Booklovers Bench authors share their favorite research stories

Favorite author research stories are one of my questions to ask authors when I do interviews with them about their book. I’m often surprised by the stories the authors tell. With that in mind, I decided to ask my friends at Booklovers Bench for their favorite stories. I’ll kick it off just to get things started.

Buster and me — my favorite author research story

Buster wasn’t actually a person, at least, not in the traditional sense. In fact, ‘he’ was a rental car on the island of Kauai. In the islands, the locals can recognize tourists from a block away just based on the car they’re driving. We switched that up one year and rented from an off-brand company. Buster turned out to be disaster on wheels—his air conditioning went on and off at will, the power window on the passenger’s side worked when Buster wanted it to, and the passenger door could only be opened from the outside. When I wrote Kauai Temptations, Buster became McKenna’s temperamental transportation. Oh, and that ‘car stigma’ for tourists? Gone. We stopped at a roadside mango stand one hot afternoon and I was treated as though I’d lived on island forever.

Nancy J. Cohen goes undercover

The most unusual thing I’ve done for author research was to visit a Russian shvitz in North Miami Beach. After I signed into the place with its medieval decor, I stripped down to my swimsuit. I threw a towel over my arm to hide my camera and notepad and then explored each room, taking notes and photos. The shvitz wasn’t anything like what I’d expected. Instead of old men, there were girls in bikinis and hunks in swim trunks. They used it as a day spa. I used it for a murder scene in Perish By Pedicure.

Learn more about Nancy at nancyjcohen.com. 

Debra H. Goldstein takes on foodies

Kensington’s Sarah Blair mystery series – Four Cuts Too Many releases on May 25, so this will show up on my release date.

Birmingham, Alabama is a foodie city. Like Sarah Blair, I find being in the kitchen frightening. To nail the restaurant world, I shadowed and ate my way through the kitchens of two James Beard winning chefs, a former sous chef whose restaurant just opened, and the top caterer in town.

Learn more about Debra at debrahgoldstein.com.

Cheryl Hollon blows glass

My favorite bit of author research was for flameworking, the featured glass art in Down In Flames, Webb’s Glass Shop Mystery #6. I signed up for a professional workshop at Zen Glass Studio in St. Petersburg. After I explained that I was a mystery writer and would mention his shop in the book, I was the teacher’s pet.

It didn’t turn out as I expected. I made several medallions and two glass beads, but it turns out — I was terrified to have a 1500 degree flame roaring about ten inches from my face. The owner was grand and let me just watch him teach and then he fully answered my barrage of questions. 

Learn more about Cheryl at cherylhollon.com.

Diane A.S. Stuckart (Anna Gerard) finds rattlesnake crafts

Time constraints of a full-time day job mean I’m mostly an armchair researcher. However, in the past I’ve managed to coordinate a few vacations that served as research. One of my favorites was a long-ago trip to Arizona, setting of my historical romance Desert Hearts, which were also written as Anna Gerard. In addition to visiting Tombstone and a few mining towns, my husband and I stumbled across an odd and now defunct place in the middle of nowhere called Rattlesnake Crafts.

The name explains it – everything for sale was made of rattlesnake skins, rattles, bones, fangs. The shop was set up in an unoccupied trailer, and payment was on the honor system. Choose what you want and drop the cash in the box by the door. The shop didn’t make it into my historical romance for obvious reasons, but I did use one thing in a later contemporary short fantasy tale. That was the display of dozens of ‘found’ metal discards—shovels, buckets, even a tricycle—rescued from the desert and hung from an old clothesline to clank in the dry breeze like a giant wind chime. The resulting sculpture was both beautiful and eerie, and I hope that even with the trailer store long gone this mesmerizing work of art still remains.

Learn more about Diane at dianestuckart.com. 

Maggie Toussaint heads to the academy

My early hands-on police research made me anxious and nervous, and at the Writer’s Police Academy, I discovered why. When a sniper walked into the room, everyone else got a hunted look in their eyes. The sharpshooter’s laser-focused energy extended beyond his physical body.

Bottom line: trust your intuition.

Learn more about Maggie at maggietoussaint.com.

Lois Winston learns to make a bang in her author research

In the late 1990’s I wrote Lost in Manhattan, a romantic suspense that involved an IRA bomb maker. Of course I knew nothing about making bombs and wanted to make sure I had my facts right about one particular scene. I started doing some research on the Internet and came across The Anarchist’s Cookbook. I emailed the author, explaining that I was an author and asked if my scene worked. He emailed me back with precise diagrams for building the bomb! Luckily, this was before 9/11, or I’d probably still be sitting in prison somewhere!

Learn more about Lois at www.loiswinston.com.

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