AUTHOR ANNE LOUISE BANNON ON JUGGLING GENRES AND THE VOICES IN HER HEAD

Author Anne Louise Bannon’s husband says that his wife kills people for a living. Bannon does mostly write mysteries, including the Old Los Angeles Series, the Freddie and Kathy series, and the Operation Quickline series. She has worked as a freelance journalist for magazines and newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times. She and her husband, Michael Holland, created the OddBallGrape.com wine education blog, and she co-wrote a book on poisons. Learn more about Anne and her books at her website.

Switching It Up

I am writing the final book in a time travel trilogy. I am thinking about a new cozy mystery series, and a new historical mystery series. I’ve also got my cozy spy series currently running on my blog. Not to mention a new tech thriller coming out in June.

 

What?

 

Am I crazy?

 

Well, yeah. Of course, I am. But I don’t read only one type of fiction. Why would I write only one type?

 

How do I keep all these different projects straight? That is harder to answer. Some of it is my native creative process. Since I tend to “hear” my writing before putting anything on the screen, my characters all sound very different to me. Jannie Miller, the protagonist in the thriller, Running Away to Boston, sounds nothing like Lisa Wycherly, who is the protagonist of the Operation Quickline series, book ten of which, From This Day Forward, is the serial currently running on my blog. Even more distinct is Maddie Wilcox of the Old Los Angeles series (the most recent release there is Death of an Heiress).

 

Even when I’m writing in third person, as I do in the time travel trilogy, it all sounds different to me.

 

Then there are the different tools I use to keep everything straight. Most of them are apps, such as Evernote, Aeon Timeline, Scrivener. But I still have plenty of paper on my desk, along with pens (including several dip pens that I use for the fun of it.)

 

Ultimately, I am telling a story, and the genre that the story happens to fall into is not usually what I’m thinking about when the characters are busy acting out their scenes in my head. The recently released Time Enough, the second in the time travel trilogy isn’t about time travel, per se. It’s about Robin Parker and Roger York and all the other characters that populate this world that I made up. From This Day Forward isn’t really about the spy business. It’s about Lisa and her new husband Sid Hackbirn and how they’re figuring out what being married is. The spy part is what they do for their jobs. Running Away to Boston isn’t about computer viruses and man-in-the-middle attacks. It’s about Jannie Miller and how she and her friends go up against this evil corporation creating a nasty virus.

 

The trick is marketing these different stories. People want to know what genre a story is to make it easier to decide what to read and what not to read. I get that. So I tell people about what kind of book a given story is and hope that it comes through. Because, trust me, no one knows what a cozy spy novel is. But that’s the story my brain wanted to tell, and I went with it.

 

So if I ask you to kindly consider reading the Operation Quickline series, please understand that Lisa and Sid are a lot of fun, and hopefully, people that you might recognize doing some pretty scary things. Same with Jannie Miller. And Robin and Roger, and all the other people in my head.

 

Because there is a real blessing to switching things up, writing-wise. I’m seldom bored with what I’m writing, which means my stories get more interesting as I go on. And I hope, more interesting for you.

 

From This Day Forward

An Operation Quickline Story

Come, share the joy…

It’s The Big Day. Sid Hackbirn and Lisa Wycherly are getting married. But in the days and weeks before the wedding, the pair discover that there is something very strange going on with their work as ultra-top-secret counter-espionage agents. Courier drops are coming in without the usual processing. The bad guys tailing them are unusually persistent.

 

Then Sid and Lisa take off for their honeymoon only to find that the nice, relaxing vacation in England that they had planned will be anything but. They’re being trained for their new job and will be touring the European continent, instead. Skiing in Gstaad, Switzerland, touring Venice, Italy, doesn’t sound so bad, except that the two get sucked into a dangerous plot, with bad guys trying to kill them. Still, trying to figure out what the potential killers are planning might actually be easier than trying to figure out how to be married.

MYSTERY AUTHOR ANNE LOUISE BANNON'S NEWEST RELEASE HAS A HOLIDAY TWIST

Mystery author Anne Louise Bannon has worked as a freelance journalist for magazines and newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times. Her mystery series include the Old Los Angeles Series, the Freddie and Kathy Series, and the Operation Quickline Series. With her husband Michael Holland she created the OddBallGrape.com wine education blog and is also the co-author (with Serita Stevens) of a book on poisons for writers. Learn more about Anne Louise and her books at her website.

Re-Visiting Christmas

Happy Boxing Day, everyone!

 

Yes, I am one of those who enjoys keeping Christmas going all the way through January 6 (aka Twelfth Night or the Feast of the Epiphany). So, it’s no surprise that Christmas figures into a few of my novels, particularly the Operation Quickline Series. That’s the one featuring Lisa Wycherly and Sid Hackbirn as a pair of spies who fall for each other. In short, the books are essentially cozy spy novels. Or romances with espionage intrusions.

