A WAILING AND GNASHING OF TEETH
For a homeowner, “you have to find a contractor” are words of doom. You may live in a small town, in which case all contractors worth a hoot are all booked up, or you may live in a suburban or urban area, in which case finding one (a) reliable enough to actually turn up, (b) able to carry the job through to the end without delays, or (c) talent to do the job in a professional manner, seems almost impossible.
After the recent water damage to our home, we have had many, many strangers coming in and out. Most of them are telling us that what we want to happen will not happen, for one reason or another. Some of them simply don’t turn up when they say they are going to, and when they do, they don’t explain their absence.
I am supposed to be grateful that they show up at all, presumably.
If I sound disillusioned and disgruntled, you’ve read me right. I am. I am at the stage where I know some obstruction to each phase of the repair will pop up. Most often, this obstruction will require hiring yet another subcontractor. The aperture will be too narrow, or too wide. Sometimes the workmen will have to leave to “get a part,” and will not return for days.
I have counted all my blessings, believe me. I am lucky to have insurance. I am lucky to be able to pay our deductible. I am lucky to have an intact home at all. But I’m finding those reminders will only carry me so far. Right now, I feel mad and powerless. You know when the floor people can come? Next year. That’s right. Next year.
Sooner or later, I will be able to look back on this and laugh. But it will be a long, long time.
Maybe after next year.
Charlaine Harris
September 12, 2016
September 08, 2016
Happy Birthday, Dad
by Donna Andrews with the Femmes Fatales.
If my dad were still around, today would be his 100th birthday.
Jay Donald Andrews was born September 9, 1916 in the small Kansas town of Bloom—now a ghost town. He grew up on a wheat and cattle farm, and when his family occasionally went to the big city, it was to the county seat, Dodge City. Yes, that Dodge City, home of Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and (fictionally) U.S. Marshall Matt Dillon.
After graduating at the top of his (very tiny) high school class Dad went to Kansas State, where he soon switched from agriculture to biology and graduated in 1938.
The U.S. was in the middle of the Great Depression when Dad headed off to college, and I'm still not quite sure how he and his family managed to pay for his education—especially since he went straight from Kansas State to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin. I do know that joining ROTC was one of the things he did to help pay his way, so on December 7, 1941, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor transformed him from a graduate student to a first lieutenant in the U.S. Army.
Dad never talked much about his time in the war. When people asked him about his experiences, he claimed the only action he'd seen was when two sentries got drunk and shot each other. And then one day at the dinner table, he finally told my brother and me what he'd told my mother when they got engaged: he'd been on a troop ship that was hit by a Japanese kamikaze pilot. The ship was so badly damaged that it couldn't keep up with the convoy, so they steamed on ahead to port, leaving Dad's ship to make its way as fast as it can. He told Mom that he'd never forget the smell of burning human flesh, and that he didn't ever want to talk about it again. The reason he was telling her was so if anyone asked “What did you do in the war, Andy?” she could help him change the subject.
He won a bronze star in the war. He never talked about that either—we found it in his dresser drawer after he died. Eventually I uncovered the citation, dated 5 August 1945, and issued from Headquarters, 38th Infantry Division:
Captain Jay D. Andrews, 0363194, Infantry, United States Army. For meritorious achievement in connection with military operations against the enemy on Luzon, Phillippine Islands, from 29 January 1945 to 20 July 1945.
That period roughly corresponds with what the history books call the Battle of Luzon, MacArthur's campaign to retake the largest island in the Phillippines.
Luckily for me, Dad survived the war and returned to the University of Wisconsin to complete his Ph.D. in Marine Biology. In 1946, after his graduation, he was hired as one of the first few scientists at the Virginia Fisheries Laboratory—now known as the Virginia Institute of Marine Science—in Gloucester, Virginia.
But he ended up living across the river, in Yorktown, where some of the locals were busy transforming the USO into a peacetime social club. He met Mom—Mary Stuart Hornsby, a native of York County—playing bridge, and they married in 1948.
