And, yet, when I began to write the Karen series, I didn’t have Charlie Piotrowski in mind.  As a matter of fact, I didn’t intend to include the police in anything other than a perfunctory manner.  After all, like me my sleuth was an English professor:  What did I know about the police?  Then I was working on an early chapter–it was late in the evening and Karen was grading papers in her office in the deserted English department.  Suddenly there was a knock on her door….

I stopped, fingers hovering over the keyboard: Who was there?  I didn’t have the slightest idea.  I raised my eyes from the screen, looked out the window, watched trees swaying in the breeze: Who was there?  I still didn’t know, but a second knock followed the first.  Karen better answer it fast!  My fingers began to twitch:  Who was there?  Karen pushed back her chair.  My fingers were on the keyboard again.  She got up.  I was reading the screen.  She walked toward the door.  The brass doorknob was cold in her hand.  She turned it …

Who the Hell was there! My eyes were glued to the screen. She pulled the door open.  It was … Lieutenant Charlie Piotrowski of the Massachusetts State Police …  Well, of course it was!  And Charlie opened his mouth and began talking.  He talked, and talked, and talked.  And he hasn’t shut up since.  And when Charlie started talking, the series came to life; I ceded control to my characters and began to trust them to speak and act, sometimes beyond my knowledge.

But where had this guy come from in the first place?  Surely he didn’t give birth to himself.  Then I remembered.  In the late 1970s when I was in Graduate School, I taught a course in Detective Fiction at Berkshire Community College in Western Massachusetts.  Someone told me about a State Police investigator who did public relations talks.  Where I got the courage, I don’t know, but I called the Bureau of Criminal Investigation, asked for this man (an Irish name–that’s all I remember), and he agreed to talk to my class.  It was an early May evening when he showed up.  He was a large (very large), plain man, greasy hair, wearing clunky sandals on bare feet, disheveled in Bermuda shorts and a Hiawiian shirt, tucked in on one side and hanging out on the other.  He filled the doorway.  Oh no, I thought, what have I gotten myself into? 

But he smiled at me, and he smiled at the class, and he began to talk.  We sat entranced for over an hour while he told us hilarious stories of stupid criminals and gave us his personal take on criminal investigation.  He was absolutely charming.  When he left, one of my women students sighed deeply and said to the class at large, “I would confess anything to that man.”

And, obviously, I never forgot him, because twenty years later Karen Pelletier opened a fictional door and his fictional counterpart walked into my story and took over.   After the first few chapters, I had to put Piotrowski on a diet.  And, Lieutenant Real-Life, I wish I had put you  on a diet, because six months later I read your obituary in the Berkshire Eagle.  I was sad about that–still am.  But just know that you charmed a classroom-full of students and their professor, and inspired a literary character that readers love–especially the women.

Besides, my pilgrimage is of a secular nature, drifting to the spiritual only on a day trip to the orange-red-purple-it-just-won’t-stay-one-color Sedona.  And, oh yes, there was that other kind of spirit awareness I found in a one-of-a kind Steelers Bar I happened to stumble upon (and even more so out of) just north of Scottsdale in a tiny town called Cave Creek.  The bar is Harold’s Corral but don’t bother to go there unless you’re seriously into the Black and Gold.  And if you have to ask what I’m talking about, I think Happy Hour at the venerable 50’s-kitsch Hotel Valley Ho may be more to your liking.

But I digress.  Back to the reason I’m in Scottsdale.  It’s to see the publishing industry’s most supportive folk on the planet when it comes to being there for their authors on the things that really matter.   And before you smirk and start to think, “Aha, Siger’s doing a you-know-what-kissing piece,” I’ve no need to.  We’ve already met and they’ve agreed to the three million advance for my next book.

Silence.

But it’s in drachmas.  And devalued ones, no less.  Make that much less.

Still, once again PPP went out of its way in showing genuine concern for my future.  This time their kindness was no doubt triggered by the financial crises haunting Greece, my adopted home and the setting for my Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis novels.

On Thursday night I was given the distinct honor of serving champagne and chocolates to the assembled masses at an author event (not mine) hosted by Barbara Peters for the thoroughly delightful Deanna Raybourn and Lauren Willig.  Their genre is foreign to my own, but waiting on foreigners is indeed a skill to be mastered in the new Greece.  I thank Barbara and the rest of the PPP family for giving me that training opportunity.

But what made it particularly meaningful was the venue.  You see, it took place on hallowed land, in the Poisoned Pen Bookstore on Goldwater Boulevard, which together with the offices of Poisoned Pen Press just a few doors up the street, are to PPP authors our Mecca of the West.

Amen.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think it’s time for bit more spiritual enlightenment, pilgrim, as this is my last night in this desert holy land before returning to Gomorrah on the Hudson.

Jeff

If my battered old runners could speak, what footnotes to my history they would reveal.

But, as the Christmas cracker joke has it, while they have tongues they cannot speak, and so I shall have to be their interpreter.

