I love research. I can’t resist going down an Internet rabbit hole to find contemporaneous accounts of a particular event — like NYC Mayor Gaynor’s funeral in 1913. How crazy is it that there was an attempted assassination on his life in 1910, and then he died three years later from the bullet, which was lodged in his throat. Here’s a picture of him immediately after he was shot!

And few things are as delightful as reading books from the past, such as Washington Irving’s 1832 A Tour on the Prairies: Thirty Days in Deep Indian Company and coming across sentences like this: “The rear-guard remained under the trees in the lower part of the dell, some on horseback, with their rifles on their shoulders; others seated by the fire or lying on the ground, gossiping in a low, lazy tone of voice, their horses unsaddled, standing and dozing around, while one of the rangers, profiting by this interval of leisure, was shaving himself before a pocket mirror stuck against the trunk of a tree.” So visual, so lyrical.

I also devour contemporary books about the past like this book I found in a Wyoming bookstore: Upstairs Girls: Prostitution in the American West by Michael Rutter. The book contains a wealth of information on everything from madams with hearts of gold and knuckles of brass to Asian “girl slaves” and the working girls who followed miners from town to town. This wasn’t the most pleasant trip to the past, but it was interesting.

While Internet and book research are incredibly valuable, there’s nothing quite like being in the place where your characters would have actually been and exploring their world. My experiential research has entailed many visits to New York including one time when my husband, Joe, and I stayed in a Harlem Airbnb with a shared bathroom on the second floor. That house became the blueprint for the townhouse where my character Louisa Delafield lives.

My second book spurred me to revisit my old stomping grounds of St. Augustine to learn about Lincolnville, which was founded in 1866 by former slaves and to spend hours in the historical research library, located in a building built in the 1770s.

The Butterfly Cage, the latest installment of the Delafield & Malloy Investigations inspired a trip to Wyoming — a place I had never been to before. Joe and I flew to Denver, rented a car and then went up through Fort Collins, Colorado to Casper, Wyoming over to Douglas, Wyoming to visit the Interactive Railroad Museum…

…and then on to Cody where we spent an afternoon traipsing through the Buffalo Bill Center of the West Museum and a night at the Irma Hotel, established in 1902 by Buffalo Bill himself and named after his youngest daughter. The next day we went to the Old Trail Town, a collection of old buildings from the early days of the west.

The buildings contained furniture and objects from the era as well as pictures and stories of famous Cody residents, including Cassie Waters, the highly respected town madam!

It was in search of Cassie Waters where the magic happened. At first she was just a name I had read somewhere in association with a brothel in Cody. But she grew as a character in my book. And eventually she gave a gun to Louisa. What kind of gun would she give her, I wondered. So I researched small guns (which would fit in a purse) of the time period  on the Internet but nothing seemed right.

It just so happens that the Center of the West has a whole museum devoted to guns. So I scoured the museum for small guns and found quite a few derringers and pistols and then just about when we were done scoping out the place, what did I come upon but Cassie Waters’ very own gun!!

“Joe!” I called out. “It’s her gun!” I’m sure everyone in the place thought I was crazy.

And what a beauty it is: gold plated with a pearl handle, inscribed to Cassie Waters: “Every Inch a Lady”.