Patricia Dusenbury’s California
Noir:
Winter is a good time for an indoor road trip. Get comfortable, grab a
cup of something warm, and join me on a classic mystery tour of California.
We’re in the Golden State, a land of sunshine and blue skies, but
sunshine creates shadows, and in those shadows, lies menace. Glittering cities
have a dark underbelly. The very ground beneath our feet is unstable. Fault
lines shift, causing mini-jolts, while working up to the next big one. Tough
guys - and gals - keep moving. So, let’s go.
We begin in 1940s Los Angeles where Raymond Chandler lived and worked.
His first novel, The Big Sleep, introduces hardboiled detective Phillip Marlowe
in a complex mystery with multiple twists and turns. Amongst them, an alert
reader might find plot holes, including one unexplained murder, but tension is
high, and the pace carries us along.
Written later but set in the 1940s, James Elroy’s
The Black Dahlia is based on a real-life murder that revealed extensive
police corruption. The murder remains unsolved, although Elroy provided a
fictional solution. Or did he get it right, and the cops messed up/covered up?
A two-hour drive north on the 101 takes us to Santa Barbara, AKA Santa
Theresa. This scenic coastal city with its red-roofed white-stucco downtown is
home to Lew Archer. Ross Macdonald’s detective is as hard-boiled as Marlowe but
has a more nuanced character. (Many consider MacDonald the all-time best
American crime writer and one of our best novelists, period.) Before we leave
Santa Barbara/Theresa, let’s move ahead several decades and walk where Sue
Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone has walked. It’s her city, too.
Traveling further up the 101 and to the present day, we reach our last
stop, San Francisco. The City by the Bay takes its noir heritage seriously. The
apartment building where Dashiell Hammett lived and wrote the Maltese Falcon
still stands at 891 Post Street. The Tenderloin is still seedy and, perhaps,
nowhere to be after dark. Near Chinatown, a
plaque marks
the spot where Brigid O’Shaughnessy gunned down Sam Spade’s partner Miles
Archer.
We end our tour with a drink at John’s Grill, Sam Spade’s favorite
watering hole, which looks about the way it did when Dashiell Hammett was
trading meals for mentions in his stories. Cheers. I hope you enjoyed the trip.
Patricia Dusenbury is the author of the award-winning mystery trilogy A
Path Through the Ashes, which includes
A
Perfect Victim;
Secrets,
Lies & Homicide; and
A House
of Her Own. She also writes short stories and has been a Derringer
finalist. Although Patricia lives in San Francisco, her mystery novels are set
in pre-Katrina New Orleans, another great venue for dark doings. You can learn
more about Patricia and her writing at
Patricia Dusenbury.com
Michele Drier
Presents a Terrible Beauty:
Yeats
wasn’t thinking about California when he wrote Easter, 1916 about the fight for
Irish independence.
But,
like the poem, California has both a breathtaking and a heartbreaking beauty.
At
the least, it’s the only state that has a designated Fire Season.
I’ve
lived in many places in the state and the one that’s in my consciousness much
of this fall is the Sierra Nevada foothills.
My
family came to San Francisco in 1849, spending vacations and summers in the
Sierra near and in Yosemite. My grandmother had a friend from school who built
a summer home on Bass Lake, in the foothills half-way between Fresno and
Yosemite. As a child we lived at Bass Lake and in nearby Oakhurst, a small
mountain town on Highway 41.
This
is an area of wooded hills climbing up to the High Sierra. Within a few miles,
we could spend days picnicking in Alpine meadows or driving across the scary Tioga
Pass built into the face of a mountain. It was on a winding two-lane road with
an almost 2,000-foot drop to the valley below.
At
the pass, 9,943 feet high, we’d stop for its stunning view of granite mountains
and lush valleys ranging to the horizon. If we sat still enough, marmosets
would appear, singing their distinctive whistle before scurrying back to their
burrows.
The
woods rising up the foothills are primarily pine—ponderosa, sugar pine, yellow
pine—with swathes of manzanita and madrone. The air smells good enough to eat
and the dust, finely ground granite, puffs between your toes, soft as talc. It’s no wonder people, a lot of people, want
to live in these wooded areas, away from the coastal crush of several million
residents.
The
upside of beauty and rural living has a terrible downside, though. Fire.
As
a kid, we’d watch summer lightning storms boil up in the high mountains,
crossing our fingers there would be rain because a dry storm meant the
possibility of a lightning strike fire. They happened but were usually out
before doing too much damage.
That
was years ago, and things have changed. The climate is drier, several years of
drought have sucked the moisture out of the woods and an infestation of bark
beetle has killed millions of trees. And more and more people have moved into the
foothills, attracted by the beauty, the rural living, the cheaper cost of
living.
Now
fire season has taken on an ominous definition—wildfires that start by
something manmade and that rage out of control across thousands of acres.
The
fall of 2018 saw a fire in in the foothills of Northern California that razed
the entire town of Paradise in a few hours. I’d been to Paradise. I had friends
living in Paradise. One friend lost everything. Her home, her animals and her
business, including a collection of typewriters amassed over years of loving
printed words.
Living
in California is understanding the terrible beauty of this land. From the
mountains to the beaches, fire can wipe out homes, businesses, towns in a
heartbeat. This fall, while the fire in Paradise raged, another friend living
in the San Fernando Valley was evacuated and a fire that started in the
chapperal above Malibu burned to the ocean, taking out billions of dollars’
worth of exclusive homes.
Fire
is a constant in California, and there is almost no “fire season” now, it’s a
year-round possibility. The state is changing.
