Having decided to write a mystery, during the spring of 2015 I mulled plots, starting points, endings, and what to include in between, but I made no progress. In an effort to understand the genre and break the logjam in my mind, I began reading as many mysteries as I could. I began with Steven Saylor’s Roma Sub Rosa historical novels, featuring a toga-clad detective, whose books were popular with Sterling, our son. I expanded to P.D. James, Agatha Christie, and Louise Penny before settling on a long run of books by Donna Leon, who police procedurals are set in atmospheric Venice. It was good stuff, but it wasn’t helping me much figure out how to get started. Finally, I took a plunge one afternoon and made a rapid, stream-of-conscious list of story elements:

“Private lands, grazing permits, big rivers, small towns, wildfire, wildlife, endangered species, anti-grazing activists, the Farm Bureau, organic farms, quarries, medical clinics, watershed groups, Boy Scouts, real estate agents, off-roaders, fly fishing, beaver dams, hunters, elk, wilderness, cheap food, local restaurants, pesticides, Big Ag, oil and gas, mining, forests, county commissioners, nonprofits, regulators, water quality and quantity, a leaky dam, lawsuits, showboating politicians, Red vs. Blue, rural vs. urban, water rights, acequias, land grants, land grabs, tribal rights, ghosts, windmills, storms, headcut gullies, riparian restoration, drought, dropping water tables, poisoned predators, cattle getting shot, spiked trees, shoot-shovel-and-shut-up, subdivisions, wildcatters, hikers, tourists, a B&B, a fancy lodge, grassfed beef, raptors, horses, flat hats, kerchiefs, snowbirds, hippies, pot farms, meth labs, wet meadows, a historic flood, a historic graveyard, pioneer families, museums, a haunted hotel, hot tubs, electric fencing, herders, illegal help, immigration services, lookout towers, writers, a jug band, hoedowns, barns, young agrarians, mentors, apprentices, home cooking, heritage orchards, failed bean fields, empty houses, wine collections, archaeological sites, deep canyons, sedges and rushes, fracking, title disputes, old mills, second homes, Safe Harbors, snakes, owls, cats, wilderness warriors, the Rainbow Family, red and green chile, traditional villages, foreign visitors, scientists, range experts, a mobile slaughterhouse, blood and guts, sheep, coyotes, vacation rentals, wi-fi, artisan cheese, dairy cows, a movie set, documentaries, a sheriff, Smokey the Bear, academics, graduate students, a local college, big geology, lakes, backcountry hikes, environmental art, performance artists, forbs, low-stress livestock management, GPS, hay, homemade beer, jeep tours, medicine wheels, fake shamans, vortexes, golf courses, industrial fertilizer, CSAs, CAFOs, feedlots, free-range chickens, banjos, bureaucrats, annual conferences, the radical center, roping tricks, rawhide, abandoned mines, pickup trucks, widowers, toxic spills, sweet spots, marsh gas, solar power, wind turbines, leaky pipes, grass lawns, wild turkeys, buried treasure, lost mission bells, adobe walls, bullet casings, utopian communities, box stores, county courthouses, historical reenactors, public hearings, NEPA, ESA, BLM, red tape, overgrazing, trespass cattle, brands, reporters, television crews, good coffee, bad laws, dust, climate change, big profits, angry bears, rare birds, migrations, pancakes, double-wides, Sunday mass, far horizons, silence, warm-season grasses, springs, teepee rings, isolated cabins, line shacks, wild mustangs, bankruptcy courts, wild bees, local bars, desperados, Hot Shot crews, tree-cutters, fence-sitters, backhoes, poop-and-stomps, opera halls, annual festivals, backyard gardens, mud holes, guns, militia, butterflies, flow charts, Friday night football, taxes, jeans, cowboy hats, more drought, dirty snow, round-ups, resorts, airplanes, and the wide open range.”

The first thing I did after writing the list was pour a cup of coffee. I needed the extra caffeine. After settling into my chair again, I reviewed the long list and decided there wasn’t one book here, but many. That wasn’t a stretch – after all, aren’t most mysteries part of a series? What would I call mine? Two thoughts came to mind: Quivira County (or Country); and The Sun Ranch, the name I had assigned the property. I knew the actual location of both – the Cimarron country in northern New Mexico. There was a big ranch up there I knew pretty well that could serve as a model for The Sun, though its historical trajectories would be different. Having a geography in mind helped hugely in sorting out the arc of the stories – or at least grounding the first story in the series. I could see the ranch, the roads, the town, the mountains, the grasslands, the river, on and on. The next step was easy – call the series the Sun Ranch Saga.

Except I didn’t know what a saga was exactly. I looked it up (in a dictionary that my father gave me in 1974 that I treasure) reading this: saga (n) – a prose narrative recorded in Iceland in the 12^th and 13^th centuries of historic or legendary figures and events of the heroic age. Ok, not really applicable. There was another definition: a long detailed account, such as the saga of the winning of the West. That was more like it! A different dictionary provided a list of synonyms: epic, chronicle, legend, folk tale, romance, history, adventure, myth, story. I like all of them. It gave the series a feeling of heft, I thought, and I couldn’t resist imagining a small group of people telling the story around a campfire. I checked one more source. Saga: a form of novel in which a family or social group are chronicled in a long and leisurely narrative; a dramatic history of a place or people; a very long story. I liked all these definitions too. I had a place – The Sun Ranch – and a hero and a ton of possibilities for drama, minus the 12^th century violence, and a long time frame, or at least a long sequence of books. A saga indeed!

The last thing I did that afternoon in May, 2015, was to sketch out the plots and overall trajectory of each book in the series. In the first book, the murder is resolved (though I didn’t know how yet) and our hero decides to keep the ranch – or else no saga. In the next book, someone shoots her cattle and then commits suicide (based on a true story). There are other threats as well, which destabilize her effort to keep The Sun, with cascading implications for the entire community. In the third book, a lone wolf appears – and a wildlife photographer disappears (or maybe a biologist). Someone is poisoning fish in the river and coyotes are being shot – you know, the usual! Fire and flood dominate the next book, and maybe drought. A body is discovered. A dam bursts. In the next book the healing begins. At the heart of the saga was the ranch – The Sun. I’d start there and build outward, one book at a time. But I had to get my hero to New Mexico first. That proved harder than I expected. In fact, it took two full years before I could even try.