He stayed on at VIMS for the next 37 years, studying oysters. In his spare time, he read, gardened, watched birds, enjoyed classical music, and worked on the family genealogy.
When I began creating Meg Langslow's family, I quickly realized that I was basing her father on Dad. I changed all the externals. I made Dr. Langslow a semi-retired doctor rather than a marine biologist. I made him short, plump, and balding, instead of tall and mostly thin (until Mom's cooking caught up with him) with curly hair. They shared a love of birdwatching and gardening, but Dad's horticultural interests never included growing poisonous plants. I gave Dr. Langslow passion for mysteries instead of French culture and history.
And yet everyone recognized Dad, because I also gave Meg's dad his passionate enthusiasm for whatever interested him at the moment. For example, after reading Lelia, Andre Maurois's biography of Georges Sand, Dad become fascinated by everything connected with Sand. Chopin took on new luster in his eyes because of his love affair with Sand. And one afternoon, during Dad's Sandian phase, Mom, my brother, and I were talking at the dinner table about I don't remember what—family stuff? Neighborhood stuff? Dad waited until there was a microsecond's pause in the conversation and then announced, cheerfully: “So, speaking of George Sand.”
He was taken aback, at first, to find some of his salient characteristics incorporated into my fictional world. But then he learned to tolerate and eventually even revel in his new role as a fictional character. “I've done something you're going to want to use when you hear about it,” he announced during one of our phone calls a year or two after my first book came out.
Dad isn't Dr. Langslow—Meg's dad has grown and diverged from his real life inspiration as the series evolved. But he was the inspiration for Meg's dad. We lost Dad in 2004 to esophageal cancer, so it's curiously comforting to think that in some way he lives on in Meg's dad.
Happy 100th birthday, Dad.
September 07, 2016
A Marylander Abroad
I’ve just returned from my annual trip to the UK where I attended – for the 21st consecutive year! -- the St Hilda’s Crime and Mystery Weekend. This year’s theme was “The Question of Genre: What Is Crime Fiction?” Guest of honor Lee Child gave the conference lecture on thrillers (natch!), and attendees enjoyed two days of fascinating talks on various mystery genres by Elly Griffiths, Jane Finnis, Martin Edwards, Carol Westron, Andrew Taylor, Shona MacLean, Kate Charles, Chris Ewan and Sarah Weinman. I was honored to appear on the dais with Sarah, who spoke on the origins of domestic suspense. I was the conference’s wrap-up batter, with my humorous review of the cozy genre, “Murder Least Foul.”
The conference opens on Friday evening with a champagne reception on the lawn, followed by dinner. After dinner this year we were entertained by Ted Childs, the creator of ITV’s “Inspector Morse,” with a talk and video clips from the popular series set in Oxford and written by friend and frequent conference attendee, Colin Dexter. Saturday’s after dinner speaker was St Hilda’s “old girl” Val McDermid. I’ve written before about what sets St Hilda’s apart from other mystery conferences. (You can read about it again here.)
Definitely something to put on your Bucket List!
After spending a quiet week at a favorite B&B in Somerset with dear friend and fellow mystery author, Kate Charles and her husband, we repaired to Kate’s home in historic Ludlow, Shropshire, where I got to sing alto in the choir of historic St Laurence's Church for a wedding.
Girls Day Out was a train trip to Liverpool to tick off something on my bucket list – a visit to the boyhood homes of John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Both homes have been lovingly restored by the National Trust to the way they appeared in the 1950s when the boys lived there in their teens.
While “Magical Mystery Tours” will ferry you around town by bus and let you take pictures from outside the gates, you can get into the homes only by booking with the National Trust. Knowledgeable guides, both of whom actually knew McCartney and Lennon, tell you the history of the homes then let you wander about on your own. The Beatles composed over 300 songs. To stand in the small "lounge" at 20 Forthlin Road where Paul lived and 100 of them were written ... sigh.
The living room at Mendips, where John Lennon lived with his Aunt Mimi from 1945-1963.
