The True Story of Mindy Moo the Monkey Dog

by Janis Susan May/Janis Patterson

I don’t write about animals, but with two neurotic cats and a very prissy little dog – all rescues from horrific situations – I live with them all the time.

Mindy is a small 12 pound blonde dog who is half terrier mix and half pure diva. As far as she is concerned the house and everything in it – except perhaps our bossy little tuxedo cat Squeaky Boots – belongs to her. She has as many toys as the average day care center, and no matter how often I pick up they litter the floor like a minefield.

It wasn’t always so, though. When my husband returned from his last Iraqi deployment I told him it was time to get another dog, as our beloved little poodle had died just before he shipped out. We went down to East Lake Pet Orphanage, where we get all our animals, and asked to see a little dog. We were told they only had one, and she was spoken for by a woman who was coming to pick her up in a few days.

I asked if we could just play with the little dog for a while. Knowing that my husband had just returned from a war zone, they happily agreed and put us in an empty room. When Mindy came in I knew instantly that she had to be ours. She was hesitant and darling and wearing one of the ugliest dog dresses I had ever seen. We played with her for half an hour, each minute making me feel ever more strongly that she was our dog.

When the adoptions lady – whom we had known for years – came back, I started negotiating, doing everything in my power to get this dog. She was sympathetic but firm, saying that this other woman had been talking to them for over a month about Mindy, and that there was no way we could have her.

I don’t know why, but I looked her straight in the eye and said, “When she calls and tells you she doesn’t want the dog, we do and she is ours.”

The lady was startled, but politely insisted that it wasn’t going to happen. I repeated my order again. I ended up doing it four more times, each time more forcefully, every time she told me that it wasn’t possible. Finally – just to shut me up, I’m sure – she took my cell phone number and promised to call if the other woman called and decided not to take the dog. Obviously she didn’t believe it was going to happen.

The orphanage is exactly 4.4 miles from our house. We hadn’t even gotten home when my cell phone rang. It was the adoptions lady, her voice shaky and full of awe when she told me the woman had just called and she had decided not to take Mindy. I smiled and told her we’d pick our new baby up at 10 the next morning.

Oddly enough, from then until she left several years later, the adoptions lady made sure she was never alone with me again. I heard that the incident had freaked her out quite badly and she almost believed I was a witch. I’m not, but if I did do something to change the path of the cosmos I wish I knew how I had done it. It could be a useful skill!

Mindy has an unfortunately tragic history. Someone found her stumbling along a road, so starved she was almost too weak to walk, her claws overgrown so badly that they had punctured a couple of her pads. The worst thing was, she was judged to be only about eight months old – and she was lactating. The person who found her was a good person, for they searched for her puppies, but could never find them. He took her to East Lake, which has a wonderful medical system for their orphans. They saved Mindy medically, but she was so depressed that they wouldn’t even show her for possible adoption for almost four months for fear she wasn’t going to survive.

No trace of that pathetic creature remains. Mindy is active, bossy, loving, fun – a wonderful little dog. Her only failing – if you can call it such – is that she hates big dogs. When we go walking small and medium-sized dogs rate only a bark-bark, sniff-sniff, wag-wag and then all is cool. Big dogs – she goes into stealth mode. Not a sound, but suddenly she is latched onto their throats and growling for all she is worth. The big dogs in our neighborhood know to respect her – as do their owners – and steer clear. One of the funniest sights I’ve ever seen is an enormous Harlequin Great Dane – roughly the size of a small pony – literally dragging his owner to the other side of the street the moment he laid eyes on my tiny 12 pound darling. My personal opinion of such blatant animosity is that when she was out on her own (and Heaven only knows how she got there) she saw a big dog eat her puppies. I cannot imagine anything else that could cause such pure hatred of all big dogs.

Other than that, though, there is no hatred in Mindy. She wags, she plays, she sleeps at my feet while I work, she loves my husband and me devotedly, constantly warning us of sinister postmen and marauding moths. I may not write about her in my books, but I cannot imagine life without her.

