About 20 years ago, as an investigative reporter on the Houston Chronicle, Nancy Stancill plunged into a murky story that would eventually inspire her first novel.

Recounting her experiences Tuesday to a dual audience of Suffolk’s Sans Souci Literary Club and Tuesday Afternoon Book Club, the daughter of late former Suffolk News-Herald publisher Godfrey Wells Stancill said two men “who were rather odd” ran the bizarre community college.

She said she discovered the two odd men were involved in a lot of secretive military contracting. “When I went out there to start interviewing them, they were even more odd,” she said.

“They found a picture of me and they blew it up and made a poster … it was kind of a wanted poster. Someone sent it to me.”

The two odd men filmed the interview, which was fine, Stancill said. But when she started asking questions they didn’t like, the men fled the room, running into an office down the hall and slamming the door behind them.

After spending a couple of years investigating the two men, Stancill said, she found many misdeeds. They were “cheating Texas out of a lot money,” shortchanging their employees’ retirement accounts and involved in a shady gold mine near Las Vegas.

“They were never convicted of anything, but they did leave (town),” Stancill said. “They left in disgrace.”

Stancill, who had a 38-year reporting career with newspapers in Texas, Virginia, California and North Carolina, started thinking about writing a novel when she and her husband, banker Len Norman, moved to London for his career in 2009. They remained in London for three years.

Her probe of the two odd men’s activities in Texas popped straight into her head, she said.

A governor’s race was under way about this same time, Stancill said, and she was hearing a lot about comments from incumbent Rick Perry on Texas seceding from the Union.

“I got to thinking, what if something like this was really happening?” Stancill said. “I started seeing this novel take shape.”

Stancill envisioned a female investigative reporter on a fictional Texas newspaper investigating a secessionist gubernatorial candidate.

“What if he started falling in love with her, and another man was also courting her, and her newspaper is dying and things are getting tough there?” Stancill told the book club members, explaining a little about her thought process at the time.

Stancill’s debut novel “Saving Texas,” deals with a political idea and philosophy very much alive today. Besides Texas, she cited the secessionist movements in Scotland, Colorado and Alaska.

“I think it’s a very dangerous thing to happen within the United States, and I kind of wanted to call attention to that,” she said.

It also grapples with the troubling future of the newspaper industry, Stancill added.

“She’s (main character Annie Price) working for a mythical newspaper that really has a lot of the atmosphere of a lot of the newspapers I worked at,” she said.

“I wanted to show that unless we support our newspapers, they really are in danger of dying. And I think that would be a terrible shame.”

Meanwhile, the book clubs whose members Stancill spoke to and signed books for have a long history. Sans Souci started in about 1903, member Anne Henderson said, while The Tuesday Afternoon Book Club, according to Gail Pruden, started in October 1923.

Back then, Pruden said, “you would have seen us in hats and gloves — very appropriately attired. Our great-grandmothers would have been very upset, had they seen us today.”

Stancill also reminisced about reporting for the Suffolk News-Herald, over the summer while attending university. “I felt I got to know Suffolk as an author and as a visiting student,” she said.