Here's me, standing outside.
Get your own “ticket to ride” here.
Now, of course, I can’t get “Penny Lane,” out of my head.
The roundabout, the bank, the barber shop, the fire station, the bank, and even the corner where the pretty nurse stood selling poppies from a tray.
September 05, 2016
The Dread Line--and the demise of Newspapers
HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: It's a real moment of change in our lives--and some of us--who are not of a certain age--might not even realize it. I read in the newspaper today (newspaper? yes, on paper) that The Newspaper Association of America, the trade organization that represents the interests of newspaper publishers, and has done (the article says) since 1887, is going to drop the word "newspaper"from its title and call itself the News Media Alliance. Even the newspaper people--or maybe especially the newspaper people--realize it's the sunset of an era.
Which, as the terrific (and Edgar-winning) writer Bruce DeSilva says, creates a special kind of problem in his fiction as well.
What’s A Writer To Do When The Hero of His Crime Novels Loses His Crime-Fighting Job?
by Bruce DeSilva
Looking back on it now, I can see that Liam Mulligan’s career as an investigative reporter for a failing Providence, R.I., newspaper was doomed from the start.
But when he was summarily fired for a journalism ethics violation he had not committed, it took me by surprise. It happened two-thirds of the way through A Scourge of Vipers, the fourth novel in my Edgar Award-winning series, and it created a crisis for both of us. It was a crisis for Mulligan because he considered journalism his calling, like the priesthood but without the sex.
He’d always said that he could never be good at anything else—that if he couldn’t be a reporter, he’d end up selling pencils out of a tin cup.
It was a crisis for me because I owed my publisher another Mulligan yarn. I’d never intended for Mulligan to lose his job, but it’s the sort of thing that can happen to a writer who never outlines.
Fact is, I never think very far ahead when I write. I just set my characters in motion to see what they will do. But what was Mulligan going to do now? How would he make a living? And more importantly, how could he continue his life’s work of exposing greed and corruption?
It was as if Joe Friday had been stripped of his badge. As if Robert B. Parker’s Spenser couldn’t be a private investigator anymore. As I sat down to write The Dread Line, the new novel in the series, the first thing Mulligan and I had to do was invent a new life for him.
When I first made him a newspaper journalist in my debut novel, Rogue Island, I didn’t know that the book would be the first in a series, so I gave no thought to the possibility that I was writing myself into a corner. I made him an investigative reporter in Providence for three reasons. I’d been one myself, and they say you should write what you know. I liked the idea that reporters can’t get search warrants or drag people in for questioning, which sometimes makes their jobs more challenging than police work.
But the main reason is that I wanted that first novel not only to be suspenseful entertainment but also to address a serious social issue. American newspapers are in deep trouble. Many already have gone belly up, and economic changes triggered by the internet have forced virtually all of them to slash their news staffs.
This is a slow-motion disaster for the American democracy, because there is nothing on the horizon to replace newspapers as honest and comprehensive brokers of news and information. As someone who spent forty years in the news business, I’ve always been annoyed that journalists are usually portrayed as vultures in the popular culture. The truth is that most of them are hard-working, low-paid professionals dedicated to digging out the truth in a world full of powerful people who lie as often as the rest of us breathe.
And Mulligan had been even lower-paid and harder-working than most. It was my hope that as readers followed the skill and relentlessness with which he worked, they would gain a greater appreciation for what all of us are losing as newspapers fade into history.
I made that first novel both a compelling yarn and a lyrical epitaph for the business that Mulligan and I both love. But as the first novel led to a second, and then several more, the financial health of Mulligan’s employer, the fictional Providence Dispatch, became increasingly desperate. Circulation shrunk, advertising dried up, and hordes of Mulligan’s newsroom colleagues got bought out or laid off.
Fiction followed fact as the once-great Providence Journal, on which The Dispatch was loosely based, also spiraled downward. The newspaper had 340 newsroom employees when I worked there in the 1970s and early 1980s. It has only 37 reporters and columnists now, and another buyout has just been announced by the chain that bought it a few years back.