 

I’ve been publishing them first as serials on my blogs, which is a lot of fun, and the most recent, Just Because You’re Paranoid, finished up the week before Christmas. I hadn’t planned it that way, but it worked out especially well since the novel ends with the holiday. Even more fun, there’s a scene sort of near the end that echoes a scene in the first Quickline novel, That Old Cloak and Dagger Routine.

 

The series is set in the 1980s. In the first novel, Lisa comes to live at Sid’s house and gets recruited into the spy business as Sid’s partner. By the time December rolls around, Sid and Lisa are just beginning their friendship and the focus is on how different they are in terms of their values. Sid is a playboy, spending four to six nights a week trying to get laid, and he is more successful than not. Lisa is a nice, church-going woman and a virgin. Sid was also raised as an atheist by an aunt who was a Communist, and they lived among a bunch of bohemians, beatniks, and later hippies, which accounts for Sid’s belief in free love.

 

In fact, we find out that Sid has never celebrated holidays, including Thanksgiving (“A part of Capitalistic propaganda to convince the people they are not oppressed and dedicated to a god that doesn’t exist.”) or Christmas.

 

Lisa, on the other hand, loves Christmas, loves decorating the house, loves eggnog, and the annual Christmas pajamas from her mom. And, yes, Sid gets swept into it. In particular, there’s the scene where Lisa has borrowed Sid’s car to get the Christmas tree. Lisa comes back from the errand bubbling over. She has, once again, found the perfect tree. Sid is a little perturbed to find a tree tied to the top of his beloved Mercedes 450SL, but helps Lisa get it off the car, and hefts the tree into the house, as Lisa shouts out directions to bring it in foot-first. She’s already shifted some of the furniture in the living room to make room in the front window. The tree is gorgeous, but exactly five inches too tall.

 

Fast forward three years to the holiday season in Just Because You’re Paranoid.

Sid and Lisa are engaged to be married. The two jointly own what had been Sid’s house and it has been completely remodeled. Lisa’s parents, who have in the past stayed with her sister Mae and her family, are spending the holiday at Sid and Lisa’s place. Sid has taken custody of his 12-year-old son, and it’s Nick’s first Christmas with Sid and Lisa and her family.

 

The bringing home of the tree remains the same. Lisa arrives home with Nick, shouting and bubbling over. Sid gets called on, along with Bill, Lisa’s father, to get the even larger tree out of her truck. Lisa shouts instructions on how to remove the tree and get it into the house as Sid reminds her repeatedly that they’ve done this before. And the tree is five inches too tall. Again.

 

Yes, there are significant differences, which is part of the fun. But there is also a connection to the past Christmases that was so much fun to play with. It’s how real life happens, and it’s one of those things that makes Christmas and other such holidays so very special. Every year we celebrate Hanukkah, or Kwanzaa, or whatever we celebrate, is utterly new. We’re different people than we were before. But it’s also a connection to the past, as well. Not only the history that gave us the holidays, but our personal histories as well. And it’s fun to celebrate that, even fictionally.

 

Just Because You’re Paranoid

Operation Quickline, Book 9

 

It doesn't mean they're not out to get you

 

Lisa Wycherly and Sid Hackbirn find themselves up against a relentless enemy and about to get the shock of their lives in book nine of the Operation Quickline Series. First, there's the wedding. Not Sid and Lisa's, but her cousin Maggie's, where Sid and his son, Nick, raise all sorts of eyebrows. 

 

Then there's the attempt on Sid's life. Then Sid and Lisa's good friends are recruited into their top-secret organization. Then there's Lisa's sister being jealous, and a new house getting close to being ready, and Sid and Lisa's own wedding to work on, and Nick bringing home every bug there is at his new school and sharing it with his parents.

 

Being highly trained top-secret counter-intelligence agents will only help so far as the circles of family complications ripple outward. Sid and Lisa try to cope with the multiple surprises as they train their two friends and track down a ruthless killer determined to take both of them out.

 

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#CRAFTS WITH ANASTASIA--MAKING BIAS TAPE WITH AUTHOR ANNE LOUISE BANNON

Aside from her tendency to think of weird ways to kill people, Anne Louise Bannon is appallingly normal. Her only real quirk is wearing earrings that don’t match. She is the author of the Freddie and Kathy series, set in the 1920s, the Operation Quickline series of cozy spy novels, and the Old Los Angeles series, featuring Maddie Wilcox, a doctor and winemaker in 1870. Anne and her husband live in the Los Angeles area, where they make the things most sane people buy. Which would be a quirk but seems to be increasingly normal these days. Today Anne stops by to talk about making her own bias tape. Learn more about her and her books at her website.  

