The Dollmaker’s Daughters

The Dollmaker’s Daughters is free free on Kindle Friday-Saturday August 10-11. The link is in the title; please tell your friends.

This was the last Bo Bradley mystery and it continues to haunt me, or its inspiration does.  Legally, I can never say why, never tell the real story behind the fictional one.  But surely I can safely say something.  I really was a child abuse investigator, really did Bo’s job and lived on Tagamet the entire time.  Any social worker can describe the rhinoceros-thick defensive skin social work entails, and the skin must be even thicker when the clients are children.  (Or animals, except they don’t even get social workers.)  My “skin” was about as defensive as wet tissue.

It isn’t necessary to describe the horrors that showed up on my desk in tidy manila folders.  Everybody knows these things happen, although most would prefer not to know too much.  I preferred not to know that much and after a few years quit my job to write novels and work as an advocate for people with psychiatric illnesses.  Moonbird Boy was finished and during a break between speaking engagements I was in that mood where you read the whole Sunday New York Times cover to cover even though you don’t live anywhere near New York and don’t really understand half of it.   The paper I read wasn’t the NYT  but the local one.  I read about tire sales and ribbon cuttings, somebody’s son in the military who got a medal, a knife fight outside a bar.  And I read the obituaries.

I never read obituaries because they’re not interesting.  They’re all the same.  Everybody who died was beloved by everybody else and will be sorely missed.  No stories there.  But this time I plowed on through, actually puzzled at my own behavior.  I won’t say that “something” told me to read the obits because it wasn’t like that.  I just kept reading for no reason whatever.  Reading every word.  Including a brief, dry, obviously legal announcement.  The kind of announcement government agencies are required by law to print, once, in a paper of record in the jurisdiction of the agency.  No one is expected to read these.  They are a formality.  But I recognized the name, and felt an involuntary, sharp intake of breath.

It had been years since I handled that case, and the reality of what had happened after I closed that manila folder for the last time swirled in my head like a sandstorm.  It couldn’t be!  The name in the paper should have died long ago; but didn’t.  Neither did it live.  That name had merely existed in some limbo I suddenly imagined in the prose style of Stephen King.  The prose style of horror, what else?

I started to write The Dollmaker’s Daughters immediately, that minute, wrote until I could put the image in words, Bo’s dream that begins the tale.

“The dream had been of a cold, windowless room filled with breathy clicking sounds. Mechanical sounds. Repetitive and devoid of meaning. And the room was some kind of trap, or prison, or place of exile filled with grief and anger and a terrible sense of waiting. It felt like a long-abandoned subway station where no train has come in years, although one more is expected. And that train will be the last, and will carry nothing alive.”  (The Dollmaker’s Daughters, Chapter One)

The true story still haunts; the novel is the only closure it will ever have.

 

 

 

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Jill Bonner

I had to choose a pseudonym.  I write darkish, dense, wry, occasionally acerbic tales that hover perilously close to another genre called magical realism, without ever quite going over the line.  Heretofore, I’d never written a cozy mystery.  But now I can write anything I want, so I thought I’d try a series of cozy mystery short stories for Kindle.  Authors who write in differing genres create pen names for the various series.  I needed a cozy name.  It wasn’t hard.  “Jill Bonner.”  My grandmother’s big fox terrier.

The dog in the pic isn’t Jill and isn’t even a fox terrier (it’s an English white terrier), but imagine her with brown spots and that was Jill.  Jill was the first dog in my life, hers the first canine kisses and muddy footprints on those tiny starched pinafores my mother ironed with precision.  I learned to walk hanging on to her fur, so I’m told.