As I was completing A Scourge of Vipers, it became evident that Mulligan’s newspaper career, too, was dribbling to an end. The Dispatch had been sold to a predatory media chain that had no interest in costly investigations and saw news as something to fill the spaces between the ads. Forced to spend most of his working hours on the routine tasks of putting out a daily newspaper, Mulligan ended up doing most of his investigative reporting on his own time. And his increasingly heated squabbles with his editors were making life untenable for both of them.
By the time that novel ended, Mulligan was on the unemployment line. And he was, truth to be told, feeling bitter and lost.
So as I began The Dread Line, Mulligan and I sat down together and looked back over his life, considering whether it offered him any hope for the future. There, we discovered a handful of possibilities. Edward Mason, his young colleague at the paper, was leaving to start a local news website with his daddy’s money and wanted invited Mulligan to join him. But the new business wasn’t turning a profit yet, so Mason could only offer starvation wages. Mulligan’s pal Bruce McCracken ran a private detective agency, so perhaps Mulligan could do some work for him. And Mulligan’s mobbed-up friend Dominic Zerilli was retiring to Florida and needed somebody to run his bookmaking business.
What should Mulligan do? How about all three? The opening of The Dread Line finds him no longer living in his squalid apartment in a run-down Providence triple-decker. Instead, he’s keeping house in a five-room, water-front cottage on Conanicut Island, which squats like a harbor seal at the entrance to Narragansett Bay. He’s getting some part-time work from McCracken, although it rarely pays enough to cover his bills. He’s picking up beer and cigar money freelancing for the news website. And he’s running the bookmaking business with help from his thuggish pal, a former strip-club bouncer named Joseph DeLucca.
For the first time in his life, Mulligan has a little money in his pocket at the end of the month. After twenty years as a newspaper reporter, he says it feels strange to be living above the poverty line—and even stranger to be a lawbreaker. But as Mulligan and I see it, he’s not breaking any important ones.
And of course, he still manages to find trouble when it isn’t finding him.
He’s feuding with a feral tomcat that keeps leaving its kills on his porch. He’s obsessed with a baffling jewelry heist. And he’s enraged that someone on the island is torturing animals. All of this keeps distracting him from a big case that needs his attention.
The New England Patriots, still shaken by a series of murder charges against Aaron Hernandez, one of their star players (true story) have hired Mulligan and McCracken (not a true story) to investigate the background of a college star they are thinking of drafting. The player appears to be a choirboy, so at first, the job seems routine. But as soon as they start asking questions, they get push-back. The player has something to hide, and someone is willing to kill to make sure it remains secret.
Mulligan may not be an investigative reporter anymore, but he and I are still in the crime-busting business.
HANK: Yup, newspapers. Situation. I still read three real papers, on actual paper, every day. How about you?
(And on another topic: Aaron Hernandez. What a tragedy.)
The Dread Line by Bruce DeSilva is the fifth hardboiled crime novel featuring Liam Mulligan, an investigative reporter and part-time private eye in Rhode Island.
To order it from a choice of independent or chain online bookstores, please click here: https://www.amazon.com/Dread-Line-Mulligan-Novel-Liam/dp/0765374331/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1472507388&sr=8-1&keywords=desilva+bruce
Bruce DeSilva grew up in a tiny Massachusetts mill town where the mill closed when he was ten. He had an austere childhood bereft of iPods, X-Boxes, and all the other cool stuff that hadn’t been invented yet. When he left this parochial little town, metaphors and alliteration were also in short supply.
Nevertheless, his crime fiction has won the Edgar and Macavity Awards; been listed as a finalist for the Shamus, Anthony, and Barry Awards; and been published in ten foreign languages. His short stories have appeared in Akashic Press's award-winning noir anthologies. He has reviewed books for The New York Times Sunday Book Review and Publishers Weekly, and his reviews for The Associated Press appear in hundreds of other publications.
