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Eye of the Mountain God
I
was idly reading some Southwest U.S. history when I became fascinated
with the legend of the five emerald arrowheads.
Sometime in the autumn of 1535 the first
Spaniards reached the Rio Grande in southern New Mexico. The four who
survived the trek met a band of Pima Indians who showed them five
emerald arrowheads and told them about rich cities in the mountains to
the north. This may have begun the stories of the Seven Cities of
Cibola.
The tale of the arrowheads caused a
Franciscan friar to be sent to check it out. He dispatched an advance
scout who was to send back a cross each time he found something worthy.
The bigger the cross, the more important the find. The scout sent back a
whole series of crosses, each larger than the last, but he never came
back himself.
Over the next several years I constructed
a thriller plot around those arrowheads.
Megan Montoya, my protagonist, is a single
mom with a deaf autistic daughter and a driving desire to become a
professional photographer. The New Mexico landscape has yielded some
stunning photography, and this seemed a powerful way to establish place
and setting. As a magazine editor in Los Angeles I had directed
some superb photographers.
Lizzie, Megan's daughter, is based on a
charming young girl who lived across the street from me in Pennsylvania.
(Thank you Stan and Patty Gralski, for the loan of your daughter
Allie.) I must admit though, that Lizzie’s ESP powers were just my
imagination.
Bernie Ortiz, my unwilling, cussing,
curandera, or white witch, is based on a woman I worked with years ago
at New Mexico State University. She was as peppery as Bernie, but so far
as I know, she didn’t see the future.
Miguel is pure imagination. Putting myself
inside his skin and walking a while in his shoes is one of the most
creative and enjoyable work I've ever done.
I
confess to a lot of influence from John Nichol’s Milagro Beanfield
War and Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me Ultima, two of my favorite
books and authors.
Alma, my elderly artist with the rather odd
past, is mostly imagination, but her cabin and Rodolfo are not. I spent
several summers at that cabin and one summer a roadrunner fell in love
with me—actually I think it was the sound of my keyboard he fell in love
with; roadrunners sometimes make a clacking sound. At any rate, he kept
coming to the window trying to bring me lizards, which I later learned
they feed to their young. At any rate, I named him Rudolfo and years
later gave him to Alma.
Corazón's stunning appearance is based on
the woman who cut my hair in Pennsylvania. Her shop belongs to the guy
who cut my hair in Los Angeles.
Ben Corgan is very loosely based on an
archeologist I once worked with at New Mexico State.
The desert tortoise is always a surprise
when it strolls across a road and it seemed the perfect unusual wild pet
for Lizzie.
Early in the writing, I remembered a
resort owned by the Apaches in Southern New Mexico called Inn of the
Mountain God. When I saw a decoration made of twigs and yarn, known as
an Ojo de Dios, or Eye of God, I knew I had my title.
Listen to the Mockingbird
It is truly amazing what one finds when idly leafing through the pages -
and places - of history.
Much of the Mockingbird story
is based on real people and events, although I confess to playing fast
and loose with some of the facts. Matty, the protagonist, is loosely
based on two real women of the Civil War era. One was an Army wife who
came to New Mexico over the Santa Fe trail. In real life, she went on to
become a relatively well-known writer in 1870s San Francisco. Mathew is
based on this woman's real husband except for his final appearance.
But building a novel around that time and
place didn't occur to me until I discovered another woman of the New
Mexico Territory. This one wasn't in the history books. In fact, there
wasn't much written about her at all. Perhaps the only words were on her
tombstone in southern New Mexico: She owned a ranch and held up a
stagecoach.
I began to wonder what if..? And it wasn't long before Matty Summerhayes
walked straight out of that question and into Listen to the
Mockingbird.
Other "real" characters include the
general, the colonel and, of course, Kit Carson. The itinerant priest
and the gold mine are based on a legend that predates my story by about
60 years. The newspaper editor, the captain, and certainly the duel are
almost entirely factual. The exorcism and the character of Winona,
Matty's former slave, though, are entirely imaginary.
But was their story to be a Civil War
novel, a historical mystery, or perhaps a thriller? I've never quite
answered this question myself. Maybe the reader can.
Thicker Than Blood
In one of my several incarnations, I headed
the publications unit of a large California water agency.
Here, I have to confess something: after
writing about many, many subjects, I fell in love with water.
Think medicine is interesting? Take a long look at all the facets of
water. Whole civilizations rise and fall on its availability. People
kill for it. They really do.
The present triangle of warring water
interests -- agriculture, urban developers, environmental interests --
fascinated me and the industry magazine I edited won quite a few awards.
But it wasn't until long after I left that
job that it occurred to me that water was absolutely overflowing with
passion and drama: heroes, villains, corruption, misguided messiahs, the
very stuff of novels.
I needed a heroine, someone outside the
world of water, but close enough to see into it. I was killing time
waiting for someone in a parking garage, when I saw a newsletter written
by the owner of that garage. A young attractive woman! And Rachel Chavez
was born.
Lifeblood
At first I didn't think I could do a sequel to Thicker Than Blood.
I had originally planned that as a stand‑alone. But people began asking
me for more of Rachel Chavez.
So I Googled Crime+Parking and discovered that 38 percent of violent
crime takes place on the street or in parking lots.
Parking Lots? And the highest rate of that violence occurs in parking
areas connected with hospitals. Hmmm. A number of my years in Los
Angeles was spent as a medical writer and I had worked with a large
hospital. My excitement began to build.
As Rachel's Lifeblood episode grew, I discovered what a pleasure
it was to get to know my characters better: Rachel, who Booklist had
described as “one of the most refreshing heroines to wander into the
crime genre in quite a while,” Goldie a wise-cracking Whoopi Goldberg
sort, and Irene, a cell-phone-toting homeless woman.
They began to talk on their own. And I began to listen.
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