St. Louis has been a stopover on the journeys of many members of the Pierce family and of Hannah True. They caught steamboats going west or trains going east, but St. Louis was never their destination, the place where the story happened, until Book 4 of Hannah’s adventures.

In Book 4, now a rough draft in progress, Hannah joins the Hollandar Detective Agency and goes on her first official case. She is joined by agency owners, Vance Hollandar and his mother Victoria Nelson. Additional new investigators are Benita Walton and Aaron Jackson. The owner of an upscale St. Louis hotel has hired Vance to investigate a series of thefts that have been carried out over several weeks. Because Vance and his team arrive undercover, and because I had read and seen so many buildings with so-called false fronts in old western towns, I decided a perfect name for the novel would be False Fronts. I even envisioned a book cover with that image.

One Big Problem

Buildings with false fronts were a few hundred miles west and half a dozen or more years later than the St. Louis setting of my story. So now I am working on a new title and cover and researching to find out what more I need to know before I make a decision. A recent Emporia Rec Center tour allowed me to visit the city and its museums. The trip gave me a start toward building the crime scenes and the backstory of the characters involved in committing those crimes while also searching for a fitting title.

1849 Was a Bad Year for St. Louis

In 1849, the population of St. Louis was about 63,000. On May 17, fire destroyed the waterfront business district. In the summer of 1849, a cholera outbreak killed approximately 4,500 St. Louis residents. Main characters in my novel lost family members in these two events, and those losses shaped their lives.

Within a year of the fire, new buildings made of brick, some five stories high, were built to replace what was destroyed. By January 1861, the year my novel takes place, St. Louis had a population of nearly 161,000. Brick buildings, not the false fronts of frontier towns that I had imagined, lined the streets.

What’s Next?

As I explore the setting for my now unnamed novel, I’ll be researching the caves beneath St. Louis and the nefarious things that might happen in them. Maybe I’ll find a title buried there.