Strange Pets: How Frank Became a Lizard - by Susan McCormick

 JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Susan McCormick and her Fog Ladies Mysteries are fan favorites here at JRW for a good reason. This time around, she's switching into suspense! In The Room at the End of the Hall, a surgeon winds up at the same the hospital where his alcoholic mother is receiving care. When things start to go very wrong, he begins to suspect his mother - or is it that he's the one mentally slipping away?

As usual, Susan leaves it to you, dear readers, to take a look at the book. She's here to talk about something almost as near and dear to our hearts as crime fiction: pets!

 

I love dogs and try to include them wherever I can in my books, big dogs like the Newfoundlands we have loved, little dogs the size of our Newfoundland’s tongue. Cats make good characters, too, and the squint of a cat’s eye or the laziness of his stretch can color a scene without a lot of words. 

 

For my new novel, The Room at the End of the Hall, a mother/son suspenseful mystery, the pet plays a significant part. Originally I wrote about a cat named Frank, and the lonely main character poured out his troubles into Frank’s sympathetic ear. Then I received advice that cats mean cozy, and if I kept the cat, my book would be forever pegged as a cozy mystery. I love cozies; in fact I write an entire cozy series, The Fog Ladies, replete with all the requisite cats and dogs. 

 

But this book is not a cozy. Frank became a tegu lizard, who listens coolly and offers no support. I knew nothing about lizards, did a lot of research, and along the way discovered that people have pets even more strange than a mini T. rex reptile.

 

 

 

Strange pet #1. Zebra. You may have seen the photograph in the paper this summer with a forlorn zebra being airlifted in a sack by a helicopter. His owner had had him less than a day, and the poor zebra, Ed, hightailed it to elsewhere. Ed was found a week later and returned by air, and at writing, his owner was looking for a more suitable home. What do you even feed a zebra? What do you do with him? You can’t ride him. You can’t put him to work pulling a plow. Where are his friends? Zebras travel in packs, and Ed was probably looking for his when he took off.

 

Strange pet #2. Lion (s), Tiger (s). Roar, a film by Tippi Hendren and Noah Marshall, began as an idea about lions moving into a house in Africa and culminated in the couple raising lions and tigers in California to star in the movie. 400-pound Neil the lion roamed the house and slept in their bed, and one photo shows five tigers in the bed as well. All told, 150 untrained lions, tigers, cheetahs, and leopards took part in the filming, which lasted years. Tippi once required 38 stitches to her neck, and her daughter, Melanie Griffith, required 50 stitches to her face and almost lost an eye. Not ideal house pets.

 

Strange pet #3. Bear. I can’t talk about lions and tigers without mentioning bears. I love bears. I could watch bears all day, all week, never leave the bear area. Mark Dumas felt the same but went one step further and brought the POLAR BEAR home, a baby from a mother who neglected her and a zoo that could not keep her. Agee grew into an 800-pound fur ball, grew out of the house and into her own yard, but still swam in the family pool. Mark Dumas was an animal trainer, so the photo with his head in Agee’s mouth is apparently safe.  Agee died this year at age 30.

 

Strange Pet #4. Giant African Millipede. Described by The Spider Shop as “the perfect starter invertebrate,” these creatures are slow, docile, and quiet. They are not cuddly. They require a humid terrarium and millipede mulch and can live ten years. Oh, and when alarmed, they secrete a toxic liquid, HYDROGEN CYANIDE, enough to irritate the skin but not enough to kill. Unless a murder mystery writer decided to collect it…

 

Do you have a strange pet? Or know of one? What’s the strangest pet you’ve seen?

(Note: Some of the pictures are from Pexels. Sadly, no picture of Ed, Neil, or Agee.)

 

 

The Room at the End of the Hall  When rising star surgeon Michael Baker moves home to care for his estranged alcoholic mother, his life falls apart. One patient dies, another lands in the ICU, he loses his chairmanship, and the new chairwoman takes a nasty tumble on the roof. His mother cries murder, but did her alcohol-addled brain suffer one fall too many? Or… is he the cause?