Making Your Own Bias Tape

 

Lisa Wycherly, one of the two main characters in my Operation Quickline series, sews a lot of her own clothes, but we don’t actually see her doing it very often. That’s probably because it’s a lot more interesting to see her chasing down bad guys or fighting with her partner, Sid Hackbirn, than it is to see her putting in a zipper. 

 

On the other hand, in the latest Quickline story, My Sweet Lisa, we see her doing working on her friend Kathy’s wedding dress. And we get to see her sewing room through Sid’s eyes and through her mother’s eyes.

 

It's no coincidence that Lisa sews. I do, too, and like Lisa, I have a lot of scraps hanging around. One of the things I sometimes do is make my own bias tape. It’s rather easy, thanks to a gizwatchee called a bias tape maker (https://clover-usa.com/collections/bias-tape-makers).

 

The best fabrics to use are medium-weight cottons, but I’ve made bias tape out of corduroy, and it worked well. I’ve also used the backs of shirts whose collars have died. If I can get some solid strips, I’ll make bias tape out of it. The toughest part is finding the bias on a scrap that no longer has its selvedge. The second toughest part is figuring out how much you need if you have a specific project in mind.

To find the bias on a scrap, look for the warp (lengthwise grain) or the weft (crosswise grain), and draw a line with a washable marker, chalk, or whatever you like. I use Flair pens because the ink shows up well and washes out easily.

Next, get a right triangle – you can find them in art supply stores or raid someone’s toolbox. Line up the triangle so that one of the right angle legs runs along the grainline you marked and the hypotenuse cuts diagonally across the grainline. If you happen to have a bit of selvedge on your scrap, you can line up the triangle along that instead. Mark the diagonal line, then use your ruler to make a series of lines parallel to each other along the diagonal.

 How wide to make that line depends on how wide you want your finished tape. It can vary and you should check the directions that come with your specific bias tape maker. As a general rule, the cut width is going to be three times your finished width. So, if you want half-inch wide bias tape, you’ll want to cut your bias strips an inch and a half wide. The wider the tape, though, the more it will depend on the specific bias tape maker you have. Another thing to consider is that if you’re using heavier fabric, you’re going to want to make the tape a lot wider since corduroy, for example, won’t go through a half-inch maker.

 

Once you’ve drawn your strips, you need to stitch them together. The best way to figure out which angle to match the ends is to lay the pieces out. If it will make a nice straight line when sewn and pressed, then that’s how it goes together.

Now, the fun starts. Depending on how long your strip is and how clean your floors are, you can just let the fabric hang off your ironing board or find something to roll it on, such as an empty toilet paper tube. You’ll probably also want another tube or piece of cardboard to roll up the freshly pressed tape.

 

Get your bias tape maker ready and your iron good and hot and steaming, adjusting for your fabric as needed. Poke the end of your strip into the wide end of the maker and push it through. This can be a little tricky and some makers have little holes in the top or bottom so that you can use a pin or other pointed object to push the fabric through. Once you’ve got the end through, get your iron in place and press on the end. Pull the maker back along the strip and you’ll see the folds magically form. Press those folds into place, roll up the strip, leaving enough space for the iron, then pull the maker back, and press again.

 

That’s pretty much all there is to it. Use your bias tape like you would any other. I used some corduroy tape to bind the edges of a vest. Other tape I used as decoration on a dress, and there’s a blouse somewhere in my closet that has my homemade tape binding the raw edge of a collar.

Now, whether we’re going to see Lisa Wycherly making bias tape in a later Quickline story, I don’t know yet.

 

My Sweet Lisa is currently appearing as a fiction serial on AnneLouiseBannon.com/blogs. It’s the seventh Operation Quickline story. You can find the previous six stories at https://annelouisebannon.com/operation-quickline-series/

 

My Sweet Lisa

Finally, it's real love... Now what?

 

Lisa Wycherly's surprise birthday party ends in a terrifying disaster when she's kidnapped off the street. Her partner, Sid Hackbirn, is so devastated that he loses his interest in sleeping around - the one thing keeping the two of them apart. The kidnapping gets messy enough when it comes to light that the kidnappers got the wrong target. But there's also a defecting KGB agent playing games with the CIA, who are involved with the Colombian kidnappers.

 

Then Lisa's recovery sets in motion a whole other set of challenges as she and Sid deal with her trauma and try to get the KGB agent under control, only to find that Sid's randy past will continue to haunt them. The only thing worse? Figuring out how to be a couple.

