Photo by Mike Lamb Patricia Lubeck shows off her variety of books based on crime in southwest Minnesota during the spring vendor show at the Red Baron Arena on Saturday.

MARSHALL — When it comes to crime during the early days of Minnesota, nothing shocks Patricia Lubeck.

She has been writing books since 2009 because she has a passion for history.

“I like to do a lot of research, and that’s the biggest part of it — gathering information and you have to sort it out, organize it, write the story — because you got to write it where somebody’s going to want to read it,” Lubeck said. “You have to make it interesting. And so I’m gong to keep writing, probably til I can’t anymore.”

Lubeck uses her skills developed over the years first as museum director at the Yellow Medicine County Museum and then at the Redwood County Museum. She retired in 2018.

“So I do a lot of traveling and I do a lot of research and writing because everything is true stuff that I write about,” she said.

Lubeck put the majority of her nine books she has authored on display during the spring vendor show held at the Red Baron Arena Saturday.

“At first, I thought I would never write a book, but now I have written nine and I got interested in history — the old stories from newspapers when I was the museum director at those two locations because I had access to that stuff,” she said. “And that’s what really kind of inspired me to document these stories because nobody knows about them and it’s getting harder to find the material to back up the stories. So I’m documenting history to share with others.”

“Murder in Gales” was Lubecks’s first book.

“It’s a story about William Rose, the only man that was executed in Redwood County in the 1800s,” she said.

Her second book was “Murder History and Mayhem in Minnesota.”

“Then this one came up because while I’m researching this story (Murder in Gales) there was so much else going on Redwood County. So this is a collection of more crime in Redwood County,” Lueback said.

Her third book, “Crime and Calamity,” was written because Lubeck grew up in Yellow Medicine County.

“Murder and Madness” dealt with crime events in Renville County in the early days.

“I was always interested in the different type of poisonings and how it was easy to poison someone because a lot of stuff was readily available,” she said.

Because she didn’t know much about the early days of insane asylums, she wrote “Asylum Scandals.”

“I only wrote about the two oldest ones in Minnesota. That first one is St. Peter. Then couple years later, they built Rochester,” Lubeck said. “There was a lot of them built after that. Willmar had one, Fergus Falls. I mean there was a lot of them. But I had enough with just those two.”

She didn’t have her best seller on display because it’s presently out of stock. The book is about Clarence Larson who was suspected in the suspicious deaths of both wives in Tracy.

Lubeck is proud of her new book “Crime in Chippewa County, Minnesota” because it takes place in the county she currently resides in and she took the photo of the Chippewa River that is on the cover.

“I live in Chippewa County so I had to find out what was going on back in the early days. That takes place from the 1850s to the 1930s,” she said.

Lubeck enjoys hearing back from her readers.

“People tell me all the time, repeat customers, come back and say, ‘oh man, we love how you write. Keep writing. We didn’t have any idea this was happening in our area.’ So that makes me feel better that people really appreciate what I do and to keep writing, keep documenting history, to share with others, because history was meant to be shared,” Lubeck said.

While she deals with some historical documentation is being destroyed, Lubeck says the internet has been helpful.

“There is a lot of stuff online, like the Library of Congress, newspapers, the Minnesota Historical Society,” she said.

“I do interview other people. Go to other places like the police department. They’ll let me see their records if I’m working on a case or the sheriff’s office. I have been in the sheriff’s office in Marshall on several occasions on a project I was working on. And that makes me happy because people give me permission to go through their files and I can add more to the story. Makes it more interesting. It make it more believable. It’s not my work. I’m reporting the facts. I keep finding stuff and then I got to plug it into the story,” Lubeck said.

Lubeck said she will back for the fall vendor show.

“Come back for the next book that’s coming out soon,” she said.