Tangle Glen is not a real place in Toledo, Ohio. However, anyone who is familiar with the city will recognize it as looking very similar to Wildwood Manor. Once a mansion owned by the Secor family, it’s now one of the city’s most popular parks. However, it doesn’t sit anywhere near the Maumee River. Instead, that inspiration came from the Linck Inn building on River Road by the river—it has a smuggling tunnel used by bootleggers in the 1920s and ’30s.
Like Tangle Glen, neither Ma Yaklin and her gang, the Jacks, nor Two Thumbs Lundquist and the Digits Gang were real either. However, their rivalry was based on two real Toledo gangsters: Jack Kennedy and Yonnie Licavoli. Much like Tangle Glen, Licavoli’s house had a hidden room in the basement. Though he used it to hide himself from the police, rather than his smuggling from rival gangsters.
Bloodhounds really are super sniffers, but it’s best to keep them away from peonies. The flowers are fine for sniffing but will make them sick if eaten. And with dogs, you just never know what they’ll try to eat. (My sister once had a dog who ate printer cartridges, just like Bunny the librarian dog early in the book. Meiko was fine. But it was still a weird and upsetting thing to do.)
Anyone who was in the University of Toledo’s English department in the early part of this century will recognize many of the last names in this book. I stole those names shamelessly from my professors. Except for Ma Yaklin, who is named after my longtime friend, Sara Yaklin.
Eli is named after Eli Bishko of Eugene, Oregon, for placing the winning bid to name a character in my next book during the Kidlit Against Anti-AAPI Racism Fundraiser.
Finally, the characters of Kuneman and Baker were supposed to be throwaway characters that I added in to make my friends Lindsay Kuneman and Jillian Baker laugh. Sometimes people ask me how I name my characters, and there’s the answer: I steal them from anyone I can!