A Road Trip for Readers by Neil Plakcy

Neil Plakcy’s golden retriever mysteries were inspired by his own golden, Samwise, who was just as sweet as Rochester, though not quite as smart. And fortunately he didn’t have Rochester’s talent for finding dead bodies. Now that Sam has gone on to his big, comfy bed in heaven, his place by Neil’s side has been taken by Brody, a cream-colored golden puppy with a penchant for mischief.

 

A native of Bucks County, PA, where IN DOG WE TRUST, THE KINGDOM OF DOG and DOG HELPS THOSE are set, Neil is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University and Florida International University, where he received his MFA in creative writing. He has written and edited many other books; details can be found at his website, http://www.mahubooks.com.

 

Neil, his partner, and Brody live in South Florida, where Neil is working on a fourth mystery, and Brody is busily chewing something.

 

 

 

 

 

A Road Trip for Readers

by Neil Plakcy

 

 

Let me take you on a little trip, to the river towns of Bucks County, Pennsylvania. I grew up in Yardley, right smack dab in the middle of this string of charming towns. I write about a place much like it in my golden retriever mysteries.

Bucks County snuggles against the curves of the Delaware River, forming the boundary between Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Within easy commuting distance of New York and Philadelphia, it’s home to a growing and increasingly transient population. As its farmlands gradually give way to suburban developments, some of those old connections are lost. I try to recreate a bit of that lost world in my books—my hero runs into classmates at the local coffee shop, and helps his childhood piano teacher out of a jam.

Writing about Bucks County has reminded me that my high school typing teacher, Mrs. Scammell, still lived at Scammell’s Corner, where generations of her family had farmed. The names of my classmates’ parents were on everything from garbage trucks to antique stores. Today, they have been replaced by chain stores and restaurants, but these the towns along the Delaware’s banks still retain their charm.

Yardley is a small town of Victorian gingerbread and native brown stone. There is only one traffic light in town, at the corner of Main and Afton. To the east is the Delaware River, and the ruins of the bridge to New Jersey that was destroyed in 1960 by Hurricane Donna. To the west is the old mill pond, now Lake Afton, where swans paddle beside the Victorian library, built by local residents in 1878. The mystery section was located beside one of those high, gothic-arched windows, and I used to look out at the water between browsing for the classic mystery authors  who cultivated my taste for crime fiction-- Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and Agatha Christie.

Today the library has moved to a modern facility in the country, but children and adults still use its steps to change into their skates for a quick turn on the ice in the winter, creating a tableau straight out of Norman Rockwell.

 Though the Hyatt Pharmacy at the corner is now a Starbucks, Yardley retains a small-town charm. I’ve even converted the Continental Tavern, which has been serving thirsty travelers at this intersection since 1863, into my own bar, called the Drunken Hessian. This is, after all, the stretch of river where Washington crossed the Delaware en route to his attack on the Hessian outpost at Trenton.

My fictional Stewart’s Crossing is just north of Yardley, on a stretch of beautiful riverfront that in real life contains only farmland. River Road, which my hero, paroled computer hacker Steve Levitan, travels a lot, is overhung with oaks, maples and elms and is lined with purple and white phlox on long stems and the tiny pansies called Johnny jump-ups.

As the rest of the river towns do, Stewart’s Crossing straddles the Delaware Canal, and I’ve used the canal and its towpath in my books, starting with In Dog We Trust. Steve walks his inherited golden retriever, Rochester, there. Despite the town nearby, the towpath is wild and quiet, lined with wild apple blossoms in the spring, climbing vines and yellow daisies and buttercups. Rochester loves to chase the mallards, Canada geese, other small birds, and maybe a rabbit or two.

Before railroads, canals played an important role in American commerce and transportation. They carried anthracite coal from the mines of Lehigh County to New York City and Philadelphia. Two hundred years later, the only traffic on the Delaware Canal comes from mule-drawn sightseeing barges run from New Hope, where an artists’ colony grew in the early twentieth century. When I was a teenager in the 1970s, New Hope was filled with hippies, head shops and antique stores, and it still retains a unique character today.

The land is low along the river and the verge is very narrow in many places from Yardley north to New Hope. I placed a car accident there in In Dog We Trust, though I’d probably never walk my own dog there, as the river is so close you can almost reach out and touch it.

