When I was a kid, we’d occasionally go to visit my mother’s
childhood friend, who had an adorable dachshund, I loved playing with. I began
pestering my parents to get me a dog, and my seventh birthday present was
Pierre, a black miniature poodle puppy. (My mother, who had grown up with a
Chow, was determined not to get stuck vacuuming dog hair every day.)
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| Me and my puppy |
Although like every kid, I tried to duck out of some chores,
I did walk Pierre almost every day, he sat on my lap on car trips, and he was
small enough that I could carry him around. Pierre set me on my path as a dog
lover, though I didn’t realize that I could write about dogs until my partner
and I adopted a golden retriever puppy we named Samwise, who became my constant
companion, just as his namesake did in The
Lord of Rings for Frodo.
But dogs weren’t the only animals to show up in my fiction. I
am allergic to cats – but that has never stopped me from writing about them.
The first significant cat in my life belonged to my friend Vicki’s mother.
Rajah was a regal black Persian who owned that house, and I was intrigued by
his personality, so different from Pierre’s eagerness to be petted and loved.
Vicki and I would sit on her living room floor, calling for Rajah to come to
us—and we were usually ignored.
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| A six-toed Hemingway cat |
That wasn’t the case with my friend Pam’s cats, though. When
we both moved to Miami, she got interested in Hemingway cats – the six-toed
ones that lived around Ernest Hemingway’s house in Key West, or were descended
from those. She adopted a six-toed Abyssinian
she named Hemmie, and Hemmie and I became good friends. I used her, and her
characteristics, for a couple of short stories I wrote for collections of
romantic stories sold at grocery store checkouts.
The cat in those stories is named Pilar and she’s as quirky
and inquisitive as Pam’s Hemmie. I admit I used both those cats as the basis
for Sheba, the tiger-striped cat in my story “Riding the Tiger,” included in
the Happy Homicides 5 anthology. I needed a smart cat, one savvy enough to go
out seeking the crime-solving duo of Rochester and Steve. Of course it’s
Rochester who first notices Sheba, and takes off after her down the street.
So far, cats and dogs are the only animals who’ve populated
my fiction. But a neighbor of mine has a couple of brightly-colored parrots who
often stand out on the wall at the edge of his house, and my own goldens, Brody
and Griffin, are very interested in those birds. So who knows how my criminal
menagerie will expand?
Today (May 26) is the last day that the Happy Homicides 5 collection will be discounted to 99 cents.