PS – Why Monkey Dog? When we pick her up to hold her, she will wrap her forelegs around our arm. On seeing this, one of my friends said, “She looks like a monkey.” It seemed only fitting that she have a name as unique as she is.

~~~

Janis Susan May Patterson is a seventh-generation Texan and a third-generation wordsmith who writes cozy mysteries as Janis Patterson, romances, horror and other things as Janis Susan May, children’s books as Janis Susan Patterson and non-fiction and scholarly works as J.S.M. Patterson.

Formerly an actress and singer, a talent agent and Supervisor of Accessioning for a bio-genetic DNA testing lab, Janis has also been editor-in-chief of two multi-magazine publishing groups as well as many other things, including an enthusiastic amateur Egyptologist. She is a founder of RWA and currently serves on a regional MWA Board.

Janis married for the first time when most of her contemporaries were becoming grandmothers. Her husband, also an Egyptophile, even proposed in a moonlit garden near the Pyramids of Giza. Janis and her husband live in Texas with an assortment of rescued furbabies.

Find Janis on Twitter @JanisSusanMay and on Facebook at Janis Susan May.

Sophie Shapes my World

by Judy Alter

Every night when I’m ready to go to bed, I ask Sophie if she’s ready for bed. She trots to the dog bed next to my bed. We visit and she gets tummy rubs; sometimes I talk over the day with her, sometimes I just tell her what a sweet girl she is. When I say, “Okay, time to go to sleep,” she jumps up and goes to her crate (she’s housebroken but occasionally unreliable). In the morning the first thing I do is let her out of the crate, and we have another little love session, which me scratching her ears. I begin and end my day with my dog.

Sophie is a deliberate, kennel-bred cross of a border collie and a miniature poodle. I badly wanted a Labradoodle but my physician-brother convinced me that a woman of my age with mobility problems does not need a dog that would be eighty lbs. at a minimum. So I opted for a mini-labradoodle and, along with three children and three grandchildren, went to the kennel. The Labradoodle puppies were sweet but sleepy and passive—still only six weeks old. The breeder mentioned she had one Bordoodle and brought out Sophie. She was lively, mischievous, playful and irresistible. We all fell in love.

Sophie is not a perfect dog. In addition to occasional housebreaking mishaps, her unbounded enthusiasm and independent spirit gets us both in trouble. If anybody leaves a door a crack open, she is gone—headed for Canada. The only way to catch her is to drive by and open the car door—she loves cars. Even at thirty-two lbs., she is too strong for me to walk, although a younger neighbor occasionally walks her. She gets her exercise in the yard chasing squirrels. She is stubborn beyond belief—sometimes when I call her to come inside, she looks at me with an expression that says, “Really?” And doesn’t move. But she can be bribed with a treat.

She loves people and dogs but is sometimes wild in her greetings, bad about jumping on guests, until she calms down—which, now four, she eventually does. She has her favorites—my daughter and my grandson, a neighbor, the neighbor who tends my yard, almost anyone who gives her attention. Her fans, besides me, are legion.

Because I work at home, Sophie and I spend a lot of time alone together. She’s fierce about protecting me from unseen enemies—about half the time I can’t figure out what sets her off. In her crate, she is silent—off duty, as one neighbor says. If nothing alarms her, she’ll sleep in the easy chair in my office while I work. If I go to the kitchen, she follows, watching from a respectful distance in the dining room. If I nap, she goes to the dog bed. She is my shadow, giving me a much-needed sense of companionship by following me, staying wherever I am. Sometimes I talk over my problems with her—she’s an attentive listener.

She’s also the most vocal dog I’ve ever known. Many intonations and tones, from deep growls to almost a howling, that make us all wish we could speak “dog.” She so earnest about what she says to us. I answer conversationally and that sometimes satisfies her.

I cannot imagine life without a dog. Through a lifetime filled with dogs, I’ve loved them all—but Sophie is special. 

~~~~

An award-winning novelist, Judy Alter is the author of six books in the Kelly O’Connell Mysteries series: Skeleton in a Dead Space, No Neighborhood for Old Women, Trouble in a Big Box, Danger Comes Home, Deception in Strange Places, and Desperate for Death. She also writes the Blue Plate Café Mysteries—Murder at the Blue Plate Café, Murder at the Tremont House and the current Murder at Peacock Mansion. Finally, with the 2014 The Perfect Coed, she introduced the Oak Grove Mysteries.

Her work has been recognized with awards from the Western Writers of America, the Texas Institute of Letters, and the National Cowboy Museum and Hall of Fame. She has been honored with the Owen Wister Award for Lifetime Achievement by WWA and inducted into the Texas Literary Hall of Fame and the WWA Hall of Fame.

Judy is retired as director of TCU Press, the mother of four grown children and the grandmother of seven. She and her dog, Sophie, live in Fort Worth, Texas.

The Joys of Being Outnumbered

by Janis Susan May/Janis Patterson

In a way I feel sort of a cheat. I don’t put animals in my books, at least not in any major roles. I do, however, have them in major roles in my life, roles so major that I sometimes feel like a minor character.

I believe firmly in adopting rescue pets, so much so that The Husband’s and my favorite charity is East Lake Pet Orphanage. Right now we have two cats – a frail little tuxedo named Squeaky Boots and a simply enormous grey/brown tabby called Chloe – and an extremely prissy little dog of uncertain antecedents whom we call Mindy Moo the Monkey Dog, for reasons too complicated to go into now.

We like to say Mindy is half terrier mix and half diva. And she can be fierce, even though she is only 12 pounds. For reasons we can only guess, she simply loathes big dogs. When loathing is not enough, she will attack. I have pulled her off the chins of more startled big dogs than I care to remember – it is a nerve-wracking experience. On the other hand, it can be effective. For several years there was a Harlequin Great Dane in our neighborhood that would drag his owner to the other side of the street whenever we happened to see each other out walking.

But Mindy is not the queen of the house. That title belongs to elderly, frail Squeaky Boots, who – without the basic tools of claws or fangs – rules the roost with an iron paw. If she wants to eat or drink something, the owner of said treat simply steps aside. Same with a prime seat. If Squeaky Boots wants, Squeaky Boots gets. Perhaps it comes from her early life – we know little about her, except that she had five homes before she was four years old, and that in the last one she had to scrap for every bite of food she got.