In The Kingdom of Dog, Steve takes Rochester up to Bowman's Hill Tower, just inland from the river. It was built of local stone in 1930 and now stands over a nice park with barbecues and picnic pavilions named for Revolutionary War heroes. The picnic grounds are green and rolling, and the slope is just right for little kids to roll down. We often went there for school picnics in the spring. The tower is open from April to November, and is the centerpiece of a 100-acre wildflower preserve.

I’ve driven up the curving road many times, as well as hiking the trail up to the tower through woods that seem untouched since Washington's day. Once you've reached the summit, take the elevator up inside the tower and climb the last 21 steps, through a narrow, curving passageway more reminiscent of medieval Europe than depression-era Pennsylvania, to the observation platform, 110 feet up.

On a clear day, you can see 60 miles in any direction, and you'll understand why Washington sent his scouts to the top of this hill to watch for redcoats. The vista is of farms and fields, but increasingly you'll see renovated half-million-dollar farmhouses and fake-colonial suburbs. Look closely and you’ll see the area where I placed Steve’s alma mater, Eastern College.

I created the small college town of Leighville somewhere outside Upper Black Eddy, just a bit farther up the river from New Hope. Eastern dominates the hill overlooking the river, and provides another environment where Steve and Rochester can sniff out criminal intent. The third book in the series, Dog Helps Those, combines a college mystery with a murder in the world of dog agility training, and gave me a chance to return to the farmlands outside town where my parents used to take me to pick apples and strawberries, and to choose our Halloween pumpkins.

I try to incorporate the landscape of this area where I grew up, as well as years of loving dogs, in creating the world where my characters live. I may not live in Pennsylvania any more, but I love revisiting these river towns in my imagination, even though dastardly deeds occur there!

More information on my golden retriever mysteries, as well as my other mystery and romance novels and stories, can be found at my website, http://www.mahubooks.com.

 

Aging Dogs by Neil Plakcy

Neil Plakcy lives in south Florida, where he’s the president of the Florida chapter of Mystery Writers of America as well as a college English professor.
 

Though his own surfing is limited to the Internet, he’s written six mystery novels in the Mahu series, about an openly gay homicide detective in Honolulu who surfs big waves in his free time. He does have some experience to bring to his golden retriever mystery series, though—eleven years and counting with a very bossy golden named Samwise. His website is www.mahubooks.com, with information on his mystery, romance and mainstream novels.

 

Aging Dogs

by Neil Plakcy

One of the big questions a writer of a crime fiction series has to face is whether or not to age his characters. Some of the most moving books I’ve read have been the last in a series -- No Country for Old Men, by Joseph Hansen, or The Remorseful Day by Colin Dexter, in which the series hero faces his aging and mortality.
 

When I began writing my first published mystery, Mahu, I didn’t know the book was going to expand into a series. But once I finished that book, in which Honolulu homicide detective Kimo Kanapa’aka is dragged out of the closet, the character wouldn’t leave me alone. He knew there was more to his story to be told. I made the decision to age Kimo through the next five books, spacing them out about a year apart so that in a traditional publishing schedule I wouldn’t fall too far behind.
 

One of the important things about Kimo’s character arc has been his gradual coming out process. I often say at events or on panels that coming out isn’t just an event, it’s a process, and one that takes a character through several steps. In Mahu Surfer, the second book in the series, Kimo starts to get comfortable with being gay, and makes some gay friends. In the third book, Mahu Fire, he gets a boyfriend, and by the most recent book, Mahu Blood, they’ve moved in together.
 

All those life events meant that Kimo needed to get older as time passed. That isn’t a problem; unlike some authors, I was lucky enough to start with a character in his early thirties. He’s got a long, productive police career ahead of him.
 

I faced a different challenge when writing my golden retriever mysteries. In the first book in the series, In Dog We Trust, my forty-two-year-old human hero, Steve Levitan, adopts the year-old golden retriever belonging to his next-door neighbor when she is murdered. Not a problem for him when it comes to a series--but as all dog and cat lovers know, our companion animals have a much shorter life span than we do.
 

In her “Cat Who” series, Lillian Jackson Braun never seems to age either her protagonist, Jim Qwilleran, or his cats, Koko and Yum-Yum. She’s also never clear about how much time has passed between cases, though a few background details change-- Jim and the cats move to the north country, for example, and eventually into a converted apple barn.
 

