney in
our county and invited him out to lunch so I could pick his brain about how to
mount an effective challenge to a will. He was gracious and highly informative,
discoursing at length not only about how a will could be broken, but also about
how a good attorney, anticipating a challenge, could take steps to create a
will that would be more bulletproof in court.
Bill’s
expertise helped me frame a realistic situation in which the precautions weren’t
taken and the appearance of undue influence would rear its ugly head in court,
as it does in the book’s first chapter. If anything in that chapter is wrong,
legally speaking, the fault is mine for misunderstanding Bill’s clear
explanations.
Paying Attention on Vacation
As
for the rest of the book — the sense of place, the fishing material, etc. —
most of it came from observation and memory.
Earlier
in this life I spent nearly 20 years as a newspaper reporter and editor. It’s
one of those professions (police work is another) where you never really get
away from thinking as you do on the job, even when you’re on vacation. In
practical terms that means eavesdropping, asking questions, and paying close
attention to what you see and hear.
When
I go to the mountains on a fishing trip, I love to go to breakfast at the local
café (there’s always a joint like Mom’s in my book), newspaper in hand, and
listen while I’m looking at the paper. Nobody pays any attention to a solitary
reader and you can generally monitor several conversations in the immediate
vicinity. If you know a piquant detail when you encounter it, there are plenty
to be found in such a place.
I
also talk to store clerks, law enforcement officers, park rangers, basically
anyone I meet. And when it comes to describing the fishing, that’s easy. A fly
fisherman has to pay close attention to the water and to what he’s doing, so
that’s all between my ears. And fishing a stream is the pleasantest research of
all.
