The Origins of The Mad Hatter’s Son, An Annie Collins Mystery

Copyright © 2018 Helen Starbuck, All rights reserved

The Idea for The Mad Hatter’s Son came to me years ago when I worked in the OR. We sporadically cared for a teenage girl for things like inserting a gastrostomy tube to feed her and a central line for IV fluids (back in the days when they did that in the OR). Her neurological symptoms were very puzzling and had increased over time until she was comatose. The ICU docs and the anesthesiologists talked about it a lot and were puzzled as to what had caused them. She had no tumor, nothing physical that they could identify for quite some time.

If I tell you what they discovered, you’ll know the plot to the book, so no spoilers here. Needless to say the diagnosis, when it came, shocked us all. I thought at the time that it was a great plot for a novel and actually wrote several chapters, then life got in the way and I shelved it. I found it again in 2015 and still liked it, so I began writing the story.

I started with the central cause for the plot, Libby’s illness, its baffling presentation, and the difficulty Annie has trying to figure out whether her illness was real or an attempt to get attention from those around her. Annie’s friendship with Libby, their estrangement, and Libby pulling Annie back into her life created another element of tension in the story. They are no longer close, there are hard feelings on both sides, and Annie is a very reluctant participant in Libby’s drama. It seemed key to have Annie be an OR nurse. She is off kilter with Libby because of their estrangement and uncomfortable with private duty nursing and investigating Libby’s problem. Neither is something Annie has any experience doing. She’s an OR nurse, that’s what she knows.

What’s funny to me is how characters and plot lines change. Originally I had assumed Angel would be a peripheral character, a neighbor, a friend, someone to bounce things off but not a major character. Ian is the love interest. Angel, however, morphed almost immediately into someone who was in love with Annie. Since meeting him four years previously when she moved into the other side of their duplex, she kept him at arms length because of his history with women and is unaware of the depth of his feeling for her. He has chosen to remain friends so he doesn’t lose her by pushing the issue of his feelings toward her. The tension between his concerns for Annie and Ian’s jealously about him helped fuel the plot. The villain turned out to be someone unexpected and Libby morphed into a less sympathetic character until her death.

In the next book, No Pity In Death, I explore Annie’s journey back to normality after a nearly successful attempt to kill her. One of my frustrations with literature, especially mysteries and thrillers, is that the hero or heroine can be seriously injured and pop back up almost immediately to save the day. I wanted Annie to be human and experience the PTSD that would accompany an experience like she had. As the series progresses, her relationship with Angel changes and their attempts to adjust to these changes and deal with each other’s failings are part of the plot.