And Bonner was my grandmother’s maiden name – Ann Lucile Bonner – later Scindy Padgett.  She’d longed to be an actress and insisted on spelling “Scindy” with an S as a sort of stage name she would never have.  The stage was forbidden territory for proper young women in the late 1800’s, the lair of questionable virtue.  So Scindy dutifully subverted her taste for drama and became a primary school teacher.  Until wild, handsome David Padgett came along, and she married him.  Probably, I suspect, because at the time he was the manager of a traveling Chautauqua show, and maybe she got to shed the straitjacket of propriety and show her stuff on limelit stages far from home.  If she did, she never told.  But she never lost her taste for drama.  The sort of drama found in what are now called romance novels.  And cozy mysteries.  Bingo.

By the time I was born the marriage was over and she lived alone, running an antiques shop from her living room in a house across from the cemetery on old Indiana Highway 41 in Vincennes.  That living room was like the set for “Fanny and Alexander,” a wonderland of spinning wheels, Victorian bric-a-brac and a carved table with a tasseled brocade tablecloth beneath which I created imaginary realms.  She never remarried, but much later I heard stories of visits by the legendary local veterinarian, aristocratic “Doc Tade,” whose horse was often seen tied to the hitching post outside.  He always brought flowers, I was told, on his visits to doctor the frequently ailing Jill.  (How many fox terriers enjoy house calls, much less bouquets from their vets?  Those were the days!)  Horses were long gone by my time, but Scindy wouldn’t let my dad tear out that hitching post.  It stayed until she died.

There were no romance novels back then, and no cozy mysteries, but if there had been my grandmother would have read them

Scindy and me

by the truckload.  As it was, she voraciously read the available fiction, itself an earlier version of the endless themes reiterated in contemporary women’s novels.  I still have her books, including her favorites – Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White and everything by Anna Katharine Green.  After Jill, a subsequent, and final, fox terrier was named “Maggie” for the 1893 Stephen Crane novel, Maggie, a Girl of the Streets.  Scindy devoured novels about women imperiled by the crushing social restraints of her time, and about others who managed to fall into “good” relationships with men.  Of course I’d choose her name, and Jill’s, as the author of a cozy mystery series!

And so sleuth “Mandy Dru” (It was originally “Nancy Dru” until lawyer friend muttered about fines for licensing infringements.) is born in the shadow of my grade school mystery favorite, under the pen name of a thwarted actress and her beflowered dog.  Mandy’s struggles are very contemporary, but I know Scindy would absolutely love them.  These are for you, grandma!

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A BRAND NEW BOOK!

As of today I have a new book, Bone Blind, on Amazon, its story still more a landscape of my mind than real.  Only just released, it remains entirely mine tonight, but sits all shimmering and luminous on the cusp of its future.  Other minds will soon enter that landscape, will engage with the curious spin from a murder in a candlelit room and the desperate scramble of three people to interpret, hide or succumb to its consequences.  But for the moment, on a rainy California night, Bone Blind and I are still locked in the ferociously intimate bond that exists between author and story.

We might have remained so forever.  Bone Blind is a novel my agent couldn’t sell.  “Love the writing but it’s too complicated, impossible to categorize,” editors said.  And they were right.  A mystery that’s also a near-obsessive love story and a police procedural plus not one but two little horror novels written by the protagonists, would be a nightmare to advertise, blurb and shelve in bookstores.  It’s not a horror novel; it’s about writing horror novels.  It’s not a “romance” because the romantic p.o.v. is not that of a spunky young woman, but a man who’d rather be anywhere but the mess he’s in.  Its police procedures are carried out on the sly by a detective on the eve of retirement who’s distracted by his fascination with Victorian architecture.  But it is a mystery, in the end.  And now, thanks to a technology that’s changing everything for books, and writers, Bone Blind gets to be a book!

I’m proud of it and thrilled to set it free.  When my seven other books were published there were bookstore events, positive reviews in major newspapers, speaking engagements and interviews.  There were award nominations and awards received, foreign editions, movie options and one actual movie.  But my other books were agented and handled by a large, long-established publishing house that no longer exists.  Bone Blind will have none of that massive promotional support; it will fly on its own merit and whatever amateurish help I can give it in a technological realm about which I know absolutely nothing.  This is exciting.

