Readers often like to ask where an author’s inspiration for a story came from, and the answers vary widely from author to author, and even story to story. Sometimes it’s a place that inspires, or a scene in a play or movie. Sometimes it’s a song, or a dream, or a conversation with a friend or colleague. Writers are always searching for inspiration for their next story, and anything and everything becomes fodder for our imaginations. 

 

Often for me it starts as a question, a what-if scenario. How did the Celts feel about being conquered by the Romans? There are so many stories told from their-the victors’-viewpoint, what if I wrote a story from the Celts’ side.

 

Other times it’s a matter of trying to fit a character or scenario I’ve fallen in love with into a story. An American female, forced to spy for her country in England. Why, when and how would she do this?

 

However, in the case of my debut novel, The Anatomist’s Wife, my intention was more specific, and my inspiration grew from there. I had decided to try my hand at writing a historical mystery, and I knew I wanted my main protagonist to be female. I also knew that I wanted to set it sometime in the later eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries, so I needed to find a reason why my heroine would become involved with solving a murder. Women from those time periods, particularly those who were members of high society, as I’d decided Kiera would be, did not take part in murder investigations. In fact, men would have attempted to keep them sheltered and far from such unpleasantness. So, why would my heroine be allowed to take part? What skills or knowledge could she contribute to an inquiry?

 

First off, I knew I wanted her to have some artistic talent, and being a portrait artist seemed ideal. Her observation skills of people would be acute, and she would be able to detect even the slightest changes in their expressions. However, I did not think that was enough. So I pondered how a female of that era could obtain any medical knowledge. A gently-reared female might help her father if he was a country physician, but she would certainly not have had experience with autopsy or violent death. I decided I needed her to have a connection with a surgeon, particularly an anatomist. But once again I ran into the problem of why she would be allowed anywhere near a corpse being dissected. 

 

And that’s when I stumbled upon the idea for the anatomist to be working on a definitive anatomy reference book, similar to the popular Gray’s Anatomy. This anatomist would need an illustrator, and I decided his character would be vain and miserly enough that he would wish to keep the credit to himself and avoid paying for the work—and thus, Sir Anthony Darby was born, and his wife, my heroine, Kiera, Lady Darby, was given a plausible way for her to acquire the knowledge I wanted her to have, albeit in an unpleasant manner. 

 

Once I knew that anatomy was going to play heavily in my story, I decided to set the novel in 1830, in the midst of the public fear and outrage following the arrest of Burke and Hare, grave-robbers turned murderers, in late 1828, and before the Anatomy Act of 1832 was passed to alleviate some of the problems that had encouraged the trade of body-snatching in the first place. I decided this public hysteria would play into Kiera’s ostracism from society, giving her a reason to hide herself away in the northern Highlands. So when her sister decides to throw a house party to reintroduce her, and one of the guests is found murdered, their location far from polite civilization forces Kiera’s brother-in-law to ask for her assistance, despite the fact that she’s seen by many as the prime suspect because of her unsavory past. 

 

Once I had my scenario and some of Kiera’s back story, everything else started to fall into place. Until I hit the middle… But that’s a blog for later this week.