By contrast, Chloe is a world-class wimp. Although she is huge – 16+ pounds and when stretched out almost as long as a king-sized pillow – she is shy and timid and incredibly neurotic. We know little of her early life, except that she was a police seizure from a home where she had been tortured for years. Every time I visited the orphanage she had invariably wrapped herself in a towel with only her tail sticking out. I brought her home while The Husband was deployed abroad. Like we’re told to do, I put her in a room by herself for a few days so she and Squeaky Boots (Mindy had not joined us yet) could smell and hear each other but with no contact, and I would spend a couple of hours a day in there, reading aloud or perhaps working on my laptop. Chloe cringed and hid, but did not fight too much when I picked her up and held her for a minute or two a couple of times a day. I thought we were making progress.

Then after a couple of days I decided to let her out… and she promptly disappeared. It was two or three weeks or more before I even caught a glimpse of her. Taming her took months. It started with just the touch of a fingertip on her tail. Then she let us touch her head. Then on one glorious day she started rubbing against my leg when she wanted to be touched. She learned that if I was working at my computer – which I nearly always am – she could butt her head against my leg and I would then be allowed to scritch her head for a moment.

I always played along, but once she butted my head in search of a head scritch at the wrong time. I was lost in my work and could not turn loose of the words to play with her. She butted again, once more without my responding.

Chloe has both claws and very intimidating fangs, and she wields both with skill. She turned her head and sank her fangs into my leg. Hard. She neither moved nor ran when I jumped and screamed, but merely butted my leg once more, demanding her scritch. I was overjoyed. She even allowed me to pick her up, put her in my lap and pet her. I didn’t even mind that blood was running down my leg.

And Mindy? Mindy simply moved into our home and hearts. You’d never believe what she suffered before she finally ended up with us, or how we managed to get her. That’s the subject for another blog. Now she is happy to sleep at my feet when I write and with her courageous barking protects the house from sinister mailmen, marauding moths and other offenders.

So how is it working at my writing when I am surrounded and outnumbered? It feels great. At least one is always at my feet or on my desk, and the others are usually within scritching distance. Normally the babies are pretty good about not disturbing me, especially while I’m working, unless it’s time for din-din, when everything descends into pandemonium. But with the love and companionship of three wonderful, affectionate animals, even pandemonium is great.

~~~

Janis Susan May Patterson is a seventh-generation Texan and a third-generation wordsmith who writes cozy mysteries as Janis Patterson, romances, horror and other things as Janis Susan May, children’s books as Janis Susan Patterson and non-fiction and scholarly works as J.S.M. Patterson.

Formerly an actress and singer, a talent agent and Supervisor of Accessioning for a bio-genetic DNA testing lab, Janis has also been editor-in-chief of two multi-magazine publishing groups as well as many other things, including an enthusiastic amateur Egyptologist. She is a founder of RWA and currently serves on a regional MWA Board.

Janis married for the first time when most of her contemporaries were becoming grandmothers. Her husband, also an Egyptophile, even proposed in a moonlit garden near the Pyramids of Giza. Janis and her husband live in Texas with an assortment of rescued furbabies.

Find Janis on Twitter @JanisSusanMay and on Facebook at Janis Susan May.

Horses and Me with Author Judy Alter

Horses and Me—a Non-Relationship

by Judy Alter

 

I’m embarrassed to write this because there are so many mystery authors whose lives—and books—center around horses. Truth be told, I am not a horse person. Put me in front of a dog, and I generally make friends, slowly but easily. Not so with horses. I rode maybe three times as a pre-teen in Chicago—at a stable where you rode nose to tail around an indoor ring, English style. I was okay with it, not wildly enthusiastic. Then I had to miss a couple of lessons and when I went back I was uncomfortable. I think the only other time I’ve been on a horse was once in my twenties when a ten-year-old niece led me on a pony—bigger than most Shetlands (my brother denies knowledge now of what kind of pony it was). I felt like I was slipping and sliding off first one side and then the other. She kept assuring me not to worry. “I won’t let you fall, Aunt Judy.” I found it cold comfort.

Yet I’ve written a lot of books with horses a major part of the action, especially during the days when I wrote fiction for adults and young adults about women of the American West. One of my first projects was a young-adult trilogy about a girl named Maggie, whose mother wanted her to be a lady. She wanted to be a cowgirl, and she alone tamed the wild horse named Devildust that the men at her papa’s Texas ranch all shied away from. With a fancy that would I hoped appeal to ten-year-old girls, Maggie and Devildust go from the ranch to Hickok’s Wild West and Madison Square Gardens, with an episode of thievery and disguised horses thrown in.

There was Cherokee Rose, a novel loosely based on the life of Lucille Mulhall, the first woman to compete with men riding and roping professionally. She rode for the Miller 101 Ranch Wild West Show, then formed her own company and eventually produced a rodeo herself. Among Mulhall’s skills was roping several horses at one time. I learned about roping by asking good friend Joyce Roach, author of The Cowgirls, a thousand questions until she finally said, “Enough about roping, Judith. Get on with the novel.”  But always, when writing about things I hadn’t done or known personally, I asked people who had.

Libbie Custer was no slouch on horseback either. When her husband, General George Armstrong Custer, would quirt her horse until it bolted on the prairie, with her clinging to reins, mane, whatever she could, she generally stayed with and on the horse. Libby detailed her horseback adventures in three biographies, so that research was there for me when I worked on my fictional account of her life, Libbie.

Other than that, I guess I’ve lived in Texas long enough, gone to enough rodeos, and been around enough horse people that I picked up sufficient knowledge to get by. No one ever criticized my horse knowledge in reviews or comments, though they criticized a lot of other things.

My four children had an adopted uncle who helped me, a single mom, raise them, and one thing he taught them was how to ride. I was grateful that I didn’t transfer my fears to them, though I think only one of my daughters rides these days—and that maybe once a year on a dude ranch. I remember one time, though, being in a pasture with a whole lot of horses. That same uncle had taken me to visit a friend, a horse trainer, and I so trusted both of them that I walked among the horses.  Uncle Bob was impressed and kept telling his friend, Alan, that I would never do that for anyone but him.

Sophie

I haven’t missed horses in my life, maybe because they showed up in so many books. On the other hand, I’ve always had dogs in my life—collies, an Irish wolfhound, cairns, labs, Aussies, a bearded collie or two, and now a bordoodle (border collie/poodle cross). I could not live without a dog in my life and my house, but strangely they rarely show up in my fiction and then in only minor roles. Go figure!

