Regan McHenry Real Estate Mystery Blog Site

Christine Verstraete took time off from her busy writing schedule to stop by for a visit with her dog Gracie. My cat, Fala, is very relaxed about dogs and Gracie is very well mannered and sweet. They seemed to get along so well, it almost seemed to Chris and me that they were talking.

Gracie:  What is your name?

Fala:  I’m Fala. I was named by children who met me at Christmas and were overexcited by the season. They thought it would be fun to call me Falalala, la, la, la like the carol. It was more than seventeen years ago. I was just a kitten and didn’t know better than to accept my fate.

GRACIE: I understand you live with a mystery writer. Is she the parent of the children who named you?

FALA: Heavens, no! I climbed into my peoples’ car repeatedly when they came to visit my original people. It took me three years of clawing furniture and leaving mice in their shoes before they understood how unhappy I was and allowed me to escape with my new people. Human’s can be so obtuse, don’t you agree?

GRACIE:  What breed are you?

FALA:  That’s such a doggish question. I’m black with green eyes and intelligent and opinionated. Whatever breed that makes me, I’m certain it is a superior one.

GRACIE:  I don’t know why my owner insists on making up dogs like that other German Shepard named Chico in the book she’s writing about some girl zombie (whatever that is). I mean, I’m a lovely white dog with a great sense of humor; aren’t I enough? But I’m not in my writer’s books. Does your writer use you in her books?

FALA:  Unhappily, no. She does have two cats who figure more or less in her mystery series, but both are modeled on cats who were members of the household before I arrived. In her books, Harry was adopted by the protagonist Regan McHenry and her husband Tom after his person was murdered, and Regan and Tom’s other cat Cinco is modeled after my writer’s cat Sophie. I wonder if our writers are trying to protect our privacy of if they are simply obtuse.

GRACIE:  Do you help your writer when she writes?

FALA:  I try to, but she’s not terribly receptive to my suggestions. When I try to type on her keyboard she gets quite agitated and shoos me away. Granted I’m a terrible speller, but she doesn’t even try to understand what I’ve written. Some of my best work has been committed to the ether by her too-quick finger on the delete button.

I’ve tried sitting on her lap purring to calm her as she types, but even that doesn’t work. She’s forever flopping around and talking out loud to herself as she writes as if she were living what she’s putting down on paper. Why, she has on occasion even ducked down behind a chair and pretended to hide.

I feel sorry for her sometimes; she seems to be in such a state, especially if finding a body is happening in her writing. I remember when she was writing her first book, The Death Contingency, she actually wound up curled in a ball crying and shaking, she was so upset. I think it was because her characters start out as someone she knows — Regan was my writer, I think, until she found that body — but now she renames them right away and says it lets the characters be free to do things the real people she starts them as would never do. Of course an independence expert like me could have told her that if she asked, but she didn’t.

My writer has written four books now and she’s gotten better at the acting out part, but I still have to be careful if she’s doing a tense scene lest she trip over me.

GRACIE:  I know what you mean! My owner rights frightening things. They make me run under the covers and shiver!  I thought her short story The Killer Valentine Ball was going to be about playing, what with a ball in it, but it’s scary stuff. I don’t know why our writers do what they do; do you know why they write their books?

FALA:  Not a clue, but they seem to enjoy it. Humans. I’ve heard her tell people she began writing at the start of 2008 as a game because she got bored when she took time off from being a Realtor, but who really knows.

If she’s having fun like she says, why does she work so hard on the mystery part of writing. Some reviewer said her mysteries were, “smart, funny mysteries.” Another one said they were “well constructed mysteries filled with well hidden secrets like Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple series.”  I think she took those reviews too much to heart. When she’s writing, she doesn’t even want to take a break to play string chase with me. I just don’t think she can possibly enjoy what she’s doing when she doesn’t even want to take time out to watch me being cute. Is your writer as foolish?

GRACIE:  She is, but I have a great way to get her mind off her work and make her play with me. The most fun I have is when my owner and I play hide and seek. She makes and collects miniatures. She’s even written a book about her hobby called, In Miniature Style II, which looks like fun if you can get past the fact that it doesn’t have any projects to make for dogs. Anyway, the fun part is she’s always dropping something on the floor while she’s working.

