Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson here. The other day my friends over at the Word Wenches blog answered a reader question about where they got their characters’ names. A couple of days later, the same topic came up at Jungle Red. Baby books were a popular source. So were contemporary documents and family trees for historical novels. I’ve used both, but I realized, thinking about it, that a lot of my choices (inspirations?) came about in rather peculiar ways.

Take the name of my series character, Liss MacCrimmon. I needed a protagonist for cozy books with a Scottish theme. MacCrimmon was a no-brainer because I knew someone in Liss’s family would play the bagpipes and the MacCrimmons were a famous bagpiping family as far back as the sixteenth century. But Liss? Well, it’s short for Amaryllis, and Amaryllis is the little girl in The Music Man, the one that Winthrop, the little boy in that musical who lisps, struggles to pronounce. I was involved in a production of The Music Man in high school. Enough said.

Then there’s my pseudonym, the one I had to come up with to write the Liss MacCrimmon series. Kaitlyn was the name I always wished my parents had given me instead of Kathy Lynn (which IS my real name—it isn’t “short” for anything). I first heard the name Caitlin in college. That was the name of Dylan Thomas’s wife. And Dunnett? Again, I wanted something Scottish, and one of my favorite authors, especially since she wrote both historical fiction and mysteries, is the late Dorothy Dunnett. Her six-book Lymond Chronicles is unsurpassed as a fictional glimpse into the sixteenth century.

Mikki Lincoln, protagonist of the Deadly Edits series, has a lot of me in her, so I gave her the first name—Michelle—that my parents once considered giving me. Lincoln came from living on Lincoln Place when I was growing up, since it’s that house Mikki moves into in Crime & Punctuation.

With my historical novels, my choices weren’t quite so personal. Susanna, Lady Appleton is the sleuth in my Face Down Mysteries. I wanted a first name that was favored by followers of the New Religion. (If I’d wanted to make her a secret Catholic, she’d have had a saint’s name.) As for her surname, I had written an earlier historical novel that was supposed to be the start of a mystery series but ended up as a single title romance. The hero was named Allington, chosen because it was similar to Allingham and I was reading a lot of Marjorie Allingham’s mysteries at the time. Allington morphed into Appleton for Susanna.

Sometimes I mixed and matched names from my family tree: Julia Applebee, in the children’s book Julia’s Mending, mixes Julia Swarthout and Ella Applebee, my maternal great-grandmothers. Shalla (short for Mahershallahashbaz) in Shalla was the real name one of my seventeenth century ancestors gave his daughter.

Surnames can be tricky. There are a lot to avoid, from political and sports figures to people in entertainment fields. A name too closely associated with a real person can influence how readers view a character. So where did I take inspiration. Two places were the authors of reference books on my office shelves and placenames. There’s a Lady Dixfield in one of my romance novels, inspired by the fact that I live in the village of East Dixfield in the town of Wilton. I’ve used friends’ names, too. In one contemporary romance, I inserted all the last names of the members of my critique group. Three of them became a law firm my character noticed in passing.

Auctioning off a chance to name a character in a forthcoming book is popular to benefit charities. That’s where the owner of Moosetookalook, Maine’s bookstore—Angie Hogencamp—came from. My friend Patsy Asher bid against Angie and lost, so I used her first name for the owner of the local café. In thirteen books I don’t think I ever did give the fictional Patsy a last name. The second cat, Glenora, in my Liss MacCrimmon series was also named by an auction winner.

Speaking of cats, I usually just reuse the names of cats who’ve shared our home, but Lumpkin, for the first cat in the Liss MacCrimmon series, came from a family in one of Charlotte MacLeod’s humorous mysteries. I just liked the sound of it.

Just about wherever you find inspiration works, as long as the name fits the character and the historical period. For the Face Downs, I kept lists of names I found in my research. They were all accurate for the times, but not necessarily believable. I felt readers would probably accept a sixteenth century woman named Dowsabella or Euphemia, but that they would balk at Philadelphia.

Have you ever had a character’s name stop you cold because it just didn’t fit, or was too unlikely, or reminded you of someone you had strong feelings about?

Kathy Lynn Emerson/Kaitlyn Dunnett has had sixty-four books traditionally published and has self published others. She won the Agatha Award and was an Anthony and Macavity finalist for best mystery nonfiction of 2008 for How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries and was an Agatha Award finalist in 2015 in the best mystery short story category. In 2023 she won the Lea Wait Award for “excellence and achievement” from the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. She was the Malice Domestic Guest of Honor in 2014. She is currently working on creating new editions of her backlist titles. Her website is www.KathyLynnEmerson.com.