~~~

See Judy's earlier posts on Writers & Other Animals~

• Seven Things About Judy Alter
• How Many Truly Favorite Books Can You Name?

An award-winning novelist, Judy Alter is the author of five books in the Kelly O’Connell Mysteries series: Skeleton in a Dead Space, No Neighborhood for Old Women, Trouble in a Big Box, Danger Comes Home, and Deception in Strange Places. She also writes the Blue Plate Café Mysteries—Murder at the Blue Plate Café and Murder at the Tremont House. 

Before turning to mysteries, Judy focused her career on writing about women of the American West, both for adults and young adults. Her work has been recognized with awards from the Western Writers of America, the Texas Institute of Letters, and the National Cowboy Museum and Hall of Fame. She has been honored with the Owen Wister Award for Lifetime Achievement by WWA and inducted into the Texas Literary Hall of Fame.

Judy is retired as director of TCU Press and the mother of four grown children and the grandmother of seven. She and her Bordoodle, Sophie, live in Fort Worth, Texas.

Watch for Deception in Strange Places, the fifth Kelly O’Connell novel, due out in late July. Alas, no horses in that one either, though a dog has a minor part, almost walk-on.

Animals and Cozies

by Linda O. Johnston

Last time I blogged here at Writers and Other Animals, my topic was Animals, Novels and Me.  I described how all of my cozy mysteries, and some of my romances, involve animals.  Why?  Because I love animals!

Today I want to talk about how many animal themes there can be in cozy mysteries.  The answer, of course, is that the possibilities are infinite, as wide in scope as there are animals.

I'm especially a dog lover.  I think that's apparent by my focus on dogs in my mysteries, especially my Pet Rescue Mysteries.  My protagonist Lauren Vancouver runs a wonderful no-kill shelter that also saves cats, but she, too, is more of a dog lover so the stories are mostly themed around issues that threaten dogs.

And in my upcoming Superstition Mysteries, my protagonist there, Rory Chasen, who happens to own a lucky dog named Pluckie, will become the manager of the Lucky Dog Boutique.

I'm not the only one who centers cozy mysteries on dogs.  For example, my host here at Writers and Other Animals, Sheila Webster Boneham, writes the Animals in Focus Mysteries.  That's Animals in Focus, not Dogs in Focus.  Even so, many of those animals happen to be dogs.  Her upcoming book Catwalk obviously features a cat, but that doesn't mean dogs don't play a major role, too.

Then there are the Pampered Pets Mysteries by Sparkle Abbey, which likewise feature dogs... and cats.  And the Downward Dog Mysteries by Tracy Weber, where yoga is important, but so is the protagonist's dog.  And the Paws and Claws Mysteries by Krista Davis--also featuring both dogs and cats.  And the Barking Detective Mystery Series by Waverly Curtis, which happens to have a very special Chihuahua in it. 

Some mysteries feature cats without dogs, such as The Cat in the Stacks mysteries by Miranda James and the Magical Cats Mystery Series by Sofie Kelly.

Other animals can be the subjects of mysteries, too.  I took advantage of that in my Kendra Ballantyne, Pet-Sitter Mysteries.  Kendra happed to live in the Hollywood Hills, as I do.  She is a lawyer, as I was.  And she happens to own a tricolor Cavalier King Charles Spaniel named Lexie, which, coincidentally, is a description of my older Cavalier.  You can guess by the titles of some of the Pet-Sitter Mysteries what animals besides dogs were featured in them: NOTHING TO FEAR BUT FERRETS, FINE-FEATHERED DEATH, MEOW IS FOR MURDER, THE FRIGHT OF THE IGUANA, NEVER SAY STY, and FELINE FATALE, to mention a few.