Previously, he was a journalist for forty years, most recently as writing coach world-wide for The Associated Press, editing stories that won nearly every major journalism prize including the Pulitzer. He and his wife, the poet Patricia Smith, live in New Jersey with two enormous dogs named Brady and Rondo.
The Dread Line
Since he got fired from his newspaper job last year, former investigative reporter Liam Mulligan has been piecing together a new life for himself—one that straddles both sides of the law. He’s getting some part-time work with his friend McCracken’s detective agency. He’s picking up beer money by freelancing for a local news website. And he’s looking after his semi-retired mobster-friend’s bookmaking business. But Mulligan still manages to find trouble—when it’s not finding him. He’s feuding with a serial-killer cat that leaves its kills on his porch. He’s so obsessed with a baffling jewelry robbery that he can’t let it go. And he’s enraged that someone in town is torturing animals.
All of this distracts him from a big case that needs his full attention. The New England Patriots, shaken by murder charges against one of their star players, have hired Mulligan and McCracken to investigate the background of a college star they’re thinking of drafting. At first the job seems routine, but when they begin asking questions, they get push-back. The player has something to hide—and someone is willing to kill to make sure it remains secret.
An oops of the Lost Weekend variety.
by Donna Andrews with the Femmes Fatales.
So I was trying to decide whether to write my blog tonight or wait till tomorrow when I realized . . . . . . I'm supposed to blog Monday. Tomorrow's not Monday. Today's Monday.
Oops.
I hate three-day weekends. I also love them. But right now I mostly hate them. I always have the most overambitious plans for long weekends--I tend to forget you only get one extra day, not three or four. And always, on Monday night of a long weekend, I end up bemoaning how little I actually got done.
I got a lot done, really. I held a freakin' garage sale on Saturday, getting up at 7 to get everything in place, and after the garage sale was done I dragged anything that wasn't waterproof back inside the garage, returned half of the borrowed tables, and collected the signs with which I'd festooned the neighborhood. And I'm halfway through packing up what didn't sell at the garage sale for donation.
I spent time helping one of my nephews with his summer homework--math and Latin and reading a book aloud with a family member--we're doing Dracula. I dragged Jingle, the loaner dog, around the yard at random but frequent intervals (that's him at the top of the blog). I did a lot of sorting and filing. I had a nice dinner with friends.
But I didn't get to spend time at the pool with the nephews. Didn't get to the cookout I was invited to. Didn't get much reading done. Didn't get to the movies. Didn't make a start on my Bouchercon packing. Didn't--
You can see where this is going. Take the usual Sunday-night "where did the weekend go" remorse and multiply it by ten.
I'm thinking of making a resolution. Next time we have a three day weekend, you know what I'm going to do?
Nothing.
Well, nothing except whatever I feel like at the moment. I will throw deadlines and responsibilities to the wind. Because if I'm going to have the guilts at the end of the weekend, I might as well have something worthwhile to feel guilty about.
How about you? Did you have a lost weekend? A productive weekend? Will you vow to join me in utter irresponsibility the next time a three-day weekend rolls around?
September 02, 2016
Who are you, Mr. Steele?
by Kris Neri at the Femmes Fatales
Sometime back I wrote about our new rescue dog, Rosie, and her alter-ego Kevin. It’s Kevin, named for the little
boy in the Home Alone movie series, who does the naughty things around our house, Joe concluded, not his beloved Rosie. Well, I’m happy to report that Kevin doesn’t make too many appearances in our household anymore. Oh, sure, someone still empties the bathroom wastebaskets regularly. I don’t think it’s our sixteen year-old cat, Philly, since that had never interested him, though he is still frisky enough to steal the dog’s toys and sleep in her bed. But the more destructive of Kevin’s behaviors simply aren’t happening anymore.
I believe that Rosie just needed to know who we were, and a thorough investigation of our entire environment
felt necessary. After all, she’d been dumped once by people she must have loved. Would it happen again? she had to wonder.