 

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MYSTERY AUTHOR ANNE LOUISE BANNON ASKS: ARE BOOKS SET IN THE 1980'S CONSIDERED HISTORICAL FICTION?

Mystery author Anne Louise Bannon is an author and journalist who wrote her first novel at age fifteen. Her journalistic work has appeared in Ladies' Home Journal, the Los Angeles Times, Wines and Vines, and in newspapers across the country. She also spent more than ten years as a TV critic. In addition to her mystery series, Anne is also the co-author of Howdunit: Book of Poisons with Serita Stevens. Learn more about Anne and her books at her website.  

Is it Historical Yet?

In my youth, I came up with a perfectly lovely series of spy novels that turned out to be more romance than spy. Over the years, I’ve re-written them, fleshed out the characters, officially named it the Operation Quickline series, but one thing held up – the original 1980s setting.

So, fast forward to a couple of years ago. I’m at a writers’ meeting and someone asks this agent what she considers historical, and she says late 1980s and before. Okay. The days of my tender youth are now considered history. Hmmm.

When it comes to my own aging, I’m pretty cool with it. I wear my gray hair proudly. I’m working on accepting my extra pounds with the same grace. I’m certainly not going to lie about my age, which is almost sixty-two. After all, I have had the good fortune to last as long as I have, and with God’s grace, I’ve got another couple of decades or so to go.

But wrapping my brain around the idea that people consider the time of my early twenties as history. That one is going to take more work than getting used to the extra weight. I get that it’s over thirty years ago, almost forty. But that still says recent past to me. I mean, it doesn’t feel like it was all that long ago.

Yet, in some ways, it really is. The daughter I gave birth to was born in the middle of that decade and is now thirty-five years old. The world has changed quite a bit since I was the first person in the theatre department at Cal State, Fullerton to write a masters thesis on a word processor. The phone I put in my pocket has more computing power than that Apple IIe that I wrote on.

Attitudes have changed. I have changed. I hope I’ve gotten more resilient since then, and I really hope I’ve gotten a lot more open-minded. I know I’m a better writer than I was then, which is why I made the decision to re-write the Operation Quickline series. 

The joy of working with something I wrote so long ago is revisiting those times, looking at the person I was then, and realizing, yeah, I have grown, and not just my waistline. And there’s also looking at my old work and realizing that I was not a bad writer. And that I was pretty darned cute in my mid-to-late-twenties. Yes, that is a mullet I’m wearing in that photo – it was the best-damned haircut I ever had. If only it weren’t so dated. Sigh.

Finally, there’s the blessing of having those everyday kinds of details already in the text so that I don’t have to remember when we got word processors and when the full Star Wars trilogy was first available on video. Even if I have to look something up, I have a starting point and a frame of reference that I will never have for Nineteenth Century Los Angeles, no matter how many pictures I look at, and books I read.

So, I guess it’s not all bad having someone call the time of my youth history. It’s still going to take some time to get used to, but with luck, I’ll be around long enough to call it ancient history.

Operation Quickline Box Set

A compilation of the first five books in the Operation Quickline series, featuring Lisa Wycherly and Sid Hackbirn, agents for an ultra top-secret organization, who may seem like opposites but have a lot more in common than they think. The set includes the following titles:

That Old Cloak and Dagger Routine

Lisa Wycherly had no idea what she was getting into when Sid Hackbirn recruited her as his partner in an ultra top-secret organization called Operation Quickline. But then, neither did Sid.

Stopleak

Lisa and Sid are set up as bait to plug a leak in the system. Surviving the elaborate trap will be a lot easier than learning to appreciate each other.

Deceptive Appearances

When Sid and Lisa are called to Lisa's home town of South Lake Tahoe, they find themselves in the middle of a murder and a drug operation. 

Fugue in a Minor Key

Lisa's nephew is in trouble at school. An old girlfriend of Sid's has dropped his son into his lap. Oh, and they have to find out who's selling secrets from local defense plants.

Sad Lisa

Lisa gets engaged to her boyfriend only to have the case she and Sid are working blow up in the worst possible way.

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MYSTERY AUTHOR ANNE LOUISE BANNON USES OLD LOS ANGELES AS INSPIRATION FOR A NEW SERIES

Los Angeles, circa 1875--Spring Street at Court Street

Aside from her tendency to think of weird ways to kill people, Anne Louise Bannon is appallingly normal. Her only real quirk is wearing earrings that don’t match. She is the author of the 1920s set Freddie and Kathy series, the Operation Quickline series of cozy spy novels, and the Old Los Angeles series about a winemaker in 1870. Learn more about Anne and her books at her website. 