The world of independent digital publishing is a wild west of chaotic newness.  Throwing any American into it is like throwing Br’er Rabbit in a briar patch.   We thrive in such contexts.  So tonight I throw a new book into it and myself right behind, and anticipate having incredible amounts of fun.  Go, BB!

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The Zen of eBooks

A woman in my Jung study group defines herself as “an Episcopalian Buddhist,” a term to which I can relate. Zazen is not my thing; if I’m going to sit for any length of time, give me a chair with a back. But for a while I, an agnostic Anglican, fell in with a Buddhist sangha where you could lie down to meditate! I loved lying around on a soft carpet beneath the all-knowing eyes of a gigantic Buddha. Listening to myself breathe is tortuously boring so I never did come close to meditation, but nonetheless picked up a sort-of-Buddhist perspective that surfaces at times like this.

I have managed to get one book up on Amazon for Kindle!

It’s my first mystery, Child of Silence, long out of print but editions of it are all over the place since it went into several printings and was a book club selection. (Plus five foreign translations and a TV movie in France.) So its reincarnation as an eBook with a fantastic new cover (by DeronLeeAssociates@gmail.com) is exciting, but almost beside the point. The point is a peculiar sense of luminous calm that seems to accrue to the process. I have, with the usually-patient assistance of eBook producer Kimberly Hitchens, channeled a book into an existence that’s both insurmountably transient (As in- What happens when the entire Internet crashes?) and eerily permanent. It’s Change personified, ambiguous and hypnotic. And the Buddhist Third Noble Truth, in my proto-understanding, is that an ability to go with change is really cool.

So I’ve set my first book in Change, and will do the same for the others to which I hold the rights. Those already-published books, and new ones, will become electronic zeros and ones in a realm about which I know nothing. And so what? All I need to know is that doing this feels expansive and right. Child of Silence is now a cyber-pulse anybody can pull from the ether and transform into a familiar alphabet, its story available. Wow.

There is much discussion about real (meaning paper) books vs. e-books, these discussions involving a need to declare one’s deep attachment to real books. I admit an attachment to my grandmother’s 1890 edition of James Whitcomb Riley’s Rhymes of Childhood that is always in my bedside bookcase. Along with a hundred equally indispensable volumes. Then there’s the other upstairs bookcase and many more in the living room and my office, all double-shelved with books. I’m at the library weekly. To me, voicing a fondness for books is the equivalent of insisting that really, I do like, and am loyal to, water. “I” would not exist in the absence of either.

But unlike water, books are not physically (as in physics) definable. Books are experiential – mentally, emotionally, spiritually, all that. Riley’s words, “Aroint him the wraithest of wraithly things!” lie silently upstairs on century-old pages thick as grade-school construction paper. But those wraithest of wraithly things are no less so in Arial 12 on my pc screen, or carved in marble or written in sand. They are in my mind. And so I’m okay with any vector between words and minds.

The process necessary to the channeling of words into eBooks is, however, not very Buddhist. The process may be the antithesis of enlightenment, insisting as it does on close attention to HTML codes and Kindle’s renowned aversion to italics in headers. But this is the skeleton without which the magic would just swarm, amoebic and indecipherable, in a sloppy puddle of letters. So for the first time in my life I eagerly read techie stuff I loathed until two months ago. I learn a new vocabulary. “Metadata. Ping. Stray page breaks.” Who knew the placing of letters in space was so complicated? But it is and I’m in awe at the work of centuries of printers, typesetters, bookbinders, everybody who made books real. I guess attention to The Ten Thousand Things is necessary in order to get out of The Ten Thousand Things, as in reading a book. I’m not sure if this is a neat insight or just something everyone else has always known.

But in the end, when the metadata is hidden and the page breaks corralled, there is something that wasn’t there before – an eBook. This one is mine, but there are thousands of them, each some soul’s attempt to tell a story. I don’t know what there is, except stories. So I think maybe the doing of this, the intent of it if not necessarily its reception, is a slice of Nirvana. At least I think that today.

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