 

Susan McCormick is an award-winning writer and doctor who lives in Seattle. She writes a cozy murder mystery series, The Fog Ladies, and she also wrote Granny Can’t Remember Me, a lighthearted picture book about Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, and The Antidote, a middle grade to adult medical fantasy. She is married with two sons, and she loves giant dogs, the bigger and slobberier the better. However, she will not house any lions, tigers, bears, or millipedes. You can find her at her website, friend her on Facebook, and follow her on Instagram.

You can find her books and reviews at Goodreads and at Bookbub.

Harvesting Inspiration, a Guest Post by Sarah Stewart Taylor

RHYS BOWEN:  So many good books coming out around this time! Not only are we celebrating my release and Lucy's next week, but several good friends of the Reds also have new books out. I'm happy to be hosting Sarah Stewart Taylor today, calebrating her new book HUNTER'S HEART RIDGE. And Sarah is here to share about a subject close to my own heart: flowers.  I love flowers. When I go to the farmer's market to buy beans and plums I often return with a bunch of freshly cut flowers as well. I'd love to have an English garden full of scents and blooms but alas I live on a hill where deer wander freely and devour anything that isn't oleander. But I'm living vicariously through Sarah's flowers today!

SARAH STEWART TAYLOR:

 While harvesting flowers in my cut flower garden this morning, I thought to myself, “Alice Bellows would be so proud of my scabiosa.”

Alice Bellows is not a real person. She is a character in my series of novels set in 1960s rural Vermont. In the series starter, Agony Hill, Alice, who has returned to her hometown to live after the suspicious death of her CIA-connected husband and a lifetime of espionage adventures of her own, makes flower arrangements for a town celebration, gives arrangements to friends, and spends hours upon hours in the peace of her meticulously-designed and well-tended gardens.

At some point over the last couple of years, I realized that my interest in flowers and Alice’s had begun to flow together so that I wasn’t sure where one started and the other ended. Like Alice, I became absolutely obsessed with growing cut flowers for bouquets.

I’ve always loved growing things. We have a perennial garden, planted by my late mother-in-law, at our farm that I have fun caring for, and I have often planted sunflowers or zinnias and enjoyed harvesting the blooms. But two years ago, after one too many visits to Floret Flower Farm’s Instagram account, I realized that I wanted to try growing cut flowers myself and that I wanted to learn how to arrange them.

There’s something about being able to present a friend or family member who is celebrating or going through something difficult with a glorious arrangement of home-grown flowers. Flowers, lovely but short-lived, force us to slow down and notice the sublime, to revel in the miracle of nature’s wildly varied colors and shapes.

So, last summer, I started preparing the beds and grew a few varieties of zinnias and cosmos. Over the winter, I read and researched and ordered way too many seeds. When my husband gave me a seed-starting set up, complete with grow lights, my new hobby began to bloom, so to speak.

While snow blanketed the ground outside my windows, I started about twenty varieties of cut flowers from seed: snapdragons, scabiosa, yarrow, strawflower, feverfew, veronica, celosia, gomphrena, zinnias, cosmos, and more. Every day I would check the little seedlings, watering them, turning them to the lights, and dreaming about the day they would finally reach maturity.

I can’t tell you how much joy it has given me to watch them grow, first inside and then out in my garden. In so many ways, cut flower gardening is an excellent antidote to the ups and downs of writing and publishing. Weeding and watering give me a great excuse to get up from the computer and when my words don’t feel particularly well-composed or beautiful, I can create order and art with the flowers. I don’t know exactly where I’m going with this passion; I’m hoping to have a farmstand and sell bouquets at some point, but I have a lot to learn before that will be possible. 

