Iowa author’s historical mystery series a dream come true

Clara McKenna has been writing her entire life, starting with personalized greeting cards for family and friends from the time she was old enough to form letters.

“I would write my own little message” inside the handmade cards, says McKenna, 55, who grew up in central New York but has lived in Iowa since 2001.

Her love of writing took off from there, as she started to pen short stories and later on, poetry.

By the time “Murder, She Wrote” had begun airing in the 1980s, she dreamed of becoming a version of Angela Lansbury’s character, Jessica Fletcher.

In the TV series, Fletcher is a writer who solves killings every week in her small town -- which has a bit of a crime problem based on the show’s homicide rate. McKenna says she told her family that she “wanted to be like Jessica Fletcher,” but after her dad jokingly pointed out the character’s penchant for attracting homicides, she amended her vision: “I want to be Jessica Fletcher without all the murder.”

In a way, McKenna has succeeded in that goal through her creation of the Stella and Lyndy mystery series. While the characters encounter plenty of murder throughout the seven books published so far, it’s all of the fictional variety – not some kind of crime wave following McKenna around, Jessica Fletcher-style.

The research that goes into the books, however, is very real for McKenna. The series is set in the early 1900s, with most of the action taking place in the United Kingdom. That has meant a lot of traveling and studying for McKenna, who lives near Ames – far from the British Isles that Stella and Lyndy inhabit.

“I’ve been enamored with all things British since I was a kid,” she explains.

She first mentioned wanting to go to England when she was 10, and her mom told her she needed to save up the money for a trip. By the time she was 17, McKenna had saved enough money to travel to the United Kingdom for the first time.

Even though she had read and studied a lot about life across the pond, she still found it to be an eye-opening experience.

“It was really different than what I expected,” she says.

She loved it, but had the sensation of being a “fish out of water.” That feeling – of being an American trying to adapt to life in the UK – eventually led to the creation of Stella.

In the series, Stella is a wealthy American who is forced into an arranged marriage with a member of the British aristocracy (Lord Lyndhurst, or Lyndy). This was a real phenomenon at the time, in which British aristocrats sought to shore up declining financial fortunes through marriage into wealthy American families.

As McKenna writes in the author’s note for the first Stella and Lyndy book, “Murder at Morrington Hall”: “Between 1869 and 1911, more than a hundred American heiresses or ‘Million Dollar Princesses’ crossed the Atlantic and married into the highest levels of British society.”

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Because of this, Stella is the one dealing with the challenges of adapting to a new culture throughout most of the series. But in the latest book, “Murder at Cottonwood Creek,” the roles are reversed as the action moves to a fossil dig site in Montana.

McKenna says she was eager to “turn the tables” on Lyndy by making him the one who feels out of place in a foreign land.

As for placing the characters in Montana specifically, McKenna says she didn’t have any tie to the vast Western state, and hadn’t spent much time there before starting “Cottonwood Creek.”

“It just made sense for the series,” she says.

But after spending three weeks in the state doing research for the book, she now feels a deep connection to Big Sky Country.

“Montana was amazing, and I want to go back,” she says.“… I didn’t realize how fantastic it was going to be.”

While the settings for her books are far removed from her real life living in a Victorian farmhouse near Ames, her real-world background in biology and science is on full display in the series.

“Cottonwood Creek” includes a wealth of details about the science of paleontology, including information about the techniques and tools used at dig sites in the early 1900s. There also is plenty of detail about horses and early 20th-century ranching.

It makes sense given McKenna’s background as both a large-mammal biologist and an academic librarian. After earning a bachelor’s degree in biology and a master’s in library science, she worked for a time at Iowa State University with the Iowa Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit.

“It was a great job,” she says, noting that it was her first job upon moving to the state, and she got to travel to different Iowa Department of Natural Resources research stations to collect historical data on fish populations.

“I really got to experience and get to know Iowa in a really quick, fun way,” McKenna says.

Now that she writes full time, her trips around the state are more focused on bookstores than fish. She tries to visit Swamp Fox Bookstore in Marion every year, and is planning to be there to meet with readers at 1 p.m. Jan. 11.

“I really enjoy going back” to Swamp Fox, she says. “I like to support independent bookstores.”

And, she noted, she brings cookies. The sugar cookies are cut into the shapes of two major elements of the “Cottonwood Creek” book: horses and bones.

As for Stella and Lyndy, the sleuthing pair are headed back to England for the next book in the series, which McKenna turned in on Dec. 15. She expects “Murder at Pellhurst Pond” to be released sometime in fall 2026.

And as the new year gets into full swing, McKenna will be hard at work plotting the duo’s next adventure. Or more accurately, writing down a story that has long been percolating in her mind.

“I’ve been planning this book for years,” she says.