Why, Hello There!
I’m not actually a native Floridian—I’m from Seattle—but I’ve been transplanted down to the beautiful area surrounding Tampa Bay and I’ve fallen in love with it just a little bit. As an Air Force veteran, I’ve had the opportunity to see many parts of the world, and I’m very fond of this one. And not just because of the swamp puppies, I swear.
I have an MFA in Creative Writing from Full Sail University—which both helped pay for our cats to go to England (long story) and gave me the appropriate credentials to use as many em dashes as I do (longer story).
My stories tend to orbit the same things even when the settings change: mysteries, complicated people trying very hard to do the right thing, found family, historical oddities, humor in inappropriate circumstances, and an apparent desire for Hurt/Comfort to become an actual bookshelf category.
When I’m not being a chaotically unhinged writer of swamp-noir westerns, I moonlight as a perfectly respectable emotional support librarian.
How a Florida Western Came to Be
This started with grief.
Not the big kind—the specific, slightly ridiculous kind you feel when a show you love ends on a cliffhanger after four seasons and simply never comes back. There was a giant, adorably goofy detective-shaped hole in my heart and no way to fill it.
So much grief.
Eventually, I reached the acceptance stage: nobody was coming to fill this hole for me. If I wanted more of that wholesome detective solving murder mysteries with his found family in Florida feeling, I was going to have to build it myself.
And because I’m me, it would have to be a western.
That was when I realized I had absolutely no idea what a western set in Florida looked like.
Florida existed in the 1800s, obviously, but I’d never seen that version of it on television or in the movies. I’d never read it. And the more I thought about it, the more irresistible it became: frontier swamp, 1880s, heat and mud and menace and manners.
Cowboys versus alligators.
How cool is that?
I was hooked.
I started wondering what Florida would look like to a big-city detective who didn’t have television or the internet to prepare him for the weird, wild, wonderful world down here. I’m a transplant myself; the culture shock is a thing, and I knew what I was getting into.
Then Tom Bracken stepped off the train into a swampy little frontier town wearing a wool suit in ninety-degree weather.
And my heart healed right over that gaping hole I was telling you about.
Then immediately grew three sizes.
Tom was nothing like any character I’d ever written. He’s the best of a dozen influences, and I adore him with every fiber of my being.
Everything else sprang to life around him: the woman he falls in love with, the doctor who gets to see him at his lowest, the found family that gathers around them, the town itself, and all the menace waiting at its edges.
Four books later, The Cypress Run Quartet is finished. And I’m still just as in love with the whole cast as I was the day my sheriff stepped off the train and his future partner looked at him and essentially thought:
Who is this man, and why is nobody protecting him from himself?
Quick Facts
Comfort Food Genre
Westerns
Current Habitat
Tampa Bay
Weakness
Character Limits
Research Rabbit Hole
Historical Home Economics
MFA Superpower
Licensed for
excessive em dash use
Currently Writing
Tom Bracken’s Chicago Case Files
The Quartet
Cypress Run Quartet
Take a trip to 1880s Florida and meet Tom, Ellie, and Diego, as well as the rest of Cypress Run.
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Contact T. N. Daigle
For reader questions, book clubs, media inquiries, and other literary business.
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The Cypress Run Gazette
News, behind-the-scenes nonsense, research rabbit holes, and whatever else I’ve gotten myself into.