Old Los Angeles as the Setting

I call it the Cabot Cove Syndrome, after that old TV show Murder She Wrote. It was a tiny town in Maine that had, like, a murder a week. You’d never want to live there. Nor would you want to live in most of the small towns, fictional and otherwise, featured in cozy mysteries because the murder rate is so incredibly high.

Most cozy writers simply ignore this and most of us play along because that is, after all, the convention of the genre. In my Freddie and Kathy series, it’s ridiculous that they come up against so much murder and mayhem, even in the series’ 1920s New York setting. But we all know that in real life the murder rate in most small towns is something like one every few years, and even in the “Big Bad Cities”, very few people apart from the police come nose-to-nose with a real murder.

However, as I was doing the research for my Old Los Angeles series, I quickly realized that I had a time and place where one really could run into enough murder to make a series plausible. L.A. in 1870, was an incredibly violent place. It probably wasn’t as bad as one wag put it, with a murder a day. Historian Scott Zesch put the rate at 13 murders a year around this era, based on newspaper and court reports, and it’s likely that those numbers are a little low.

Even if we go with 13 murders a year, it doesn’t sound like much until you think about it. Los Angeles now has roughly four million people and gets around 300 murders a year, which is considered a relatively high rate. That’s between six and seven murders a year for each 100,000 people living in L.A. In 1870, there were roughly 5,000 people living there. At 13 murders a year, that’s a murder for roughly every 350 people. That’s a very violent place.

What made it so violent was that it was a frontier town. The population was largely transient, with all manner of men coming and going as they looked for work or to make their fortunes. Most of the murders were bar brawls, knife fights, and shootings.

One of the reasons I picked 1870 to start my series was that L.A. was on the cusp of civilizing. They had just set up the police force in 1869 (in fact, this year is the 150^th anniversary of the LAPD). The city would double in population during that decade, with more women and families moving in. This makes for a really nice cross-section of social strata. Add in the mix of Whites, Chinese, Blacks and Mexicans, and you’ve got one heck of a set-up for plenty of mayhem.

It gets even better when real history cooperates. The incident that Death of the City Marshal is based on really happened. Okay, I massaged the facts a little when Marshal Warren does not actually die of his wounds. But he really was shot by his own deputy in a dispute over the bounty on a prostitute.

I’m not knocking the small-town cozy. I love books like that. I’m more than willing to suspend my disbelief for a good puzzle and some quirky characters, like the lovely Ms. Pollack, whose blog this is.

But, dang, a real-life time and place that already has an abundance of nefarious goings-on? How could I resist? Cabot Cove is a wonderful setting. But so is Old Los Angeles.

Death of the City Marshal

Old Los Angeles Series, Book 2

When the city marshal gets into a gunfight with his deputy, winemaker and physician Maddie Wilcox is on hand to care for the marshal's wounds. Then the marshal is smothered in his bed the next morning, sending Maddie on the hunt for a killer prepared to do the worst to keep that most basic of human desires: a home.

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AUTHOR INSPIRATION FROM ANNE LOUISE BANNON

TobyWan

Anne Louise Bannon is a journalist and former TV critic who has written several novels, including the Operation Quickline series; the Freddie and Kathy series, set in the 1920s; and the Old Los Angeles series, set in 1870. Learn more about her and her books at her website. Today she’s joins us to discuss how she gets the ideas for her books. 

How I Get My Ideas

I’m sitting at my desk. Behind me, from outside, comes the persistent whine and occasional wail of TobyWan, my basset hound/beagle mix. I’m waiting, in spite of his plaintive cries because I know darned well that if I get up right away, the dope will amble inside as if I have all the time in the world to serve his needs. If I make him suffer endlessly, like a whole five minutes, he’ll hurry right in.

I suspect that a moment like this will end up in one of my stories at some point – which is a long way of saying that ideas are everywhere. You never know when one will hit. You can use anything.

This is going to sound horrible, but when our last dog before TobyWan passed away, it was a long night of waiting for it to happen. Sometime after, I was writing a scene in which a young boy died slowly. It was a scene that needed a lot of pathos. In addition, I really needed you to feel for the kid and his family so that when the villain was finally revealed, there was an added punch to the emotional breadbasket. And using old Clyde’s last night on the planet as the basis for this scene really wasn’t as callous as it might sound. It helped me work through my grief over losing our sweet dog.

A weird dream jumpstarted the Operation Quickline series, a romance with espionage intrusions. I dreamt that an old man wanted to move into my house. He brought his suitcase inside, and I took it right out onto the porch. I’m still not sure how that got everything else started, but the next thing I knew, I had written several short novels.

A dream about a tiger was the genesis of Tyger, Tyger.