I haven't attempted to describe all the mysteries there are that happen to involve, or feature, animals.  That's partly because there are so many of them!  Plus, there are more being published all the time.  Apparently not only authors, but readers, too, enjoy animals in their mysteries! 

How about you?  Do you enjoy animals?  Reading about them?  Having them as pets? 

Come visit me at my website:  www.LindaOJohnston.com   You can also friend me on Facebook.  I additionally blog weekly on KillerHobbies.blogspot.com   on Wednesdays, where my Killer Hobby is supposed to be pets--but we all know that pets aren’t hobbies.  They’re family!  I also blog on the 18th of each month on Killer Characters--or at least my characters do.  And I additionally blog on Inkspot, the blog of Midnight Ink authors, and on the 6th of each month at A Slice of Orange, the blog of the Orange County Chapter of Romance Writers of America.  As I've mentioned before, I blog a lot! 

Excerpt from Scapegoat by Susan J. Kroupa

A haunting retelling of a rainmaker myth, Scapegoat is set in the barren mesas of northern Arizona, after a brutal war has destroyed modern civilization. The story originally appeared in Realms of Fantasy. (Oct 1996).

Scapegoat

(Excerpt)

The night Nuva was born was like too many other nights that autumn. The wind raged across the land shrieking like a spirit come face to face with Masau, God of Death, himself. But it was barren, as all the winds that season had been. It brought the cold, but no snow, not even a cloud to shadow the mesas. A barren, old-woman wind.

Tiyo huddled against a juniper trunk where he could keep a wary eye out for coyotes and cursed. The wind meant a miserable night and most likely his uncle's wrath the next day. Mana, fat as a cow though she was only a goat, had been restless and crying all afternoon, and Tiyo was sure she was ready to kid, goats always picking the worst weather for birthing. Her babies would have rough going in this cold. And if they died, his uncle would probably blame him, as if it were his fault that Mana had bred late and had to kid in the fall when the wind blew endlessly, sucking the life from the land.

He caught a motion among the goats bedded down in the hollow. His hand tightened around his bow. But it wasn't a coyote. Mana bleated and struggled to her feet then sank back to the ground, as if Tiyo's very fears of her kidding had brought it to pass. Grabbing his bundle of rags, he ran to her side.

Now his uncle's best goat--she usually had triplets--would probably lose her kids and maybe even her own life to the cold. If he had been closer to home, he could have sheltered her in the goat pen that sat below Second Mesa. He could have run up the twisting, rocky trail to the village on top, to his uncle's house on the plaza, and sought help. But there hadn't been any grass or forage within a day's journey of the mesa since the snows stopped coming, and it seemed that every day Tiyo took the goats farther from home.

Still, his uncle expected miracles and Tiyo wished with all his heart that he could provide one. He didn't want to see the anger twist his uncle's face or hear the words spat out like rattlesnake venom. Hear him ask, to anyone within earshot, why he had to be burdened with such a clumsy child, too young to be any use, why Tiyo's mother couldn't have raised her son before she died.

Mana heaved, breaking her water, and the first kid came sliding out. Tiyo rubbed at it furiously with a rag. A second kid followed and then a third. He dumped the bundle of rags over one while he dried the other, racing against the wind's deadly bite. Finally, they were dry. He tried to coax Mana to her feet so that the babies could nurse. But Mana wouldn't budge.

"Get up!" he said angrily. Couldn't she hear her babies crying as they shivered in the cold?

Then he saw it. Another kid, a fourth, slid to the ground, bloody and still. Dead, he thought, but instinctively picked it up, wiped its face and blew gently into its nostrils. With a snort and a shudder, it began to breathe.

Mana struggled to her feet and nuzzled her babies, calling to them in urgent, throaty tones while they bobbed underneath her thrusting for milk.

Tiyo held the last born in his arms. A doe, so tiny that with her long Nubian ears she looked more like a rabbit than a goat. He knew what his uncle would want. He'd want her dressed out and in a pot of boiled corn before midday.

"Puny," he'd say. "She'll only rob the milk from the strong ones.

And there was no milk to spare. Not while the Cloud People ignored their prayers and the land lay gasping for water.

The doe trembled in his arms as he fingered the handle of the knife at his side. But then she suddenly cried out and nuzzled him, and he was undone; the cry was too close to a human infant's. Releasing the knife, he rooted through the pile of rags for a clean one and rubbed her dry. He pulled away one of the other kids and gave her a turn at Mana's teat.

Finally, Mana lay down heavily and the other three kids crowded against her. Tiyo tucked the little doe inside his shirt and eased to the ground, bending over Mana and her kids to use his back as a windbreak. Suddenly tired, he forgot about coyotes and wind and even about his mother, and fell asleep.

The silence woke him, the silence and the sun on his back. He sat up, stiff and disorientated, jolting the little doe awake so that she cried out in a high, plaintive voice.

He put the little doe on the ground to try her legs. She was pure white and her coat glowed in the light of the rising sun. Watching her stagger about, the only white against the dull browns and greens of the desert, he named her. To the west, he could see the sacred mountains that his people called Nuvatukya'ovi--snow-covered peaks--but they had not been white once in the last three winters.

