I happened to come across an article in The South China Morning Post (global media yeah) titled “Huge explosion in online romance scams in Hong Kong in 2018.”

If you’ve read my online serial novel The French Emerald, keep going.

If you haven’t, this might spoil things for you, so if you are at all fond of #chicklit or light readin’ fiction in general, click here to read the novel first (it won’t take long, it’s really more of a novella) then come back :)

Okay, you’ve read the novel, now a bit of background: I became fascinated by con men around the time I wrote Free Money.  It started through research I did at the time about a couple armored truck heists that were pulled off in Rochester in the 80s. That led me to a book titled The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man (which I recently learned was the inspiration for the movie The Sting). And The Big Con got me thinking about online romance scams …

It’s funny how novels get started. The French Emerald was a relatively easy novel for me to write, partly because my mind just figured out quickly who the characters were and where they were going, but partly because the plot was a mashup of two things.

Ingredient number one: a legend that Charles the 10th had hidden under an assumed name (Louis Anathe Muller) in a “castle” (really a big cabin–but 12 inch thick, solid cherry walls, oh my) in Madison County in central New York State.

I discovered this tale when I picked up a 1965 collection of stories titled Oxcarts Along the Chenango by Ray Gallinger .

Here is a great little piece on Muller. A bit more factually accurate than the Gallinger version ;)

Ingredient #2 was the idea of romance scams.

As countless writers have shown, you can unreel a nice plot by bringing a con man together with a mark. Add to that a real-life historical mystery and you’ve got yourself plenty of twists to throw at a handful of characters.

And that’s all I have to say about that. For now. But I plan to visit the Muller site next summer. I’ll bring back pics :)