I don’t remember if I had the dream first or if the cheesecake spilled first, but both were involved in the launching of Fascinating Rhythm, my 1920s series. I was making a cheesecake while listening to Ella Fitzgerald singing the George and Ira Gershwin songbook, and as I was getting ready to put the cake in the oven, I started dancing to Fascinatin’ Rhythm. Not a good move, but as I cleaned up the mess, I realized that it’s a song about obsession. And there was that dream about a Model T underneath a theater marquee. First Kathy, then Freddie started talking to me, and the novel happened.

That last bit is pretty key. I get tons of ideas. I’ve got an obnoxious neighbor across the street who should be inspiring any number of plots. Somebody shows up late, and I can come up with a bunch of different scenarios. But which are the good ideas, the ones that will flower into full-fledged stories?

For me, at any rate, if it’s a good idea, it will stick around. It may even keep bugging me. That’s why I don’t write down ideas or keep much of an idea file. If it’s going to go somewhere, I’ll probably remember it. Now some specific details I may write down because those I will forget sometimes.

The second thing that happens is that the characters start talking to me. That’s what happened with Death of the Zanjero. My husband was doing a lecture on the zanja system in Old Los Angeles, which is how they irrigated farms in the days before Mr. Mullholland raped the Owens Valley, and inadvertently gave me the best set-up for finding a body I’d heard in a long time. But it didn’t really turn into a story until Maddie Wilcox started talking to me and would not shut up.

In fact, she kept talking and when my research turned up that L.A.’s first police chief was killed by his own deputy in a dispute over a prostitute (I kid you not), Maddie quite politely informed me that was her next adventure. So now I have recently released Death of the City Marshal, which is based on that incident.

Now, if you will excuse me, TobyWan has suffered enough. I should probably get the cats in, too, and with luck they won’t be dragging in anything disgusting. Such as… Hmmmm….

Death of the City Marshal

Old Los Angeles series, Book 2

It's October, 1870, and once again, violence has errupted on the streets of Los Angeles. This time, City Marshal gets into a gunfight with his deputy Joseph Dye, and is severely wounded. Fortunately, winemaker and physician Maddie Wilcox is on the scene to take care of the marshal. But the next day, she finds that the marshal has been smothered in his bed.

The morning after the marshal's death, red paint is splashed all over the front porch of his home, and a list of his sins posted on the front.

The list of people with grievances against the fiery-tempered marshal is long. But then another prominent citizen has his sins posted and house front splattered. 

Maddie takes an interest in the vandalism in the hopes of finding Marshal Warren's killer. But she soon finds out that she is up against a killer driven by a profound longing, and who is prepared to do the worst to keep that most basic of human desires: a home.

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MYSTERY AUTHOR ANNE LOUISE BANNON ON CHRISTMAS TRADITIONS AND NEW KITTIES

 

Anne Louise Bannon is the author of the Freddie and Kathy mystery series set in the 1920s, the Old Los Angeles series, set in 1870, and the Operation Quickline series, starring Lisa Wycherly and Sid Hackbirn. Today she joins us to discuss the significance of one of her favorite holiday traditions in the first book in that series. Learn more about Anne and her books at her blog. 

A Fave Tradition Comes to Life in My Novel

Way back in the 1980s, when Sid Hackbirn and Lisa Wycherly first started coming to life, I was fascinated by the dichotomy of a young, devout woman sharing a house with a man whose hobby was sleeping around. I had to give Lisa a good reason for sharing Sid’s place – he recruited her as a spy.

But I also had to give Sid a good reason for his sexual appetite, one that would make sense and keep him from coming across as slimy. So Sid was raised by a Communist hippie who taught piano lessons and was also an atheist. In Sid’s universe, sex was just something you did, and he grew up utterly bemused by people’s attitudes and hang-ups. He also grew up not celebrating holidays, particularly Christmas.

Being the good, devout little Catholic girl that Lisa is, she, of course, is horrified. She brings Christmas into Sid’s house for the very first time. It was important to show Lisa having an effect on Sid’s life, given the effect he’d been having on hers. What better way to do that than have Lisa engaging in what has always been my favorite tradition – getting and decorating the Christmas tree.

It’s the memories that spring to life every time I get a whiff of that tree smell. My dad charming the tree lot guy into knocking a few bucks off the price. Hanging the ornaments that I’ve been hanging on Christmas trees since I was a small child. Just seeing them in the box gives me a feeling of rootedness and peace. My first tree as an adult, which I decorated with my ex in his apartment. My now-husband and I choosing a new ornament every year to document our then-new life together with my daughter.

