Kathleen Kaska writes three awarding-winning mystery series: the Sydney Lockhart Mystery Series, the Kate Caraway Animal-Rights Mystery Series, and the Classic Triviography Mystery Series. She also teaches writing and coaches new writers. Her blog, “Growing Up Catholic in a Small Texas Town,” can be found on her website, along with more about her and her books.
What Came First, the Stories or the Hotels?
My husband and I love to take road trips, the kind where we avoid interstate highways and stick to the back roads. We take our time, stopping along the way to enjoy the scenery and the surprises we encounter. When it’s time to find a bed for the night, we search for historic hotels, inns, or lodges. If we like the place, we put them on our return list, and they become our travel homes. When we check in, we always stay in the same room, which makes the hotel feel more like home.
So, it was only natural that I would come to set my mysteries in historic hotels. These old places have their own stories to tell, and as you may suspect, become characters in their own right.
But what came first? My idea to write a historical mystery set in 1952, or the hotels themselves? Sydney and I disagree on the answer.
I remember the first time I saw the Arlington Hotel. We were passing through Hot Springs, Arkansas, on our way north. Driving down Bathhouse Row on Central Avenue, the Arlington loomed majestically before us. I refused to go any further without checking this place out. Walking up the sprawling stairs, I was overcome with a feeling of having been there before, perhaps in another life. Stepping into the lobby felt like stepping back to the 1940s, and the déjà vu took my breath away. We spent a good hour touring the hotel: the lounge, the Venetian Room restaurant, the Fountain Room restaurant, the hot spring spa on the third floor, and the outdoor hot tub built into the hillside. We didn’t stay, but we selected a room on the top floor and made reservations for a four-night stay during Thanksgiving. After that, we returned every year and booked month-long stays once I retired.
I like to say that my idea for protagonist, Sydney Lockhart, was born there. She claims she’d been there for years waiting for me to show up and tell her story, a story which began in 1952 when she was 29 years old. If that’s true, her wait wasn’t a pleasant one. As I was unpacking, Sydney walked out of the bathroom, complaining that there was a dead body in her room in her bathtub. Its throat had been slit.
Rather than running shrieking down the hall in fear, we argued about whose room and bathroom it was. She won the argument by allowing me to stay if I would document the murder. I agreed, and we became friends. And what do friends do? They share their likes, dislikes, and experiences. She was excited to learn that I loved to travel, so she came with me when we checked out. But as it turned out, I had more fun than she did.
On the next trip, I took her to the Luther Hotel in the small coastal town of Palacios, Texas. While I was off enjoying a plate of shrimp fajitas, she went to a New Year’s Eve dance with a man staying at the hotel. Before the clock struck midnight, he was dead, murdered, and she was in jail.
A few months later, I was sitting in the hot tub of the glorious 100-plus-year-old Galvez Hotel in Galveston, Texas, when she came running up to the spa, grabbed my martini, and dumped it into the water. “How can you sit there luxuriating when there’s a dead guy in the trunk of my car? Jees!” she said. “Will I ever get to enjoy a trip without encountering a dead body?”
I raised my hand to summon the waiter. I ordered another drink and said, “Nope.”
Then it was a murder at the Driskill Hotel in Austin, followed by another at the Menger Hotel in San Antonio. After that one, she told me that maybe the next time, it would be safer to stay at a Best Western. I asked her if she really wanted to do that. She said, “Hell no. I’m having way too much fun.”
“Mardi Gras’s coming up. How about a trip to New Orleans?” I said. She smiled, and I booked us a room at the Pontchartrain Hotel.
If you know of a historic hotel, let me know. I’ve accumulated a long list.
A Sydney Lockhart Mystery Series, Book 5
Austin, Texas PI Sydney Lockhart is on the trail of Johnny Pine, a notorious bookie, who has absconded with a client’s payout from a horse race. Pine checks into the Menger Hotel in San Antonio with New Orleans jazz singer Nora Jasper. The next morning Sydney discovers Pine murdered in his bed, and Nora points the guilty finger at Sydney. The situation goes from bad to worse when Sydney is attacked and thrown into the river downtown. Luckily, a passerby rescues her, but her memory before her arrival in San Antonio is gone: no recollection of her partner Dixon, or cousin Ruth, Sydney’s sidekick. With a battered body and faulty memory, Sydney hooks up with an Irish cab driver named Taco and a music-hall bouncer named Rip in an attempt to stay alive and find the killer.
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