So he named the little doe for his heart's desire, for his people's desperate need. He called her Nuva, snow, and plotted to hide her from his uncle.

~~

Read more from Susan J. Kroupa on Writers & Other Animals ~ 

• 
  

Susan J. Kroupa is an award-winning author whose fiction has appeared in Realms of Fantasy, and in a variety of professional anthologies, including Bruce Coville's Shapeshifters.

She has lived and worked on both the Hopi and Navajo reservations. Her non-fiction publications include features about environmental issues and Hopi Indian culture for The Arizona Republic, High Country News, American Forests, and the Bristol Herald-Courier. 

She now lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Southwestern Virginia with her husband, two cats, and a trouble-prone labradoodle who's the inspiration for her Doodlebugged mysteries. 

Excerpt from Murder Strikes a Pose by Tracy Weber

Excerpt from

Murder Strikes a Pose

by Tracy Weber

Midnight Ink, 2014

Author's note: In this excerpt, Kate is at home late at night after finding her homeless friend George’s body. She has taken Bella, the victim’s dog, home to stay with her until the police locate his family. Kate feels guilty over a fight she had with George earlier that day.  

I looked at the clock and almost cried. It was one-thirty, and my early morning class started at six. I’d never felt so bone-weary in my life. My head still throbbed, and my stomach ached from hunger. But all I could think about was sleep—deep, dreamless sleep. “Come on, Bella. It’s bedtime.” I showed her the bedroom. She hopped on the bed and flopped down, lying squarely on my pillow.

“Sorry, pooch. This is where I draw the line. I sleep on the bed. You sleep on the floor.”

I grabbed a blanket from the closet, laid it on the floor and pointed to it. “For you.” It took some convincing, but Bella finally relented. I collapsed on the bed and closed my eyes.

Huge mistake.

Images of George’s body, sounds of sirens, the smell of blood, and the full knowledge of the evening’s horror invaded every crevice of my being.

Bella paced the room, panting and whining. I tried to coax myself to sleep with “Kate’s Sleeping Pill,” my favorite breath practice for insomnia. No good. The horrible memories refused to leave. But at least now the room was quiet. At least that infernal whining had stopped.

My mind froze. My eyes flew open. Why had the whining stopped?

I rolled over and locked eyes with Bella. Her accusing glare scolded me. We stared each other down for what seemed like an eternity. Finally, I realized what was bothering her. Bella was used to sleeping on the ground, but not alone. She and George had lain next to each other every night for as long as she could remember. Changing that now seemed cruel.

“OK, you win. Come on up, but only for tonight.” I slapped the bed beside me.

Bella hopped up, turned a quick circle, and sank down next to me with a heavy sigh. Her brow furrowed, her ears drooped, and her head hung low. I could tell she knew something had changed. She didn’t know what or why, but she knew it was bad. Frighteningly bad. Life-changingly bad.

I suspected Bella couldn’t understand me, but she deserved an explanation nonetheless. So I told her that George was gone, but that he had loved her more than anything. I also promised her that, although I couldn’t keep her, I would make sure she was safe until I found someone who could.

I owed that to George.

You see, I firmly believed that George’s death was at least partially my fault. That if I had listened more and judged less, I might have prevented this awful night. I deeply regretted my stubbornness in not apologizing. I regretted suggesting he euthanize Bella. I even regretted not buying that damned paper. No one else would have blamed me for what happened, but I definitely blamed myself.

As I finished the story, Bella rested her chin on my belly, closed her eyes, and fell asleep. The warmth of her body on mine felt oddly comforting, and I finally relaxed enough to do what I’d needed to do for hours. I broke down sobbing as I held Bella and allowed her rhythmic breathing to rock us both to sleep.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Murder Strikes a Pose introduces Kate Davidson, a feisty Seattle yoga instructor who’s more interested in savasana than solving crimes, until she stumbles over a body in the studio’s parking lot. The police dismiss the murder as drug-related street crime, but Kate knows that George—a homeless alcoholic she had befriended—was no drug dealer.
 Kate stretches herself and takes on two new challenges. First, solve George’s murder. Second, find someone—anyone—willing to adopt his intimidating, horse-sized German shepherd, Bella, before Animal Control sends her to the big dog park in the sky. But with Bella’s time almost up and the murderer hot on her trail, Kate will have to work fast, or the next time she practices corpse pose, it may be for real MURDER STRIKES A POSE is available now on Amazon, http://www.amazon.com/Murder-Strikes-Pose-Downward-Mystery/dp/0738739685/ and wherever books are sold.
 

Tracy Weber is a certified yoga teacher and the founder of Whole Life Yoga, an award-winning yoga studio in Seattle, where she currently lives with her husband and German shepherd. Weber is a member of the Pacific Northwest Writers Association, Dog Writers Association of America, and Sisters in Crime. She loves sharing her passion for yoga and animals in any form possible. Murder Strikes a Pose is Weber’s debut. For more information, visit her online at http://TracyWeberAuthor.com  or friend her on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/tracywe

How many truly favorite books can you list?

by Judy Alter

I have a friend, longtime English professor,who maintains the measure of a book is whether or not generations to come will be reading it a hundred years from now. His nomination is the late Benjamin Capps’ The Road to Ogallala.