In my family, we waited until at least the second weekend before Christmas to get our tree. I was always grateful that my parents didn’t hold to the old tradition (based on celebrating Advent) of waiting until Christmas Eve to get and decorate a tree. My mom often tried to do the whole color-coordinated thing. But I always protested and it was one of the few times I won. There were years she got a more “tastefully” decorated tree but I’m pretty sure she appreciates the more eclectic mix of ornaments because she kept those old ones until I was old enough to commandeer some for my own household. Please note, Mom does not keep things easily, so if she really didn’t like eclectic, she would have gotten rid of the old ornaments.

This year, sadly, I will most likely not be decorating a tree. We have kittens. Two adorable fluffy seven-month-old terrorists who would only see a nice, bright jungle gym with all sorts of fun, shiny things to bat at. With previous cats, we had put the unbreakable ornaments on the bottom and even tied the breakable ornaments to the branches. The problem, in this case, is the climbing. These two love climbing and are surprisingly good at jumping to get what they want. There’s only so much you can do to stabilize a Christmas tree, and with the one kitten turning into a decidedly larger cat, it’s just not worth taking the chance.

But as I walk by the tree lots, I’ll still be snorting that evergreen scent, and I will find some time to put some carols on softly, and sit back and reflect on the holidays and how blessed I truly am.

It’s why Lisa looks at the tree and reflects on the message of the evergreen – that love doesn’t change from one season to the next. Which may be why decorating the tree is my favorite tradition.

That Old Cloak and Dagger Routine 

In 1982, Lisa Wycherly was broke, out of work and desperate. So when Sid Hackbirn offered her a job as his live-in secretary, she jumped at it, little knowing just how dangerous it would be. Living at Sid's house was scary enough, given Sid's tendency to fool around and Lisa's unexpected attraction to him in spite of their directly opposed values regarding sex. Sid was a spy for an ultra-top-secret agency and had recruited Lisa to work as his associate. Sid knew he was turning Lisa's life upside-down. He had no clue what she'd do to him.

As Lisa learned the spy biz, things got rocky almost immediately. Lisa wasn't used to being in danger and didn't always react well. Sid tried to maintain his usual emotional distance but soon found that Lisa was not going to let him. It took the kidnapping of a college professor to force the two to really talk, and Lisa to face her own fears.

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WINEMAKING WITH MYSTERY AUTHOR ANNE LOUISE BANNON

Fermenting Grapes on their Way to Becoming Wine

Anne Louise Bannon is an author and journalist who wrote her first novel at age fifteen. She now writes the 1920’s Freddie and Kathy Mysteries, the Operation Quickline series, and the Old Los Angeles series, set in1870. Learn more about her and her books at her website and her wine education blog, OddBallGrape.com, which she runs with her husband. 

Nineteenth Century Winemaking

When Maddie Wilcox, the main character in my latest novel, Death of the Zanjero, first started coming to life, I had to figure out who she was and why she’d be there in the dramatic scene where the sluice gate is opened and the Zanjero’s dead body comes floating to the surface.

Just so you know, the Zanjero (pronounced zahn-hair-roe) was the Water Overseer in the city of Los Angeles from it’s founding in 1781 to as late as 1911. During that time, the city’s vineyards and farms were irrigated by a series of ditches, or zanjas (zahn-hah) that had been dug from the Los Angeles River. And there were lots of vineyards. California’s wine industry actually began in Los Angeles in the 1820s (take that, Napa).

Which I found insanely cool, since my husband makes wine at home. So, I had picked a time for my story – the year is 1870, when the city was just starting to civilize. And making Maddie a winemaker was a pretty easy choice. First, that was a lot of what was going on in the pueblo at the time. Second, I’d been looking for a chance to create a character in the wine biz, since my husband and I are so passionate about it. Then there was the added bonus that the research for that part of the story would be a lead-pipe cinch. Winemaking is an ancient practice. Plus, my husband had a recipe for angelica, the version of sherry wine made at the time.

Um. Not quite.

True, wine has always been made pretty much the same way since antiquity. You pick grapes, you crush them, you add yeast and let it happen, then, either press them, or pour the new wine off of the skins into barrels (by the 19^th century) and let it age. And wine is still made this way nowadays, albeit with more mechanization and better sanitation and chemistry.

Back in the 19^th century, however, things were a little different. For one thing, all that trellising you associate with grape vines today? Nope. They did what’s called head-pruning. They planted each vine in its own little space, but let it grow without supports. You occasionally see it today, where the vines all look like little bushes.

The other thing that surprised me was that they didn’t bottle wine during the 1870s. At least, not in Los Angeles. You filled your own pot or whatever from the winemaker’s barrel, and presumably kept it from getting too much oxygen that way.

Now, they did stomp on grapes in big vats to crush them before fermenting them. But they didn’t press the grapes after they were fermenting like we do now. They poured off what’s called the free-run juice into the aging barrels. The fermented fruit that was left behind was pressed, then juice was distilled into brandy, which was then added back to the wine being used to make angelica. This helped stabilize the wine so it didn’t go bad.

