Goodreads asked Michael Raleigh:

How do you get inspired to write?

Michael Raleigh I'm far enough along in my career that I've almost always got a couple of stories in progress, and I need no further inspiration to start writing if I am fortunate enough to have a morning to write (I still teach, so there are times when my time is taken up with other responsibilities.).

But the inspiration for a new book, that's a different question. Sometimes an image will strike me -- for instance, I drove past a magic shop and imagined a young boy entering the shop and encountering a mysterious old man, and this became the inspiration for THE CONJURER'S BOY. A minor character in that book became the inspiration for the private detective Harry Strummer in PEERLESS DETECTIVE. Harry isn't even the main character in PEERLESS, which is about the relationship between a young drifter and a street-wise private eye. But he is the main character in a new book I'm working on, a traditional mystery set in Chicago in 1967 and called DEATH IN THE SUMMER OF LOVE.

Inspiration is a little different for each book.

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