Well, she’s kind of slow and old—don’t tell her I said that, though—and she usually has a hard time catching me or has to crawl on the floor to get that piece of wood, or cloth, or a miniature out of my mouth. Oh, it’s so much fun!

FALA: Purr.

Gracie: What sort of cat-astrophes happen in your writer’s books?

FALA:  Cat-astrophes. Aren’t you clever? There are always catastrophes; she writes murder mysteries. Someone is always getting killed. The murderer is always trying  to not get caught. Her character Regan is always trying to figure out what really happened even when the police think they know. Regan’s people reading approach to amateur sleuthing is forever making her very logical husband Tom a little crazy and driving her long-suffering semi-retired policeman friend Dave right up the walls even though he doesn’t have claws. Sometimes Tom and Dave have reason to worry about Regan. I fear she’s not always as clever as she thinks she is because, even if she does figure things out in the end, many times she gets herself in real messes before she does.

GRACIE:  You said your writer has four books out. Which do you think I would enjoy the most?

FALA:  Well, cats Harry and Cinco are prominent in The Death Contingency, so I like that book.  You might like Buying Murder because it has more action than the other books, you know, tail-chasing and things like that. I haven’t had a chance to read The Widow’s Walk League yet because it’s new and we’ve had a gopher problem that has been requiring my full attention, but my writer laughed often when she was writing it and was talking about Halloween night, an old cars show, and a séance…wait, what am I thinking? Of course, you would like Backyard Bones the best. Duh!

You could always go to my writer’s website, http://www.goodreadmysteries.com, and read the opening chapters of each of her books and decide for yourself, or if you have a Kindle, download a sample. Whatever. Where can people find out about your writer’s books?

GRACIE: They can find them on her website, http://www.cverstraete.com.  Oh, Fala, we have to wrap it up. Our owners are saying goodbye and I think mine looks like she’s ready to play. I have to find my ball. Just one thing in closing: I want to remind you dogs rule. Do you have an opinion on that?

FALA:  Have you ever heard of cat obedience school? And I never refer to my person as, “my owner.” Need I say more?

Congratulate me: last night I got a call from KION, our local CBS affiliate, to say that one of their reporters liked my story idea about how 9/11 affected me, their topic for the month, and wanted to film a feature…today.

She liked that I planted climbing red roses on two supports in the days following 9/11 as a memorial to the victims of the twin towers, and she liked that I had planted rudbekia, plants whose meaning according to Victorian tradition stands for justice, at their base the day we found out Osama bin Laden would spend eternity in an unmarked watery grave.

She especially liked the idea that the first book I wrote, The Death Contingency had a 9/11 related motive for murder and, though it is only a cozy mystery, hardly the stuff of book club pondering, it could be considered from the perspective of some serious questions like: Is murder ever justified, what is the difference between evil deeds and Evil like what happened on 9/11, and is redemption truly possible.

By the time she called back to confirm the interview time, it turned out both KION and FOX wanted to interview me. They wanted to know if it would be feasible for them to come by my house. Here, after three years of trying to get on TV to talk about my books, was my big chance.

I decided I better take a look at the garden from the perspective of a camera. Not only were no roses in bloom, but the plants, recently deadheaded and stripped of many of their leaves to control black spot, looked sparse, and that is a generous term. The rudbekia, in full sunflower-like splendor just last week, have gone to seed. I flirted with the idea of pinning fake roses to the plants but decided that would be cheesy (not to mention obvious) and settled on giving the roses a leaf implant with canes taken from their neighbors.(I’ll have to do that no more than 15 minutes before the cameras arrive or they’ll be limp.)

I’m trying to figure out where to have them tape me holding up a book. Since I write real estate mysteries, I think our house should look like a Realtor would approve of how it looks. My husband and I are normally tidy people but this year…well let’s just say our house suffers from a mousetrap game of disruptive repair projects which have created piles of out of place dirt, empty holes where the dirt should be, stripped sheetrock and curled back carpet, drain pipes that are lying in disarray everywhere, and scrapped eaves and uprights behind the downspouts which have not yet been repainted. Ladders and tools seem visible out every window and that’s not counting the ladders and tools we have to worry about tripping over as we walk down the hall.