What was I going to do about Rochester, though, my crime-solving golden retriever? I wanted my series to be more realistic than Braun’s. That means a couple of things. First, I wanted to avoid the dreaded “Jessica Fletcher syndrome.” My books take place in a small town in Bucks County Pennsylvania, similar to the one where I grew up. It’s nestled in a bend of the Delaware River, and it’s not exactly a hotbed of crime. How often could I have the dog discover a dead body?
 

In the second book, The Kingdom of Dog, Steve takes a full-time job at Eastern College, where he has been an adjunct instructor. He’s still bonding with Rochester, so he gets permission to bring his dog to the office every day. Then when the murder happens, Rochester’s right there to discover the body.
 

That’s an important point for a series involving a big dog-- Steve can’t just bundle Rochester into a shoulder bag and take him around town. The crime and the solution have to occur someplace Rochester would naturally go.
 

Being a big dog, too, Rochester has a shorter expected life span than a little dog. The Yorkie my partner and I had lived to be eighteen, but our golden, Sam, will have at least a few years less. He’s eleven and a half now, and I can see that he’s slowing down considerably. He’s given up on a lot of the behavior he gave to Rochester, like pulling forward on the leash, jumping around like a deranged kangaroo, and getting into other kinds of trouble.
 

So I’m confronted with a real problem. If I move my golden retriever series forward year by year, soon Rochester will be too old to do much investigating.  But at the same time, I need to find crime scenes he can visit and places where murder can occur that won’t be too unrealistic.
 

For now, I’ve been doing that by moving him around Bucks County, which still has enough rural patches that big dogs are welcome. I’m working on the third book now, and Rochester’s going to agility trials, which are a lot of fun to watch (and to write about). The dog show circuit is full of interesting personalities—at least one of whom is bound to wind up dead.
 

I think about a year has passed during the course of these three books. If I can continue that progression, he’s still got a lot of good crime-solving years ahead of him. But readers have to keep wanting to read about Rochester in order for me to keep coming up with cases for him to solve!

Falling in Love with Your Heroes by Neil Plakcy

Neil Plakcy is the author of the Aidan and Liam bodyguard adventure series, Three Wrong Turns in the Desert and Dancing with the Tide.

His other books are Mahu, Mahu Surfer, Mahu Fire, Mahu Vice, and Mahu Men, about openly gay Honolulu homicide detective Kimo Kanapa’aka, GayLife.com, and In Dog We Trust, a golden retriever mystery.

He edited Paws & Reflect: A Special Bond Between Man and Dog and the gay erotic anthologies Hard Hats, Surfer Boys and Skater Boys (2010).

Plakcy is a journalist and book reviewer as well as an assistant professor of English at Broward College’s south campus in Pembroke Pines. He is vice president of the Florida chapter of Mystery Writers of America, and a frequent contributor to gay anthologies.

Falling in Love with Your Heroes 

by Neil Plakcy

Remember that feeling of falling in love? You want to spend time with that special someone, get to know everything about him or her, see how that initial attraction develops. That’s the way I feel about the heroes of my books. I fall in love with every one of them.

Kimo Kanapa’aka, the Honolulu homicide detective hero of my Mahu mystery series, is the character who has evolved the most of all my heroes, perhaps because I’ve been writing about him the longest. In 1992 I went to Hawai’i on vacation, and began work on a book about a private eye who was also a surfer, and who spent a lot of time on the beach at Waikiki. He was a handsome, sexy, mixed-race guy, and I was intrigued as I got to know him.

But I didn’t know him that well, as it turns out. I was challenged to explain why he’d left the police force to become a private eye, and I didn’t know the answer. I ended up abandoning that book and writing Mahu, where I worked through many drafts, and Kimo be became a gay cop struggling with his sexuality. By the time I finished that first book, I had fallen in love with him.

From book to book, he has grown and changed, just like any lover. He’s become more comfortable with his sexuality, met and lost a boyfriend then found him again. Like Kimo, I fell for that guy, handsome fire investigator Mike Riccardi, and like Kimo, I had to get to know him in order to love him. Working through Mike’s issues deepened my affection for him. I even wrote a short story from his point of view, which helped me understand him on his own, not just through the lens of Kimo’s affection for him.

It was a different story with the heroes of my Have Body, Will Guard series. The first book, Three Wrong Turns in the Desert, began with the image of a handsome, well-built guy taking a shower outdoors. ESL teacher Aidan Greene, on his own in Tunis, spies former SEAL Liam McCullough at that shower, and falls for him hard—hard enough that he lets himself get dragged on a crazy adventure through the Sahara.