Every mark on their scuffed once-white surface tells a story. That long smear of rust on the left shoe was acquired from an ancient exhaust pipe that fell off the buggy in Connecticut on the way to Maine for a family holiday. We stored the pipe in the right wheel well — there were five people and luggage aboard an exceedingly small car — so if stopped for disturbing the peace we could produce the relic and explain we intended to get a new one fitted as soon as we arrived at our destination. Fortunately, while we coughed and roared, or rather the buggy did, through several states we managed to arrive without incident.

The new exhaust pipe fitted the day after we arrived in Maine outlasted the car.

It was in Maine the runners acquired literal tide marks from sea-wading. They are, however, silent concerning my painful attack of Lobster Legs after I remained too long in the sun and wind. As a result I shambled about in a semi-crouched fashion for the first few hours after getting up and was forced to descend the stairs, child like, on my rear end.

Then there’s the scattering of grass stains, picked up in woods here and there, along with several dark patches left by mud from plodging in the clart, as we say in northern-eastern England. Some brownish marks are relics of spilt coffee, imbibing vast quantities of which is my only vice. Well, not unless you count reading the Daily Mail online. There’s also a delicate tracery of black splashes picked up trotting along a remote rural road newly treated with tar and stone chips.

Years ago an elderly lady remarked to me she could deduce a lot about a person by their shoes. That talent would certainly be useful in a mystery novel, though what could a detective deduce about a character whose footwear exhibited traces of rust, seawater, grass, mud, coffee, and tar?

maywrite@earthlink.net

Mary Reed is the co-author of the John the Lord Chamberlain mysteries set in sixth century Byzantium. The current entry is Eight for Eternity. The next novel in the series, Nine for the Devil, will appear in March 2012.

Quite apart from his enormously successful series featuring Dalziel and Pascoe, he wrote a series about a Luton based private eye, Joe Sixsmith, and under his own name and under various pseudonyms, he published a good many stand-alone novels, including a couple set in the First and Second World Wars respectively. He was an accomplished exponent of the short form and his canvas was broad – examples include an enjoyable Sherlockian pastiche, as well as the Crime Writers’ Association’s Short Story Dagger winner, ‘On the Psychiatrist’s Couch.’. His many other awards, included the CWA Gold Dagger for Bones and Silence and the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger for his outstanding contribution to crime fiction.

Reg was a founder member of the CWA’s Northern Chapter, which first gathered for a lunch meeting in Boroughbridge, convened by Peter Walker, in November 1987. Reg christened those who attended “the few” and that occasion was the first time I met him and his wife Pat. I was a newcomer to crime fiction, but the kindness shown to me by the older and more established writers and their partners, who became steadfast friends for so many years, is something I’ll never forget.

Reg organised various Northern Chapter week-ends in his beloved Lake District – long before I started writing a series set in that wonderful part of the world. When he persuaded me to join him on the Diamond Dagger nominations sub-committee, I found I was the only other member. One of our first tasks was to agree criteria for the award, and in a letter to me, with characteristic wit, he said “we must above all things avoid any definitions which might require my returning my own DD!” There was never any question of that, and his marvellous sense of humour, keen intelligence and quiet generosity are as much a part of his legacy as those wonderful books.

The old-fashioned stereotype image of a hard-drinking, chain-smoking writer (male, of course) pounding on a typewriter, cigarette and shot glass close at hand.

… and…

Current-day stereotype image of a writer (woman, most likely) pounding on a laptop or a tablet (? pounding on a tablet ?), chocolate and coffee cup close at hand (but not TOO close… don’t want to spill coffee on the electronics).

In either case, the writer may be doing him or herself in, thanks to “bad habits.”

Hey, what’s bad about coffee and chocolate, you ask? Well, Mayo Clinic is a good place to get answers and read about some of the wiffle-waffle results of research. As it turns out, there are pluses and minuses to both substances (coffee here; chocolate here).

Apparently though, it’s not the chocolate and coffee that’ll do us in, but the sitting around on our… sitting apparatuses (had to check the plural of that one). A recent article (true confession: I read this in the AARP magazine) states “sitting is the new smoking.” This article garnered a bit of buzz from news media, including Huffington Post. You can read what the Mayo Clinic says about extended sitting here. No wiffle-waffle in this pronouncement from Mayo, alas. It’s all bad news.

So, have we current-day writers escaped the fate of those stereotype writers of old—keeling over of various ailments of lungs and liver—only to fall victim to too much sitting?? How… undignified.

Boy, that sure takes the buzz out of the coffee bean. Maybe we writers are simply an endangered species. Guess that means we’d all better write a mite faster, move around a bit more, and eat chocolate and drink coffee with more gusto. Sounds like a plan to me!

Speaking of plans (and chocolate): Are you planning to attend Left Coast Crime at the end of March? I’ll be there, celebrating the nomination of MERCURY’S RISE for the Bruce Alexander Historical Mystery Award with… chocolate (my not-so-secret sort-of-healthy vice), and I’ll bring plenty to share! If you see me, be sure to say “hi.” There’s a bookmark and some chocolate in your future if you do so.