My husband, the hardworking architect of all this repair work, has moved jeans and tee-shirts to a back room otherwise untouched by the process so he can make quick changes. His clothing is displayed on the banquet seating in broad piles of “clean, don’t touch,” “can wear again before needing laundering, don’t touch,” and “so filthy, touch at your own peril.”

I can’t forget to mention the cat. She’s 19, deaf, and shedding fur in clumps. Three years ago the day before Christmas the vet pronounced her dying. We decided to bring her home over the holiday, feed her a good last meal, and take her in to meet her fate the day after Christmas. Did I say it’s been three years and almost nine months since that fateful day? She now eats nothing but people tuna and laps milk, whole or half-and-half enriched, and is still very much with us. Having finished destroying the sofa in our bedroom, she has taken to sleeping on top of us and shredding our matelasse bedspread to better gain our attention when she is ready for fresh milk that we, in the still dark of night, are unwilling to get up and give her. Though the sofa needs recovering and the bedspread is now a mere hole-covered rag, we know it’s useless to replace either until she dies (which better be very soon!) Bottom line is even our bedroom has a well beyond shabby-chic look to it at the moment.

Then there’s my hair. You remember your school pictures and what happened to your hair the day those pictures were taken? Un-huh. As an added plus, my grey roots are beginning to grow out a bit, not so much as to really look grey, but enough to keep my dark hair from making it all the way to my scalp. On camera I’ll look like I have a bald-spot where my hair parts.  Can I have my 15 minutes of fame with a tarp thrown over me? Please? There’s a big blue tarp just outside the front door ready to catch paint drips from the eaves that I can use.

There’s the knock on the front door. Oh good, I see that the huge scary spider who only comes out at night and disappears by the time I drag the vacuum out to get him is out today and he has two visiting friends with him.

I bet all of you wish you were living the glamorous life of a soon-to-be-local-celebrity writer, don’t you?

The Widow’s Walk League, the fourth book in the Regan McHenry Real Estate Mysteries series I write is about to be released and I’m getting a little nervous. I have all the usual, “will people like it, more importantly, will they buy it,” jitters writers have with each of their books, but this is something else.

The book blurb reads:  “Santa Cruz husbands are being murdered.  The local news media is buzzing because a dark-clad figure witnesses describe as Death had been seen lurking nearby each time a murder is committed.  Regan McHenry discovers all the murdered men have something in common: their wives belong to a walking group called The Widow’s Walk League…”

My protagonist is a real estate agent like I was. What happens to her at work is based on things that happened to me or to other Realtors I know. The real estate stories, strange as they may be, are true; the murders are not. At least they’re not supposed to be. And that’s what’s worrying me.

The first series book, The Death Contingency, began with a young surfer partying too much, getting swept out to sea, and dying of hypothermia. I got a couple of outraged emails telling me that would never happen to a fit, experienced young man…until local  headlines proclaimed a young surfer died just as I described his death  in my book. The real death occurred about a year after my book was released.

Buying Murder, book three in the series, opens with the discovery of a partially mummified body hidden in a wall anomaly. It only took three weeks after my book’s release for a headline like that to hit the local news.

In a double yikes, four months after the book came out, one of the members of the real family who inspired the villainous family in the book was arrested for being exceedingly bad.

I’m not a psychic —it’s not like I can really foretell community deaths and murders. I don’t believe in psychics or mediums who say they can communicate with the dead, and as Regan demonstrates during a séance in The Widow’s Walk League, neither does she. Still, Regan finds that what she believes and doesn’t believe gets a little confusing when another murder takes place.

I hope I’m not psychic.

Some of the murders in the new book take place at my favorite Santa Cruz events.  I set one murder on Pacific Avenue on Halloween night and another at Woodies on the Wharf. (Yes, I know, I’m the one who wrote about murders happening where they did, but I was having too much fun writing the scenes to stop and think about what I might be unleashing.) Do you see why I’m worried? Should I warn anyone that the new book is being released?

Original post on Buried Under Books June 2011