Granted, some of this we already knew, like the head-pruning thing, and how to make angelica. We’d gotten the recipe from Deborah Hall of Gypsy Canyon, who researched it when she’d found a whole bunch of neglected vines from probably the 1890s on her property. Watch the video.

But the actual process of winemaking, believe it or not, was pretty tough to find. Everybody at the time knew how to make wine, so why write it down? A librarian at the Wine Industry Archives at California State Polytechnic, Pomona, had to dig up the actual process for me. And it was from the tourist literature.

So, the research turned out not to be so easy, but it was fun. And being a winemaker made it perfectly logical for Maddie to be watching as the Zanjero’s men opened the sluice gate to the zanja feeding her vineyards.

Death of the Zanjero

Old Los Angeles series, Book 1

In Los Angeles in 1870, life was cheap and water could cost you everything. When the body of the Zanjero, or water overseer, Bert Rivers, floats up out of the irrigation ditch, or zanja, winemaker and healing woman Maddie Wilcox finds herself defending the town's most notorious madam. To save the one person she knows is innocent (at least, of the murder), she must find out who killed Mr. Rivers, a chase that will tax her intellect, her soul and her very belief in humanity before she's done. 

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BOOK CLUB FRIDAY--GUEST AUTHOR ANNE LOUISE BANNON

Anne Louise Bannon has made not one, but two careers out of her passion for storytelling. Both a novelist and a journalist, she has an insatiable curiosity. In addition to her mystery novels, she has written a nonfiction book about poisons, freelanced for such diverse publications as the Los Angeles Times, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Backstage West, and edits a wineblog. On the fiction side, she writes a romantic serial, a spy series, and her Kathy and Freddy historical mystery series, set in the 1920s. Her most recent title is The Last Witnesses. Learn more about Anne and her books at her website. 

Freddie’s First Day in Los Angeles

From the diary of Frederick G. Little, III, author of The Old Money Story and one of the protagonists of the Freddie and Kathy series, set in the Roaring 1920s. In their latest adventure, Freddie’s sister Honoria finds a body in her apartment. Freddie and Kathy take up the search with Honoria, and the three find themselves caught up in a conspiracy that could get them killed, no matter how unbelievable it is.

October 16, 1925, 10 a.m.

Amabassador Hotel, Los Angeles

Good Heavens, what an amazing day was yesterday. Joshua offered to drive me into Los Angeles, itself, all the way from his home in Placentia. He said it was only about forty miles and thought nothing of driving it.

The weather was and remains exceedingly fine. No, scratch that. It’s out and out hot. But then a breeze springs up from the ocean and it’s very pleasant. I can well see the attraction of the area, if this is normal for October, as I am told it is.

My first glimpse of the city was not overwhelmingly impressive. The skyline is not particularly distinctive, although there is a great deal of construction going on. And the oil derricks. They are everywhere. It’s one thing to hear and know that oil is a major business out here. It’s another thing completely to see it. I can well believe that they are pumping millions of gallons of oil.

The hotel is quite comfortable. However, Lowell did not do its splendors justice. Better yet, the concierge was able to provide me with excellent valet service and that went a long way to making me feel more at ease. Lowell, of course, was far more impressed with the easy availability of liquor in the hotel.

That being said, I remain profoundly grateful that my dearest friend is here. Not only are the reasons that brought me here utterly unsettling, there is the fact that we are in the heart of the movie business. In fact, Lowell introduced me to a couple of gentlemen from Riverwind Pictures. Never heard of them, but they’d heard of my book. I suppose I should be flattered by that, and their supposed interest in turning The Old Money Story into a film. Except that they clearly had not read it! How would they know what kind of film it would make if they haven’t read it? Lowell says that’s quite immaterial, which is not entirely reassuring, either.

All in all, there is a certain brash exuberance to this city that I confess, I did not anticipate. There is a great deal of money to be made here, whether one is in the oil business or the picture business, or in both, as I suspect many are. And the city is clearly growing. It’s not New York, but I do believe there is something special here, and it’s not just the weather.

Off to my meeting with Mr. Walsh. More to come.

The Last Witness

It's back to the 1920s with socialite author Freddie Little and his editor and not-so-blushing bride Kathy Briscow. In fact, Freddie and Kathy are happily enjoying their newly married bliss when Freddie's sister Honoria finds a dead body in her apartment. Honoria had taken the young woman in as a favor to a friend, but it soon becomes clear that the favor caught up. Honoria goes into hiding, and Freddie and Kathy take up a chase that will lead all three of them across the country and into a conspiracy that, no matter how unbelievable, could get them all killed.

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