Bestselling novelist Fiona Davis talks about her housefuls of characters and latest novel ‘The Magnolia Palace’ in visit to Mark Twain house

“The only way I can do a novel is taking it chunk by chunk,” says Fiona Davis.

In her case, it’s more like brick by brick. The bestselling novelist builds her stories by first finding a historic New York building that the characters can live or work in, then doing intense research on that building as the human story is still revealing itself.

“I pick a building,” Davis said in an interview with the Courant. “With every one so far, there’s always something that’s surprised me, like that there was an art school inside Grand Central Station.”

That revelation was the basis of “The Masterpiece,” in which Davis follows the paths of two passionate female artists in midtown New York City in the 1920s and the 1970s.

At the Mark Twain House and Museum this Thursday at 7 p.m., Davis will be talking about her writing journey and researching her latest novel, “The Magnolia Palace.”

“It’ll be the journey of the writer’s process, the idea behind the book to the final product, plus some wonderful and shocking true facts that leave people stunned,” she says. “Historical fiction fans want to know the backstory, and that’s what I love too — the layers of history.”

“The Magnolia Palace” charts the experiences of two artists’ models whose lives take unexpected turns 50 years apart. The building which they both gravitate toward is an imposing mansion at 5th Avenue and 70th/71st streets. In 1919, one of the novel’s protagonists knows it as the residence of the recently deceased industrialist Henry Clay Frick. In 1966, the book’s other heroine Veronica knows the building as a museum, the Frick Collection.

The writer conjures up dreamlike images of the Frick home. When Lillian gets a tour, she is overwhelmed:

But the view! A small square window looked out across Fifth Avenue, across Central Park, all the way over to the west side of the city. She recognized the ochre husk of the Dakota over on 72nd Street, rising over the sea of green treetops. She imagined herself leaning on the windowsills and staring out as the clouds skidded by, like a princess at the top of a castle.

Lillian and Veronica do far more than just wander the corridors of the old mansion. They’re both affected by a murder that took place in the neighborhood, a long-lost piece of priceless jewelry and other mysteries begging to be solved.

The only novel where the building didn’t come first, she says, was “The Chelsea Girls,” which concerns a playwright and an actress who gets caught up in the blacklisting and Red Scare of the 1950s. “I’d met a woman, Virginia Robinson, who’d been an actress during that time, and she was so bitter and angry about what has happened then.” There’s still a legendary building involved, of course. The women are roommates at the Chelsea Hotel on 23rd Street in Manhattan, which was already a landmark in the 1950s due to the number of celebrities who’ve lived there over the years.”

Davis is a former theater performer herself. She was involved for over a decade with the Willow Cabin Theatre Company and appeared in a production of three Thornton Wilder one-acts that Willow Cabin sent to Broadway in 1993. She’s also appeared in several productions of Edward Albee’s play “Three Tall Women” — “because I’m 5-foot-10,” she laughs.

The peak of her acting career, also included the soap opera “Another World,”

“I was not writing then,” Davis says. “I think I changed my career every 10 years.”

From 2005 to 2015 Davis was a freelance journalist. She published her first novel in 2016 and is currently at work on her sixth.

“I didn’t get the idea for my first book until I was in my 40s,” Davis recalls. “I was very lucky in how it got published. I had come to see a panel discussion by several agents. One of them struck me as being very smart, so when I wrote the book I sent it to her.”

It’s easy to recognize Fiona Davis novels by their covers. They all show a lone woman dressed in the style from the time the book is set standing in front of some amazing architecture. On most of the covers, the woman is in depicted in full color while the building behind her is in black and white.

“So much historical fiction looks similar,” says Davis, who has a say in how her books are packaged and marketed. “I love the way the building is in it.”

All the buildings in her books still exist, she says, and she’s found that many of her readers come to New York to visit them because they’ve enjoyed the stories. The structures live on in the novelist’s own memory as well. “I try to mention the buildings I’ve written about in the books about other buildings,” she says.

“Right now I’m writing about Radio City Music Hall. I go there and walk around it. The floor plan is online.” Davis also plans to make multiple visits inside the legendary performance venue.

“When I’m looking at the building, I’m also thinking about era of it was the most dynamic.”

Having lived on New York’s Upper East Side for the past 35 years, Davis often chooses the settings for her books from neighborhoods she’s strolled through a thousand times and always wondered about.

“I joke that by my 11th book I’ll be doing the gas station on the corner.”

Fiona Davis speaks Thursday at 7 p.m. at the Mark Twain House and Museum, 351 Farmington Avenue, Hartford. Tickets are $35, $30 for Mark Twain House members, and include a signed copy of Davis’ novel “The Magnolia Palace.” marktwainhouse.org .

Christopher Arnott can be reached at carnott@courant.com .