When you rescue a pet, particularly one who has lived some time with other people, you can’t help but wonder about that prior life. I do anyway — maybe it’s the writer in me, always creating scenarios. But I suspect we all want to know.
Some aspects are easy to figure. For instance, Rosie didn’t know how to do her business in the backyard, and expected walks in the street after her meals. That told us she probably lived in an apartment or condo, with little outdoor space. Okay, so we figured out which kind of home she lived in, not the kind of people she lived with.
A better clue emerged once when Joe and I were having quite a serious discussion about something. No, that’s not a euphemism for a fight. We really were just talking about something important. But the seriousness of our manners must have brought up bad feelings or memories in Rosie because she suddenly began frantically licking her paws. Did they give away this precious dog because they got a divorce and neither could keep her thereafter? Or were their serious discussions about getting rid of her. We know they had bred her, and when she was still quite young, because the vet confirmed that. Did they decide they liked one of the puppies more? We’ll never know.
A better alter-ego name for rescue pets would be Mr. Steele. Remember the charming P.I. TV show, with a character with a mysterious past, who used that name? When you adopt a rescue pet, they’re all Mr. Steele, because you never get more than snipers and little clues to put the past together.
Sometimes you can conclude something about the circumstances of their being handled over. With our late dog Annabelle, the shelter employees concluded that she and an older dog had been dumped at night. Some people are too embarrassed to turn a pet in during the day, when they’ll have to talk to shelter workers. Our shelter leaves cages outside during off hours, which nighttime dumpers can use to keep the pets safe. However, too often, we were told, they don’t. When dogs are left loose there, they usually try to follow the cars. Of course, cars drive faster than dogs can run, and apparently, they usually end up lost behind stores on our main shopping road. The local Walgreens parking lot, which happens to be right next to where those cars would drive, is often where they end up.
In Annabelle’s case, the Walgreen’s manager called the shelter to report that another two dogs had found their way to their parking lot, so a shelter worker could come and collect them. At least Annabelle and the dog she was dumped with managed to stay together. I don’t know what happens when people dump cats at night and leave them loose. That thought scares me; we have a lot of wildlife here.
The obvious answer to the question of past lives might be to question the shelter workers. But here they seem to have a policy of giving vague, non-specific answers. Sedona is a small town — maybe they don’t want to embarrass anyone. Or maybe Rosie also got left at night. Maybe they always make up comfortable lies to fill in rescue pet’s backgrounds.
Perhaps it’s the people we should call Mr. Steele because their identities are also mysterious and unknown. I don’t know why I care. I’ve always said that the first owners of rescue pets are just place-holders, until the time is right for pets and their rightful companions to connect. But I also know the pets always suffer from the effects of those first homes. Annabelle had separation anxiety all of her life.
Despite that, I don’t believe either dog was abused. We did adopt a dog once who had proven to be abused, and we took possession of him directly from the monsters who must have done terrible things to puppies, judging by our dog’s lifetime fears.
I don’t put Annabelle’s and Rosie’s prior owners in that category. I also don’t want to judge them too harshly. Maybe they genuinely had no choice. People do suffer from bad financial or health or other impossible situations. And I’m grateful that we had the chance to welcome both of these wonderful animals into our lives, and that couldn’t have happened if someone hadn’t turned them in.
But still…I wonder.
Have you ever rescued pets? Do you long for answers, too? Did you ever get them?
August 31, 2016
August 29, 2016
How Do You End a Mystery Series?
I'm delighted to introduce you to one of my favorite mystery writers, Naomi Hirahara, Edgar Award winning author of the Mas Arai and Officer Ellie Rush bicycle cop series. Put both her series in your TBR pile. You'll thank me. Elaine Viets
By Naomi Hirahara, Guest Blogger for the Femmes Fatales.
When I completed my debut mystery after 15 years of writing, marinating and rewriting, I didn’t imagine my amateur sleuth, an aging L.A. gardener and Hiroshima survivor, would have a tale that would span over seven novels.
