Michael Graves wanted to honor a man he barely knew, so he made up a book about him.
“To Leave a Shadow,” the winter book selection for Iola Reads, tells the story of private investigator Pete Stone. In what is now a three-book series, Graves tells the stories of a classic gumshoe detective, with his snarky sense of humor and problem solving skills in the 1930s in Wichita.
Graves, who now lives in Emporia, based the character off of his grandfather, a man he’d visit in Kansas every summer while he was growing up.
“My memories are crystal clear. They just aren’t accurate,” Graves told a small crowd of Iola readers Thursday evening at the Creitz Recital Hall.
He recalled telling stories of his youth to his brother, who promptly replied, “That didn’t happen.”
And since he never knew his grandfather well, he never had a chance to have “one of those conversations I wish I’d had.”
“As you get a little older, you reach a certain point you want to talk really seriously with your parents and grandparents to learn who they were,” he said.
His father passed down one story, though, of his grandfather’s final words regarding his grandchildren: “Tell the boys not to forget me.”
But with so little to remember, Graves decided to honor his grandfather in another way, by inventing stories about him.
He took his grandfather’s name, Pete Graves, and converted the last name to “gravestone,” eventually giving him “Pete Stone.”
Pete Graves was no detective, so his grandson took the rest of his inspiration from a lifelong love of hard-boiled detective novels and film noir movies.
“I decided to write a mystery story and I had two goals: Tell the best lies I could and don’t bore the reader.”
THE KEY element in Graves’ books is his exhaustive research into Wichita in the 1930s.
Graves poured over microfilm, reading newspaper stories from the time to give him specific insight into life during that era. He paid special attention to baseball stories, recounting details of the actual games into his novels.
He and his wife explored downtown Wichita and became frequent visitors at the Sedgwick County Historical Society Museum, where he found inspiration for such things as what type of car Pete Stone drove and which coffee shop he would frequent. Inspiration for characters was taken from those places and stories he’s heard along the way.
“A lot of what I was doing was just serendipity,” he said.