My love affair with Aidan began as I investigated his back story, how he’d been dumped by a long-term lover and fled Philadelphia for a job several time zones away from his ex. I empathized with him and wanted to provide him the happy ending I thought he deserved.

I fell for Liam, too. His back story wasn’t as clear to me; he had left the SEALs after violating “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and set himself up as a bodyguard in Tunis. When he mistakes Aidan for a client, and the client is killed, the job of completing his client’s mission gets very personal for him. Since I was writing from Aidan’s point of view, for the most part, it was harder to get a grip on Liam. Was he just using Aidan? Or was he falling in love, too?

My editor helped me figure that out, and see that Liam needed Aidan in his life just as much as Aidan needed Liam. Understanding his vulnerability made him come alive to me.

The second book in that series, Dancing with the Tide, debuted in June, and I’ve written a draft of the third book in the series, Teach Me Tonight. The more I get to know Aidan and Liam, the more I love them.

Not that I don’t love the guys in my other books, but when you work on a series, it’s like you’ve taken your relationship to the next level. Now you start to see the dirty clothes dropped on the floor, the open tube of toothpaste in the bathroom. To keep on writing about them, you have to love them, and you hope that readers will love them, too.

I do, and I hope my readers do, too.

http://www.mahubooks.com

http://www.loose-id.com/Our-Authors/Neil-Plakcy/

Unexpected Favorites by Neil Plakcy

Neil Plakcy is the author of Mahu, Mahu Surfer, Mahu Fire and Mahu Vice, mystery novels set in Hawaii, as well as the romance novels GayLife.com and Three Wrong Turns in the Desert (coming September 29 from Loose Id). He edited Paws & Reflect: A Special Bond Between Man and Dog and the gay erotic anthologies Hard Hats and Surfer Boys.

Plakcy is a journalist and book reviewer as well as an assistant professor of English at Broward College's south campus in Pembroke Pines. He is vice president of the Florida chapter of Mystery Writers of America.



www.mahubooks.com
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Unexpected Favorites by Neil Plakcy

If you know me as a writer of a police procedural series featuring a gay cop in Honolulu, Hawaii, you might make some assumptions about what I like to read. For the most part, you’d be right. I love mysteries, an affection I nourished throughout my teen years on a steady diet of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, and other classic detective authors.

I read almost everything that comes out in the gay mystery niche, which is bigger than you might think—there were 19 nominees for the Lambda Literary Award for best gay men’s mystery last year. It’s not a stretch to assume I’d read other gay fiction and at least a few books from the best-seller list. Delve a little deeper into my background and find that I was an English major in college, that I have a master’s in creative writing and I teach writing at a college, and you can see that I might appreciate James Joyce, Jane Austen and George Eliot.

But I have a few unexpected favorites, too. There’s a fantasy trend that runs through my reading, from Tolkien to Rowling to Neal Stephenson, whose works encompass historical and speculative fiction. Naomi Novik and her Napoleonic dragon series, and the Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan, feed that appetite.

Those British mysteries honed my appetite for Anglophilia. I read the R. F. Delderfield historicals in high school, as well as the village stories of Miss Read, a pseudonymous country school teacher whose books are as charming as Alexander McCall Smith’s Mma. Ramotswe series, without quite so much murder and mayhem. (Though when the gypsies bring their carnival to Fairacre, watch out!)

When I ran out of library books at home, I could always dip into my mother’s teetering stack of Harlequin romances, and from them I developed a taste for chick lit and humorous romance. I love what are called “Aga Sagas” in Britain, big thick romances by Jilly Cooper and others, named for a kind of stove.

Maybe that’s what led me to Laurie Colwin.

For the most part, I don’t reread books. Colwin is one major exception. Happy All The Time is like comfort food to me, something I dip into over and over again. Colwin’s charm, insight into human behavior, and the way her domestic details illuminate character draw me back to her whenever I need a boost.

I’ve worn out one paperback edition and replaced it with a newer one. I’ve read and enjoyed her other books, including the two collections of her Gourmet magazine essays called Home Cooking. But Happy All The Time is the book that draws me back. It’s the story of two young men of wealth, education and privilege, living in 1980s Boston and New York, and the women they fall in love with. It’s a simple story, in the end, but the characters are so vivid, the locales so perfectly evoked, that it somehow transcends its simple material.

I’ll bet we all have one or more of those unexpected favorites. What are yours?

What might your friends or fans be surprised to learn that you read?