When I set out to write a book, I have a very general idea of where I expect the story to go, but most of the details pop up along the way while I write and research. For FAHRENHEIT 501, Samantha Kidd’s 12th mystery, I had only the very general idea that the book would be about jeans.
As a person who went thirteen years without owning a pair of jeans, I had a lot of research to do! But the denim research was only aspect of the research for this book. Here are five things you wouldn’t know if I didn’t tell you:
1. Jameson Lestes is loosely based on Italian actor Stefano Macioloni. I wanted a mental image of Dante’s son, and I pictured a redhead with brown eyes. So, I cued up an image search with the keywords “cute redhead male brown eyes” (you get what you ask for!) and as soon as I saw Stefano’s picture, I was smitten.
2. There was a Levi’s car! I never found a way to get this into the book, but I think it’s hilarious! AMC did a Levi’s edition of the Gremlin in the 70s. As it turns out, Samantha has her own automotive issues in FAHRENEIT 501, so bringing in another car would have complicated things unnecessarily.
3. There are some very expensive jeans out there. This blog on Nerdable goes through the five most expensive jeans, the cheapest of which are $4,000!
4. There actually were Nazi youth camps in the US in the 1930s. Okay, this isn’t so much of a fun fact. And if you haven’t read FAHRENHEIT 501, you might feel a little blindsided by this one. But it does come into play in Samantha’s mystery, and that didn’t come out of thin air. It actually came out of this article.
5. There is a woman in Japan who owns a pink-purple Toyota Supra. Naoko Ouka is the founder of the Toyota Girl Car Collective, a group of female car enthusiasts! Her love of her car is one of my favorite research discoveries while writing this book. Check her out here.
FAHRENHEIT 501 also had the fun side effect of taking a character who’s fluent in fashion and putting her out of her element. Samantha Kidd had to acknowledge that she never spent the time learning about denim, which gave her (and me) an opportunity to do a deep dive.
Oh, and if there’s a fun fact #6, it would be that writing this book turned out to be financially beneficial to the denim industry, because I bought five pairs to supplement the creative process!
Note: links are live on my blog. If you read this post on Goodreads, Amazon, or another site where my blog feeds, you may not have active links. Original post here: https://www.dianevallere.com/post/fun-facts-about-fahrenheit-501.
Get FAHRENHEIT 501:
Indiebound links coming soon.
Stefano Macioloni is adorable, and the Levi's Gremlin is hilarious. Thanks for sharing!