@WendallThomas: YOUR HANDBAG IS KILLING ME!

HALLIEEPHRON: I write books about creepy dolls, but when Wendall Thomas, a talented screenwriter and script consultant, turned her hand to writing a crime novel, she one-upped me. LOST LUGGAGE crawls with reptiles--lizards, snakes...

Can you say Ca-reepy!

Wendall, I'm afraid to ask… but what inspired that choice?

WENDALL THOMAS: I’ve never spent a lot of time thinking about reptiles, at least the non-human kind. Personally, I’m traumatized by snakes–-I grew up in copperhead country, once found one waving around the medusa-like strands of the mop in my linen closet, and moved to the West Coast immediately. In general, I try to stay away from anything slimy, be it salamanders, politicians, or stewed okra.

 

So how did I wind up with a snake coiled through the titles and a Madagascan chameleon as the sidekick in my first novel, Lost Luggage?

It started with a script. As I stumbled through my early screenwriting career, working on children’s shows and comedies about genies and insurance agents, all I really wanted to write was Romancing the Stone. Diane Thomas’s script was one of my favorites and I wanted to write a scene as good as the one which started with a mudslide, sent Michael Douglas’s face right between Kathleen Turner’s legs, and ended with the line “Joan Wilder! Welcome to Columbia!”

 

Eventually, I found my heroine—Cyd Redondo, a Brooklyn travel agent who’d never been farther than New Jersey. I wanted her to wind up on an adventure somewhere exotic. Like Africa. So I started researching African crimes. Endangered animal trafficking came up instantly.

The more I read, the more horrified I became, not only with how many species we were losing every day, but with the innate cruelty of the smuggling trade. Traffickers killed baby rhinos to summon their mothers for their horns, sewed parrots’ eyes shut so they’d be quiet, compressed cobras into potato chip cans, and shoved week old tiger cubs into unventilated suitcases.

I was shocked that the most lucrative smuggling markets was in...reptiles. Sparked, ironically, by the first yellow python photographed in National Geographic, the American appetite for exotic snakes, lizards, and skinks had created a billion-dollar business.

Like my heroine, Cyd, I braved a Herpetology Expo, in Pasadena of all places, to find creatures I’d only seen in my nightmares sitting on patron’s shoulders or huddled in take-out containers that could have come from Jerry’s Deli. It gave me a completely new perspective on lots of things, including blacklight t-shirts, male ponytails, and pythons.

We all know we should “Save the Whales,” give to the WWF’s “Giant Panda” fund, or donate to the ASPCA, but everything that’s important in the world isn’t cute or easy, so I decided these maligned creatures deserved a story too.

The script didn’t sell and languished in a file for years, but I couldn’t get Cyd, or those suitcases, out of my head. When I started to consider her as a series protagonist, people said to lose the “animal issue,” that it was too heavy for a comic novel. But for me, Cyd’s growing understanding of the world beyond Brooklyn was the heart of the series. 

I ignored all naysayers and, miraculously, found a publisher. Time will tell whether taking on a “cause” can hurt or help a mystery, but I’m for the chameleons, regardless.

HALLIE: ...and I KNOW, from reading this, it's going to be funny. Despite the serious subject matter. And I'm intrigued to find out how then book's title figures in the plot. The mind boggles.

I grew up in Southern California, terrified of rattlesnakes which were (still are?) common in the foothills... not that there are any uninhabited foothills any longer. I grew very fond of the geckoes that lived in the ceiling of my daughter's apartment in Mexico. They clicked and pooped. And I remember learning that lizards could lose their tails and grow a new one. (What I didn't know then but something I learned from Tess Gerritsen: lizard tails keep wiggling after they've been severed.) Fortunately, that sums up my knowledge of reptiles.

What are your feelings about reptiles?