I was inspired to write The World-Famous Nine because I thought it would be fun to set a story in a type of enormous, elegant, and old-fashioned building that was once very common: a department store. When I was young, I used to love visiting two beautiful department stores (Frederick & Nelson and The Bon Marché were their names) in my hometown of Seattle. There always seemed to be so much exciting activity inside those two huge stores! Plus, I’ve always loved big buildings. Not ones filled with offices or machines, but ones that have plenty of interesting—maybe even mysterious—places or things in them. Vast hotels, endless mansions, winding palaces, sprawling museums—those are the sorts of buildings I like, because something unexpected might be found behind each door or around any corner. A department store began to feel like the perfect setting for a story, and I found myself imagining a gigantic department store with a very old secret—a curse—that threatened it. It would be run by a woman named Zina Winebee, I decided, and the story would take place when her grandson, Zander Olinga, is visiting for the summer. The novel developed from those starting points, but the inspiration was the setting itself, and that came from pleasant memories I have of those two grand stores I visited many years ago.

One of the most enjoyable parts about working on The World-Famous Nine was the research I did to learn about department stores, particularly ones in the United States. I found an amazing web site that documented the history of hundreds of department stores (most of which shut down years ago), and it was fascinating to read about how huge and lavish many of these places were. Some of these stores—such as Hudson’s in Detroit or Marshall Field’s in Chicago or Gimbel’s in New York—were basically palaces of commerce and goods, offering just about anything a person might need, from food and clothing to appliances and furniture. They were also grand destinations, places where people went to spend hours just looking around even if they weren’t doing any actual shopping; families would sometimes dress up for daylong visits, and most of the stores had restaurants and entertainment to keep people occupied. I learned a lot about these old stores by studying the information available online, and it was a real pleasure to read about these places from a bygone time.