For most of my decade-plus career as a published mystery novelist, I’ve worked in what I call my “accidental office,” a converted breakfast nook that sits off the kitchen in our 1930 house in Columbus, Ohio.
I was in one of my favorite places – the Central Library in downtown Los Angeles – when I first learned about the murder of Cecil Wells in Fairbanks, Alaska in 1953. Flicking through the newspaper archives, I read that the prime suspect in the case, Cecil’s wife Diane, took her life in a Hollywood hotel a month before the trial.