Who is Trisha Carson? Guest Post by Glenda Carroll

I’ve known Trisha Carson for at least twelve years. I first saw her on the beach at a Sierra mountain lake in northern California waiting for her sister to finish a two mile open water swim. She was almost like a ghost at that time – faceless, blending in with the people around her. 

That’s how my protagonist was born – a vision appeared based on where I spent so much of my time ... on beaches and in the water. When I started writing the Trisha Carson series, I knew little about Trisha, not even her name. I didn’t know what she looked like, what she enjoyed eating, if she had a significant other, even if she had a job. But I did know one thing about her, she was an amateur sleuth … a woman with no investigative training, but with good instincts and a fierce sense of responsibility to finish what she started. I wanted her to be normal. A person whose life had more than her shares of ups and downs. Someone who screwed up. Someone I could relate to. Creating a couture-wearing private investigator who only carried Hermes bags, wore Manolo Blahnik heels and lived in a penthouse overlooking San Francisco Bay was out of the question. I wouldn’t know where to start. Or a snappy, quick-witted, shrewd police detective seemed beyond my writing talent.

But if she was an older sister (I am one) whose father and husband walked out on her (didn’t happen to me), leaving her to raise her younger sister (I used to babysit way too much) and still grieving over a mother that died of cancer (my mom died peacefully in her sleep at 92), that I understood and could weave into a developing personality.

Since I wanted this character to be in her mid-forties when the series started, I looked up popular baby girl names in the late ‘70’s and found Trisha. Her sister, eight years her junior, took my mother’s name, Lena. As Dead in the Water, the first book in the series opened, Trisha returned to northern California and was living in the back bedroom of her family home that her sister now owns, wondering how things went so wrong. She tried to put her life back together and instead, found herself searching for the killer of an open water swimmer.  

As I was writing, her personality developed. She was noisy, pushy and bickered frequently with Lena. Not the cuddliest woman in the world. She found one job, thanks to her sister and then was fired. Although Trisha didn’t have a handle on her private life, she developed into a creative problem solver when it came to crime. I’m not sure what I expected as I constructed this character, but it wasn’t the Trisha that turned up on the page. She took over and told me who she was, whether I liked it or not.  I understood why some readers didn’t take to her. However, I did. And I gave her the freedom to develop into a strong female amateur sleuth, even while making huge mistakes, especially when it came to men.

Now in the fourth book, Better Off Dead, Trisha has mellowed as the years have passed. She’s softer around the edges and I think it’s due to her family’s influence.  To know Trisha is to know her younger sister, Lena, the swimmer in the family; Lena’s live-in boyfriend, Terrel Robinson, MD, an emergency room doctor in San Francisco, and finally her retired dad, Robert Shaver. What made a real difference was her love for Timmy or Little T, Lena and Terrel’s son.

Her confidence as a crime solver bloomed through the mystery series. She opened doors that no one would walk through; climbed in windows at midnight, hunted through trash cans surrounded by fog and found herself dumped in San Francisco Bay more than once. She’s become a good enough sleuth that the local police want her to join the force. 

Trisha Carson and her family have lived in my head for more than a decade. To me they are as real as my own family. What will happen next? Trisha will be the one to tell me and I’ll follow behind her writing it all down.

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Glenda Carroll is the author of the Trisha Carson mystery series that’s set in and around the beautiful San Francisco Bay area. Her mysteries have an undercurrent of water flowing through them. She was a long-time journalist and a professional communications manager. Currently she tutors first-generation, low-income high schoolers in English and History. Carroll lives in San Rafael, CA with her pup, McCovey.