Doing the work of growing all of these flowers has helped me to understand Alice better too. After the danger and uncertainty of her married life, she has found peace and satisfaction in her gardens. There is also a secret in her past that draws her to her beds and borders and, since these are mystery novels, in Agony Hill and its follow up, Hunter‘s Heart Ridge, which comes out August 5th, Alice begins to suspect that her past in the intelligence world is not completely in the past. 

Whatever happens to her though, I know she’ll keep growing flowers and I’ll be gardening and arranging right alongside her.

Have you ever shared a hobby with a fictional character?

SARAH STEWART TAYLOR is the author of the Sweeney St. George series, set in New England, the Maggie D’arcy mysteries, set in Ireland and on Long Island, and Agony Hill and Hunter’s Heart Ridge, set in rural Vermont in the 1960s.

 Sarah has been nominated for an Agatha Award, the Dashiell Hammett Prize, and the MWA Sue Grafton Memorial Award and her mysteries have appeared on numerous Best of the Year lists. A former journalist and teacher, she writes and lives with her family on a farm in Vermont where they raise sheep and grow blueberries. You can learn more about her at www.SarahStewartTaylor.com. Visit her on Instagram and Facebook to see more of her flowers!

Rhys Celebrates Pub Day of MRS. ENDICOTT'S SPLENDID ADVENTURE.

 RHYS BOWEN: Hello friends. Please raise a glass with me to drink a toast to Mrs. Endicott! She is a woman who has been ignored and unappreciated for all of her married life. She has lived HIS life. And when she is cast aside in favor of a younger woman she does not go quietly. Instead she escapes with two other women whom society has ignored, in her husband's Bentley to the south of France and finds a whole new and exciting life there.

I hope this book will be encouragement to all middle-aged women who think that life has passed them by. You are never too old for adventures, new challenges, a new life.  My daughter's close friend went to medical school at 55. My own daughter became a psycho-therapist after she turned 50. 

But this story has me thinking about invisible women. After a certain age women become invisible. That's why Miss Marple is such a good sleuth. She sits doing her knitting, observing everything, overhearing everything and nobody knows she is there!

It can be bloody annoying at times. I have certainly experienced it myself. I was waiting in line at a car rental counter. A man in front of me and one behind me. The first man was being served. Another employee came on and said to the man behind me, "Can I help you, sir?"

I (being me) spoke up, "Is a woman not allowed to rent a car in this state? I wasn't aware of such a rule."

She said hastily, 'I'm sorry madam. I thought you were with that gentleman."

That's always it. They think you should only be out in the presence of a male protector. How archaic. When I'm on book tour I have to eat in hotels a lot. So either I can order room service and get cold meals and a limited menu or I can face the restaurant. When I appear they aask, "Are you waiting for somebody?" And when I say no, a table for one, they escort me to a table in a far corner, behind the potted palm and usually close to the loo. I have learned to counter this. As we cross the dining room I say,"I'd prefer to sit near the window, thank you" and take a prime location. I then ask for the wine list and order an expensive wine that I know they can't pronounce. "I'd like the Schattsheimer-Gewurztrauminer, please."

They then know that they can't ignore me.  

And when it's not being ignored it's being patronized. They call you dear with a silly smile on their faces. "What medications are you taking, dear?" at the doctor's office, as if I've suddenly become simple in the head.  I had one young medical person suggest I give up typing and take up another hobby if it was affecting my neck and shoulders.

"Would you give up typing if you sold a million copies?" I asked sweetly. Small victories.

And so the fight goes on. For my three women in the book they do establish themselves in a place where they become a respected part of the community. When they are given the chance they blossom. For the rest of us the struggle continues.

I know this is resonating with a lot of our Reddies. Have you had to endure similar patronizing put downs? What do you do about it? A signed copy of the new book to my favorite comment!

And for friends in the Bay Area, I'll be hosting a launch party at Book Passage in Corte Madera on Saturday August 9, at 4 pm. See you there!