Albert Payson Terhune &
one of his famous Collies

As a child, I had many favorite books as I moved from age to age. As with many of my generation, my reading began with The Bobbsey Twins and The Little Colonel Stories. Then came the collies of Albert Payson Terhune, which made me spend years of my life wanting collies—I did have three—and the horses of Walter Farley, which somehow didn’t inspire me to want horses. I moved on to Nancy Drew and Cherry Ames, the nurse, and then suddenly I was enamored of Frances Parkinson Keyes and her thick books, romances really, about life on the Mississippi steamboats and in New Orleans.

Today I find I’m much more selective about favorite books, those that I think will survive the hundred-year test. I can point with certainty to three titles.

Mary Hallock Foote

The book I’ve claimed as my favorite for years is Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose, a novel loosely based on the life of Mary Hallock Foote. She was an illustrator, the darling of New York salons and socialites, when she suddenly left to marry a rough-and-ready California miner and raise her children in a variety of miner’s shacks from California to Idaho. Stegner was criticized for taking liberties with Foote’s life, but it makes a compelling novel, narrated by a male descendant with what sounds like the Parkinson’s that makes a person stiff-I’m still puzzling on the symbolism of that. I’ve reread this one, taught it, and found something new every time. And Foote herself was not an insignificant figure in the western movement. She was one of a handful of women who wrote fiction about the West in the early day. Her best-known novel is The Led-Horse Claim.

Scene from the movie version of
To Kill a Mockingbird

I realized one day that in claiming that as my favorite, I was leaving out a book that has made a lasting impression on generations of Americans—Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s another book in which you find new layers every time you read it. A couple of years ago I was asked to be on a multi-racial panel discussing the impact of the book. I re-read it, naturally, and was blown away by its strength and insight, by the characters of Atticus and Scout and Jeb. Then I watched the original film version and was astounded that it still managed to give depth and meaning to the book in spite of what we would now consider fairly elementary cinematography. About that time I found a copy of the book on my 14-year-old granddaughter’s bedside table. I asked how she liked it, and she said she thought it was boring. I thought I’d fall on the floor. It’s a book that I think a hundred years from now will tell people so much about culture in the American South and Americans in the fifties and sixties—and about the character of a few really good men.

Elmer Kelton

And recently, talking with people about the drought that the Southwest and California are experiencing, I hit myself in the head and wondered how I could forget Elmer Kelton’s masterful The Time It Never Rained, about the Texas drought of the 1950s. In Kelton’s rich Texas-heavy prose, we follow rancher Charlie Flagg as he goes from raising cattle to sheep to goats as the land dries up. Woven in are threads of the dangers of government help, the changing socio-economic situation in South Texas, relationships between men and women, sons and fathers, Mexicans and Anglos, and one man’s love for the land. Charlie Flagg is another of the rare really good men. I had the privilege of knowing Elmer Kelton and working with him on many projects. He used to say that many men came up to him and said, “That Charlie Flagg…he was based on me, wasn’t he?” Elmer always said he as an amalgamation of many men, including Elmer’s father, but I think there is a lot of Elmer in that timeless character.

I read voraciously, and I’ve read many books that I’d rate with five stars but these three stand out. There are other authors and titles I’m tempted to mention, but that would start me on the slipper y slope and I’d end writing a book about my favorite books. I’ll quit with my highly selective list.

~~
Other posts by Judy Alter on Writers & Other Animals ~

• Seven Things About Judy Alter
• Horses and Me - A Non-Relationship - coming October 12!

Before turning her attention to mystery, Judy Alter wrote fiction and nonfiction, mostly about women of the American West, for adults and young-adult readers. Her work has been recognized with awards from the Western Writers of America, the Texas Institute of Letters, and the National Cowboy Museum and Hall of Fame. She has been honored with the Owen Wister Award for Lifetime Achievement by WWA and inducted into the Texas Literary Hall of Fame at the Fort Worth Public Library.

Murder at Tremont House is the second Blue Plate Mystery from award-winning novelist Judy Alter, following the successful Murder at the Blue Plate Café. Judy is also the author of four books in the Kelly O’Connell Mysteries series: Skeleton in a Dead Space, No Neighborhood for Old Women, Trouble in a Big Box, and Danger Comes Home. With the Blue Plate Murder series, she moves from inner city Fort Worth to small-town East Texas to create a new set of characters in a setting modeled after a restaurant that was for years one of her family’s favorites.

Follow Judy at http://www.judyalter.com or her two blogs at http://www.judys-stew.blogspot.com or http://potluckwithjudy.blogspot.com. Or look for on Facebook or on Twitter where she is @judyalter.

When Animals Speak

By Waverly Fitzgerald (aka Waverly Curtis)

I was delighted to be invited to be on a panel of animal-themed mysteries at Left Coast Crime. Our moderator, Mary Lee Woods of Sparkle Abbey, sent the panelists a list of proposed questions, including one asking each of the panelists to name our favorite books featuring animal characters. I was surprised when I made my list of favorites and realized that all the books on it were told from the animal’s point of view.

