Research Notes from the Desk of Lynda DuBois

A moody 1980s office scene with a metal desk, investigative files marked in red, and a woman standing by a fogged window, evoking Cold War investigation and suspense.

“The room felt smaller with every page turned.”

A moment from Wolf Coat, shaped by archives and memory.

Excerpt

The radiator in the small Vermont office hissed like a distant train, the sound threading through the quiet. Lisa Moreno stood by the window, watching the glass cloud with her breath. On the table, the file lay open—German names circled in red, dates underlined twice, questions carved into the margins. She had seen thousands of files, but this one felt different. This one carried the weight of something unfinished, something that had crossed oceans and decades to land on her desk.

When I write historical fiction, research is never just about facts. It’s about listening—closely—to what remains in the margins of history and memory.

For this scene, I spent hours reading Cold War–era case documents and intelligence reports. What struck me most wasn’t the official language, but the handwritten marks: names circled in red, dates underlined, questions scrawled in the margins. These weren’t neat or clinical annotations. They felt urgent, human—evidence of people trying to make sense of something that refused to stay contained. I wanted that urgency to live on the page, so the file itself becomes a character, heavy with pressure and uncertainty.

The room’s sound came from a different place—memory. I grew up in buildings where old radiators hissed and knocked through the night, a mechanical breathing that never quite stopped. That sound always made a room feel awake, watchful, as if the walls were listening. When I wrote this scene, I wanted the space to feel conscious of what was unfolding, as though the past itself had stepped into the room and sat down.

This is how history enters my fiction—not as dates and headlines, but as texture, pressure, and quiet moments that refuse to be forgotten.

In Wolf Coat, those quiet moments—files on a desk, breath on a window, a room that won’t sleep—become the places where the past finally catches up.

Lynda DuBois

Selected Research Materials:

• West German Federal Archives (BKA case files)

• U.S. Marshals Service historical reports

• Interpol Cold War cooperation memoranda