ONCE UPON A TIME...Guest Post by Robin Burcell

Once Upon a Time....Or, as I like to tell it, 30 years and 30 pounds ago, and long before I lost a lung, I became a fledgling published author.

The math is a tad fuzzy, since I’m writing this in December 2024 and that first book came out in December 1995, so not quite 30 years. The number crunching gets even fuzzier regarding my weight. Let’s just say I was a lot younger and a lot thinner. The missing lung figures much later in this tale, and has nothing to do with my first book, which was not exactly a mystery. It was more a romance/time-travel with a little murder thrown in for good measure. I don’t talk about it much, because When Midnight Comes was the first—and last—romance I would write. The idea came to me, oddly enough, while watching a Star Trek episode.   

Years after that first book was published, I would tell my twin daughters that, should they ever do an internet search on me, they might read about my short-lived romance writing career in which I mention there wasn’t a lot of romance in my life after giving birth to them, and so I took up writing about murder and mayhem instead. I let them know that it’s my attempt at mom humor in explaining why it took four more years to get a second book written.  

In truth, my stalled writing career had little to do with having twins or a lack of romance in my life. (For the record, my husband and I will celebrate our 40^th anniversary this coming summer.) It had everything to do with the rising body count in each of my books, which made it really difficult to bill them as romances. (Did I mention that When Midnight Comes started off with a murder?)

My astute best friend suggested that, perhaps, since I actually worked as a police officer in my day job, I should try my hand at police procedurals. 

After considerable thought (did I really want to spend my nights writing a fictional version of my day job?), I decided to give it a try, and wrote my first mystery, Every Move She Makes, about Kate Gillespie, a homicide inspector at San Francisco PD. (Kate started her life as Fran, but my editor made me change it. Guess what happens when you do a hurried global change of Fran who works for San Francisco?) 

After four police procedurals, I was ready for a change, and decided to try my hand at international thrillers, starring Sydney Fitzpatrick, a forensic artist (also one of my day jobs) and FBI agent (not one of my day jobs, regardless of what some intrepid reporters have written). 

When that five book series came to an end, another friend, Lee Goldberg, asked me to write The Last Good Place for Brash Books, using the original characters from the late Carolyn Weston novels of which The Streets of San Francisco TV series was based on.  (Did I ever tell the story about how—because of my mistake—all the page breaks in TLGP were accidentally eliminated from the review copies? I can laugh now, but I owe huge apologies and thanks to those fellow authors who waded through it for a cover quote.) 

The above mentioned book was the last police procedural I wrote, not because I had given up writing, but because shortly thereafter, I was tapped to cowrite the Sam and Remi Fargo Adventures by the Grand Master of Adventure himself, Clive Cussler. Our first book, Pirate, hit #2 on the NYT back in 2016. 

Now here’s the part of the story some may not know. Finally. The missing lung. In 2016, in the midst of writing the second Cussler/Fargo novel, Romanov Ransom, I was diagnosed with a rather rare cancer. It was biopsied (we’ll leave the collapsed lung story for another day) and determined that it was not the type of cancer that responds well to chemo or radiation. Sort of a good news/bad news/good news thing. In 2017, the tumor and left lung surrounding it were removed, and I went back to writing with Cussler, for a total of five books, until his death in February 2020. 

It was shortly thereafter, as the world knows, that the pandemic hit. 

I tried to write through it. And failed. 

A couple of years went by, and I wasn’t sure if I’d ever write again. 

Then something magical happened. My first grandchild landed in my arms and suddenly I started looking at things from his point of view—once he started to have one. I wrote and illustrated a picture book for him. And while I haven’t yet submitted it (anyone know a good children’s book agent?), I realized that my creative spark had not been extinguished after all. It had merely been waiting to be rekindled.  

Small miracles aside, it’s been a long time since I’ve had anything published, or ventured into the mystery world.  Even prior to the pandemic, because of my health, I backed out of LCC 2019, 2020, and all the rest since. 

Because of the pandemic, I (like many with underlying health issues) withdrew from just about every form of social gathering, which, as mentioned above, took a toll on my creative side. 

So, imagine my surprise when I open an email to find one from Lucinda Surber. That, in itself, isn’t unusual. I’ve received quite a few from her over the last several years asking if I’m going to use that conference fee from 2019. Let it ride, I’d tell her, and then another year would go by, rinse, repeat. But this email is not about that unused conference fee. 

It’s about me and the year 2026.

I have to do a double take. One of the guests of honor…?

Wait. What…?

Tears pool on my lower lashes, making it hard to read.

I look again.

My brain is telling me this can’t be real, but my name is still there. I feel a bit like Harry Potter when 

Hagrid tells him he’s a wizard.

I can’t be a guest of honor. I’m just… Robin.

And yet, here’s my name next to the other Guest of Honor, Kwei Quartey, next to the Fan Guest of Honor, Randal Brandt, and with the Toastmaster, Leslie Karst.

Carson and Dash by Robin Burcell

I quickly accept, before Lucinda writes back to tell me it’s a mistake.

Which is a long way of saying, missing lung be damned, I will see you all at LCC in 2026.

***

New York Times Bestselling author Robin Burcell moonlighted as a cop for nearly three decades, while working as a mom fulltime. She wrote police procedurals and international thrillers, until Clive Cussler asked her to co-write with him in the Fargo series (where the good guys sometimes skirted the law, but always saved the day).