It should have been obvious to me, I suppose, since I write, with my co-author, Curt Colbert, a series of humorous mystery novels about a Chihuahua, who is adopted by Geri Sullivan at the start of our first novel, Dial C for Chihuahua, and starts talking as soon as she gets him home, introducing himself as Pepe.

My absolute favorite is The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein. The narrator, the dog, Enzo, like most dogs, is a keen observer of human behavior and a devoted companion who is wiling to do almost anything to make the lives of his humans better.

I also love Spencer Quinn’s novels about Chet and Bernie. Chet is the narrator, a Bloodhound, owned by private eye named Ernie. Chet quickly forgets important clues, blaming it on his short-term memory problems. Frustrating for the reader who remembers the clue but probably an accurate depiction of a dog’s perception and a great way to deal with the problem that we have encountered in our Barking Detective novels: once Pepe, smells a murder victim he could probably identify the murderer in a crowd, especially if he can talk, like our dog detective can.

While I was doing research on books told from an animal's point of view, I was thrilled to learn that Virginia Woolf had written a book (Flush) from a dog's point of view so I got a copy from my local library. The book is told from the point of view of Flush, the Cocker Spaniel owned by Elizabeth Browning. For many years, he sits at her feet, while she lies on a couch and writes poems. He's witness to the courtship of Robert Browning and when the newlyweds elope and run off to Italy, Flush goes with them. The language, which is lyrical throughout, really reaches a climax here as Flush describes all the sensory joys of living in Italy:

He threaded his way through main streets and back streets, through squares and alleys, by smell. He nosed his way from smell to smell: the rough, the smooth, the dark, the golden. He went in and out, up and down, where they beat brass, where they bake bread, where the women sit combing their hair, where the bird-cages are piled high on the causeway, where the wine spills itself in dark red stains on the pavement, where leather smells and harness and garlic, where cloth is beaten, where vine leaves tremble, where men sit and drink and spit and dice—he ran in and out, always with his nose to the ground, drinking in the essence; or with his nose in the air vibrating with the aroma. He slept in this patch of sun—how the sun made the stone reek! He sought that tunnel of shade—how acid shade made the stone smell!

I didn’t know Judi McCoy’s Dog Walker mysteries when we first began writing but Curt may have been unconsciously influenced by them because at first Pepe sounded a lot like Rudy, the dog who talks to Ellie Engleman, the New York City dogwalker who is McCoy’s protagonist. Rudy is a terrier-poodle whose voice reminds me of an old vaudeville comedian: irascible, opinionated and gruff.

Our Pepe’s voice has softened over time as I sway Curt to my opinion that a Chihuahua, while inclined to be self-aggrandizing when comparing himself with other dogs (or people), would not complain as much or be as greedy for food as Rudy. The Chihuahua who lives with me prefers squeaky toys to treats.

McCoy explains the communication between Ellie and Rudy by saying that Ellie hears his voice (which is always rendered in italics) in her head.

Laura Levine utilizes another clever way of handling animal-human communication in her Jaine Austen series. For instance, in Last Writes, Jaine comes home to find her cat, Prozac, glaring at her. The dialogue reads:

“Where the hell have you been?” she said, glaring at me balefully. (Okay, so she didn’t actually say that, but I knew that’s what she was thinking.)”

Those of us who have cats know this is probably exactly what the cat was thinking but the parenthetical negation playfully eliminates the paranormal concept of a talking cat. Levine also uses this technique effectively with other characters (OK, so he didn’t really say that!) so it the cat’s dialogue seems like just part of the delightful first-person narration.

I know many readers don’t like novels that contain what seems like a fantasy element. One of our Amazon reviewers wrote that she “was not prepared for this type of fantasy,” adding “ I could not get passed [sic] a dog who spoke for no apparent magical/mystical/insane reason.”

I have to admit she is not the only one who does not understand how this happens. My co-author and I actually disagree about this aspect of our joint novels. I suspect that Geri is telepathic and can read Pepe’s mind while Curt believes the dog is actually barking and Geri can translate his barks into English. One of our fans, a young woman who posted a video review of Dial C for Chihuahua, mentions the explanation Pepe gives in the book, which is the most appealing explanation of all: he has always talked but Geri is the only one who has ever listened to him.

It might seem like a fantasy to imagine a dog talking but those of us with pet companions know that they are very expressive. We know they have feelings and we know, for the most part, what those feelings are. I was cheered when I read psychologist Stanley Coren’s book, How to Speak Dog. The average dog understands the meaning of about 200 words, which is about the same vocabulary as a two-year-old. They don’t have the vocal apparatus to form words but they can let us know what they want anyway with those big brown eyes, a tip of the head, a quirk of the ears.

~~

           

Waverly Fitzgerald writes with Curt Colbert under the name of Waverly Curtis. Together they’ve completed three novels about a talking Chihuahua named Pepe and his detective partner, Geri Sullivan: Dial C for Chihuahua, Chihuahua Confidential and The Big Chihuahua. A Christmas story, “A Chihuahua in Every Stocking,” will be released as an e-book in October 2014, and their fourth novel, The Chihuahua Always Sniffs Twice, has a publication date of December 2014. For more information about their books and events, go to their website.

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