Yet, knock on wood, that seems like what will be happening as I prepare to write the final installment of the Mas Arai mystery series.
As I recently watched the final episode of “Inspector Lewis” on PBS, I couldn’t help but to think, is this the best way to end a mystery series? Was it a satisfying coda to a character that first appeared in another series, “Inspector Morse”? And is there anything I can take away and apply to my own writing journey?
The arc of my Mas Arai series has been developed through both artistic prerogative as well as commercial interests. The second one, GASA-GASA GIRL, would not have been produced so quickly or perhaps not at all if it had not been for my contract with my first publisher, Random House. They wanted a third, SNAKESKIN SHAMISEN, which would go on to win an Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original.
Because of various corporate shake-ups, editorial changes and my own need to try something different (a middle-grade novel), I decided that I needed a break from the once-a-year mystery series schedule. But when my agent was shopping around a standalone novel, another publisher wanted to continue Mas instead. At that point I realized that I couldn’t let outside interests determine the fate of my beloved sleuth, whose creation was inspired by my father’s life. I needed a plan.
A minor criticism of my second mystery printed in a San Francisco newspaper still stayed in my mind. What was I doing to poor Mas? Was I heaping misfortune after misfortune upon him for no reason other than to continue the series? There had to be a reason for each book, and it couldn’t be just a monetary reward.
Up to that point, each one of my books carried some kind of theme. Survivors’ guilt, diaspora of family and community, and the effects of colonial rule – all aspects of a past generation’s struggles. The next three, I decided, would take on my generation’s issues: addiction, technology, and the cult of celebrity. It would end with Mas revisiting Hiroshima, the theme of the first.
Since I made that literary decision, all sorts of things have happened. The fourth Mas was published without its acquiring editor and only in hardback during the depths of the Great Recession. This was the death of Mas, I thought, as I shared my publishing woes with my local mystery bookseller, a friend.
She then told a local L.A.-based publisher that I might be interested in being part of her effort to expand her fiction titles. We met in person over drinks and the deal was sealed. Mas would get a new life with Prospect Park Books (PPB).
Since that initial meeting, the fifth and sixth Mas Arai mysteries, along with a paperback reissue of the fourth, have been published with PPB. During this period of time, Mas’s inspiration, my father, was diagnosed with stomach cancer and after my family cared for him at home in hospice, he passed away.
Through these life journeys, I’ve come to understand that writing about Mas is not only about the mystery, but also about the man and others like him. It’s for readers who have lost their elders and struggle to remember their idiosyncratic behavior. It’s for our layers of history that have been either forgotten or never been told.
I recently returned from a three-week research trip to Japan, mostly financed through a foundation that support cross-cultural activities. I spent most of that time in Hiroshima, my roots, but a place that I’ve known only through my relatives. Through this summer’s journey, I got to know the city through my own lens, but also with Mas right beside me. The photo of hand-drawn lanterns was taken there August 6. Seeds of the finale have been sown and I look forward to see what grows by the time I complete my manuscript by next May.
And in terms of “Inspector Lewis” – yes, I think that it was a perfect end to the story of a devoted family man and journeyman police officer. The episode delivered the same kind of twisty plot (although this time I did figure who did it about halfway in) that it always had done. I’m celebrating the end by going to the beginning: watching “Inspector Morse” on Netflix when Inspector Lewis was a young man. That’s the way that a series should end, I think. It should be a continuum, a completion of a full circle.
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Naomi Hirahara is the Edgar Award-winning author of two mystery series set in Los Angeles. Her Mas Arai series, which features a Hiroshima survivor and gardener, has been translated into Japanese, Korean and French. The first, SUMMER OF THE BIG BACHI, is being developed into an independent film. Her Officer Ellie Rush bicycle cop series received the 2014 T. Jefferson Parker Mystery Award. She has also published noir short stories, middle-grade fiction and nonfiction books. She will be one of the guests of honor at Left Coast Crime Reno in 2018. For more information, go to www.naomihirahara.com.
