The Story Behind The Story
The idea for Murder Down The Line began to germinate with me after a stay at a small Texas town’s B&B to celebrate my wife’s birthday. We chose a place with a lot of history that neither one of us had visited. As we sat around the breakfast table having coffee with our host, he regaled us with tales of summer mansions built in the early 20th century by bankers, businessmen, and oil and cattle barons. His gift for storytelling painted a vivid picture of the town in its hey-day. My wife and I walked away that morning with ideas flying between us.
As we made our way around the town we viewed many of the mansions built in the town’s boom period. The perfection of the town as a book setting began to gel within me. I didn’t know exactly when I would use the setting, but I knew I would.
“Small towns can have big secrets.” Steve Smiley didn’t grow up in a small town, but many of you, like my wife and I, did. Most of those towns, like Mattherson, were run by two or three very influential families, generation after generation. The founding families of Mattherson are fictional versions of families I have known personally or were influenced by our B&B host’s stories.
There was one character I chose to model after someone I knew well. I drew Rodney Wells out of my own family history. My dad, Ross, like Rodney, was an officer in the Army Air Corps. After high school graduation, my dad enrolled in a local college. The rumbling of World War II began and he decided he wanted to join the newly-formed Army Air Corps. (At that time, there was no Air Force branch of the U.S. military service.) To increase his chances of being chosen, he got a job at a local air field, applied for the Air Corps and then waited until he was called. He attended Officers Candidate School (OCS) and became a bomber pilot serving in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations. Thankfully, unlike my character Rodney, my dad lived through the war and returned home to my mom. A photo of the twenty-year-old version of my dad hangs in a glass display case in our home, surrounded by the medals Rodney never had the chance to earn.
Starting with tiny seeds planted on that weekend retreat, and my own life experiences, I wanted to explore, in story form, the question of generational influences on people today. My mind went to a passage from the Bible, Exodus 34:7. The second part of the verse speaks of the sins of the fathers visiting their offspring to the third and fourth generation. Thus came the idea of a cold case, an unsolved murder that happened during World War II. How could this long-forgotten killing influence a modern-day family? This was one of many times in the writing process where I took the bit out of the mouth of my imagination and allowed it to run free. I envisioned three families who were once good friends and trusted business partners until…
You’ve read the story, so you know the rest.
Thanks for coming along as Steve and Heather unraveled their latest case. Stay tuned for the next one!