Growing up in the Soviet era, in a family of space engineers, meant imagination was part of my everyday life, though not always in the way people might expect. Our home was filled with books and magazines about space exploration, stories about black holes, and even a wall-sized map of our galaxy with the names of stars and planets marked across it. My parentsโ world was a world of science, discovery, and the mysteries of the universe. Perhaps that is where my own love of mystery began, but my imagination did not travel only to the stars. It often turned toward old manors, hidden rooms, secret diaries, and questions no one could answer.
Because my parents worked long hours, sometimes late into the night and occasionally during night shifts, my days at daycare often stretched into the evening. By 6:00 PM, most children had already been picked up. Only a few of us remained. The usual structure of the day had softened by then. We were no longer following the regular routine of lessons and activities. Our caregivers were still nearby, watching over us, but we were largely left to entertain ourselves.
That was when I began telling stories.
At first, they were fairy tales, inspired by the books my parents read to me – tales of Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, and the Snow Queen. They were filled with enchanted castles, clever characters, and secrets hidden behind locked doors. As I grew older, those childhood tales slowly changed. They became mysteries.
I remember standing in a large playroom at my daycare in St. Petersburg. The room had windows that nearly reached the ceiling. There were three of us looking out into the winter darkness. Outside, a streetlamp cast a soft glow over a tall pine tree, its branches sparkling with snow like silver glitter. Farther away, another tree stood deep in shadow.
I could not tell what was lying on the ground near that distant tree, but my imagination immediately created a story. In my mind, it became a small child wrapped in a blanket, left there to be found. A note was tucked inside with the childโs name written in perfect, slanted handwriting.
Many years later, that image returned to me when I was writing Murder at Haddonford Manor, the first book in the Charlotte Reinford mysteries. In the novel, Charlotte is left as a child on the steps of St. Helenโs. I did not realize, at first, how deeply that old childhood image had remained with me. But when Charlotteโs story began to take shape, there it was again: the abandoned child, the mystery of her past, and the question of who had left her behind.
That was not the only childhood story that found its way into my books.
When I was young, we lived too far from school for me to walk, and I was not old enough to take public transportation by myself. My parents dropped me off in the morning, and I stayed in the after-school program until one of them picked me up, often late in the evening. After the homework was finished, we played outside. Once again, my friends would gather around me, and I would tell them the stories I invented. One of those childhood mysteries used Charles Perraultโs Bluebeard as an important clue. Many years later, that idea returned to me and became part of my second Charlotte Reinford mystery, which will be available to readers soon.
My desire to write stayed with me through high school and into my university years. Without a computer, I filled notebooks by hand. After graduation, I bought myself a typewriter as a gift. I was thrilled to begin using it. To me, it felt like a real writerโs tool. Each day, I typed a few pages of the novel I was writing, then waited for my mother to come home from work so I could read them to her.
The main character in that novel was named Charlotte Reinford.
I was twenty-one years old.
At that time, I was hoping to finish the book and publish it. But life had other plans. I moved to the United States and spent the next twenty years working in educationโas a middle school teacher, district instructional coach, high school assistant principal, and college professor. I always thought I would return to writing one day, yet time was difficult to find. I was working, raising my children as a single mother, and completing my Ed.S. and Ph.D. coursework.
There was another challenge too, one I had not expected. After living in the United States for many years, I could no longer write in Russian the way I once had. At the same time, I did not yet feel ready to write a mystery novel in English. I felt caught between two languages. Russian had shaped my childhood imagination, my fairy tales, and my earliest mysteries. English had become the language of my daily life, my work, my studies, and my future. For a long time, I did not know where my writing belonged.
When I was invited to join the Louisville Writing Project, I eagerly accepted. I wanted to become a stronger writer and also a better teacher of writing for my students. That experience helped me come back to what I loved doing. It reminded me that writing does not always disappear. Sometimes it waits patiently until we are ready to return to it.
Years later, during one of her visits to America, my mother brought me a gift: the old draft of the novel I had begun on my typewriter. The pages were thin and yellowed with age, delicate as dry leaves. I was afraid they might crumble in my hands.
I read the first several pages, and the scene on those pages became the beginning of Murder at Haddonford Manor: Charlotte Reinford arriving at the manor, unaware that the house would change her life forever.
In many ways, Charlotte had been with me since the quiet evenings of my childhood in St. Petersburg, when I looked out at the snow from the tall windows of my daycare. She grew from the mysteries I shared with friends after school, from a typewriter I bought with my dream of becoming an author, and from the fragile pages my mother carried across the ocean.
Irina McGrath, Ph.D., was born in St. Petersburg, Russia and immigrated to the United States nearly three decades ago. Since then, she has worked in various educational roles within a public school district and higher education institutions. Alongside her educational career, Irina has developed a deep passion for writing. Her novel,ย Murder at Haddonford Manor, is the first in the “Charlotte Reinford Mysteries” series. As a writer, Irina brings a distinctive voice to her cozy murder mysteries drawing on her diverse experiences and rich cultural background to create narratives that captivate readers’ attention.