There’s
the beauty and now some fear.
Michele Drier is a fifth generation
Californian. During her career in journalism—as a reporter and editor at daily
newspapers—she won awards for producing investigative series.
She is the past-president of
Capitol Crimes, the Sacramento chapter of Sisters in Crime, the past-president
of Guppies, the online chapter of Sisters in Crime and co-chair of Bouchercon
2020.
In addition to writing at least
two books a year, she teaches private writing classes, does free-lance editing
and doesn’t clean her house.
Mysteries are
Edited
for Death, (called “Riveting and much recommended” by the Midwest Book
Review),
Labeled for Death and
Delta for Death. Additional books are
Ashes of Memories, and first book in a new series,
Stain on the Soul.
Her paranormal romance series, The
Kandesky Vampire Chronicles, won awards from the Paranormal Romance
Guild. The series is SNAP: The World Unfolds, SNAP: New Talent,
Plague:
A Love Story, Danube: A Tale of Murder, SNAP: Love for Blood, SNAP:
Happily Ever After?, SNAP: White Nights, SNAP: All That Jazz, SNAP: I, Vampire and
SNAP: Red Bear Rising.
And you saw it here first!!
Snap: Red
Bear Rising is now officially released and here are the links to get the newest
https://bit.ly/2GTqnXg (B&N) https://bit.ly/2SF5eS8 (Kobo)
Lofty Goals and Common Scents
Presented by Sue Owens Wright
I
was born in Sacramento, the City of Trees on the confluence of the American and
Sacramento Rivers. I’m a valley girl, but my heart has always been in the high
country of the Sierra Nevada. California’s capital is only 100 miles from mountains
or sea, but I am drawn to beautiful Lake Tahoe. Located in the Sierras at 6,224
feet above sea level, Tahoe is the largest alpine lake in North America. The
lake is so deep you could stand the Empire State Building in it and not see the
top. Every summer of my childhood, Dad loaded us and the family dog into our
Rambler Classic station wagon and drove up scenic Highway 50 to vacation at the
lake. Before my parents could afford to purchase a cabin of their own, we rented
private Tahoe cabins or stayed at rustic Camp Sacramento a few miles from the
lake. I was inspired by Lake Tahoe’s grandeur and intrigued by the history and folklore
surrounding the Lake of the Sky, or Da
Ow A Ga (Hokan translation: edge
of the lake), as the indigenous Washoe Tribe call it. That is why I chose
it as the backdrop for the Beanie and Cruiser Mystery Series.
As a
child, I loved reading and writing. Besides dog stories, my favorite books to
read were Judy Bolton mysteries, similar to the Nancy Drew series. I have since
collected them whenever I can find them. When I was eight years old, I tried
writing a mystery novel of my own. I scribbled a few pages in a notebook but
never finished the story. The notebook was lost, but I’d love to see what I
wrote back then. Fortunately, I have gotten
better at keeping my notes and finishing writing books, which thus far includes
five mysteries, a historical thriller, and two nonfiction books on dog care.
One
thing all my books have in common is dogs. I love dogs, especially basset
hounds. I’ve had a barker’s dozen dogs of various breeds in my life, eight of
them bassets, seven of which were rescued.
Unfortunately, not everyone appreciates this French breed’s unique traits,
which is why the dogs often end up in shelters. I adore those long-eared,
low-slung hounds, in spite of their drool and stubbornness. When out in the
field tracking a scent trail, as bassets were bred to do, they are tenacious
and never give up the hunt for their quarry. With scenting skills second only
to a bloodhound’s, the basset hound seemed like a perfect sidekick for my
fictional sleuth. Thus, I penned the Beanie and Cruiser mysteries, featuring
Elsie “Beanie” MacBean and her canine crime-buster, Cruiser, plus his troublesome
new pack mate Calamity, another rescued basset introduced in book four, “Braced
for Murder.”
My combined
passion for dogs, mysteries, and Lake Tahoe has brought me great joy and
purpose in life. I took the road less traveled to follow my dream of becoming an
author, which has culminated in many honors, most notably two Maxwell Awards
from the Dog Writers Association of America (DWAA) for the best writing on the
subject of dogs. I recently received my twelfth Maxwell nomination for book five
in the Beanie and Cruiser series, EARS FOR MURDER. I’m hoping for a third win
on February 10, when annual competition results are announced at the DWAA awards
banquet in New York City. Whatever happens, I am content in the knowledge that,
like a basset hound tracking rabbits on a woodland trail, I followed the right path.
Sue Owens Wright is an
award-winning author of fiction and nonfiction. She is an eleven-time finalist
for the Maxwell, awarded annually by the Dog Writers Association of America
(DWAA) to the best writer on the subject of dogs. She has twice won the Maxwell
Award and earned special recognition from the Humane Society of the United
States for her writing. She writes the acclaimed Beanie and Cruiser Mystery
Series, including Howling Bloody Murder,
Sirius About Murder, Embarking On Murder and Braced For Murder, which is recommended
on the American Kennel Club’s list of Best Dog Books.
Visit Sue Owens Wright at
all of these great sites:
Leave a comment on this post to be entered in the drawing for the Grand
Prize at the end of the month. Remember
to leave an avenue of contact so we can find you if you win! Enjoy the ride of California and please take
a minute to visit the contributor websites in this post. Have a great 2019!
(All info provided and released by Authors)
Her
Amy Hobbes Newspaper Mysteries are Edited for Death, (called “Riveting
and much recommended” by the Midwest Book Review), Labeled for Death and Delta
for Death and a stand-alone, Ashes of Memories.
