Jerold Last is a Professor of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at the University of California's Medical School at Davis, near Sacramento in Northern California. Jerry, a two-time winner of The Indie Book of the Day Award, writes “tweener” mystery books (tough mystery stories that follow the cozy conventions of no graphic sex and no cussing) that are fast moving and entertain the reader. Several of the books introduce the readers to South America, a region where he has lived and worked that is a long way from home for most English speakers. He and his wife Elaine lived previously in Salta, Argentina and Montevideo, Uruguay. Jerry selects the most interesting South American locations he found for Roger and Suzanne to visit while solving miscellaneous murders. Montevideo, Salta, Machu Picchu, the Galapagos Islands, and Iguazu Falls are also characters in these books, and the novels portray these places as vivid and real. Jerry and Elaine breed prize-winning German shorthaired pointer dogs; Elaine also provides technical advice for Jerry’s dog-related novels like The Deadly Dog Show and Hunter Down, as well as editing for all of the books.Synopsis of Unbearably Deadly
For a change, the butler didn’t do it; a bear did. Or did it? In “Unbearably Deadly”, Roger and Suzanne visit Alaska to find out the circumstances surrounding their friends’ deaths. The FBI investigation concludes the cause of death was a tragic accident. With nothing more than a gut feeling that something is amiss, our sleuths head to Alaska to search for the truth. The vast expanse of Denali National Park creates a 6-million acre locked room murder case for our sleuths to solve. There are no suspects, no clues, and little help available. Conspiracies abound and the truth is much more complicated than it appears.
Where Do Those Characters in the Books
Come From?
As
we try to create the imaginary worlds of our books, to be believable we have to
rely on reality for inspiration. I use the places I’ve lived in and
visited in South America as settings in my South American Mystery novels.
These novels have to be populated with people, both the central characters like
my detectives Roger Bowman and Suzanne Foster, and all of the rest of the
people they will meet as they investigate the murder or murders. We
quickly encounter a problem of how to make these other characters into distinct
individuals rather than just 20 stereotypes named Pedro or Jose. To solve
this problem I often use real people I’ve met in South America as models for
fictional characters in these books. The
process begins by visualizing someone I actually met for a physical description,
and/or by taking part of their personas to start building the fictional
characters. To demonstrate the process, let’s follow the path from
reality to book pages of several suspects in the murders being investigated in
three of my novels.
Next up is another character (actually a couple) from The Ambivalent Corpse,
Gerardo and Andrea, who act as hosts for Suzanne at the University de la
Republica and become good friends of our heroes as the story evolves. The
couple is modeled after my best friends and scientific colleagues in
Montevideo. They are, in fact, named after their two children. Now
there’s a switch, naming the parents after their children. You can get a
real sense of power when you write fiction! The scene at the Feria (open
air market) in the park described in the book is based on the actual Saturday
morning Feria in the park across the street from the apartment we rented when
we lived in Montevideo. Andrea’s research with algal toxins she describes
at dinner in the book is pretty close to what the real “Andrea and Gerardo” do
in Montevideo, and formed a large part of the basis for our collaborative
research and teaching.
In
The Surreal Killer, Suzanne and Roger are taken for a flight over Northern
Chile’s vast Atacama Desert in a small two-engine plane by two of their
suspects, Pedro and Romero. Along the way, Pedro gives both of them
lessons in how to fly the plane. Pedro’s character is a composite based
upon a couple of real scientists I’ve known very well. One of them is a North American, originally
from New Jersey, who actually taught me how to fly a single-engine Cessna many
years ago while we were both research scientists at The National Institutes of
Health in Bethesda, Maryland. The other, more extroverted, half of
Pedro's character is based upon a Chilean scientist who hosted me during
several visits to Santiago as we tried to build a collaborative program at The
University of Chile similar to those we had already developed in Montevideo and
Salta, Argentina.
Finally, the Kaufman sisters, Gretchen
and Barbara, make their debut as murder suspects in The Origin of Murder, as
fellow passengers on a cruise of the Galapagos Islands with Roger and
Suzanne. They return once again in time
to play a substantial role in Unbearably Deadly. We met the sisters’ counterparts in real life
as, you may have guessed, passengers on the cruise ship we took for our real
vacation in the Galapagos Islands. One
of the sisters taught school in the San Francisco Bay area, the other lived
with her and worked for a publisher in the city. We spent several dinners together on board
the ship discussing life for single women in San Francisco, our common love of
dogs, and whatever other topics came to mind.
We also met for dinner in the Bay Area a few times after we returned to
California, but that was a long drive and the friendship petered out. I grafted their physical descriptions and
personalities onto the fictional sisters in the novel as the list of characters
emerged. They were promoted to recurring
character status in Unbearably Deadly. I
like how they can interact with Roger and Suzanne to keep the plot moving along
without having to steal the limelight from our main characters. I suspect we’ll see them again as the series
continues.
In this brief blog entry I've tried to describe how a
small part of the creative process works for fiction authors. Our life
experiences are the source and our books and their characters are the product.
If you'd like to meet Bernardo, Andrea, and Gerardo, they can be found hanging
out in The Ambivalent Corpse, available from Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/Ambivalent-Corpse-Crime-Meant-ebook/dp/B0060ZFRQG. You can meet Pedro, Romero, and their
Beechcraft Baron airplane in The Surreal Killer, available from Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/The-Surreal-Killer-ebook/dp/B007H21EFO. Finally, the Kaufman sisters appear in The
Origin of Murder http://www.amazon.com/Origin-Murder-Suzanne-American-Mystery-ebook/dp/B00K4KDL3O and Unbearably Deadly at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00RAOVJWW.
