CHARACTERS AND THEIR OBJECTS: Guest Post by Neil Plakcy

NEIL PLAKCY:
Characters and their Objects 

In a recent interview with New York Times, best-selling author Gail Carriger said that because of her background in archaeology, she sees objects “as very representative of culture and personality. So a lot of my characters have a signature gadget that represents them.”

It’s an intriguing bit of shorthand, isn’t it? Carriger, author of The Parasol Protectorate, says, “My [heroine carries] a Swiss Army kind of battle-parasol with all these secret devices in it.”

When I think of Craig Johnson’s Walt Longmire, I immediately see him in a cowboy hat. That object connects him to law enforcement, to the Old West and the New West as well.

When I envision Aimee Leduc in Cara Black’s series, she’s on her moped, which gives her the freedom to explore every arrondisement in Paris.

That made me wonder if my characters have an object that represents each one of them.

The first book I published was Mahu, about a Honolulu homicide detective who gets forced out of the closet while investigating a dangerous case. It’s easy for me to associate him with an object—it’s his surfboard.

Very early in the book, he goes surfing and I make explicit the connection between him and surfing, and how it connects to him as a police detective as well.

“I am renewed, reborn and revitalized every time I step into the salty water. With my board under me, balanced on a wave, surrounded by sea spray and blue skies, I am finally complete. It’s a moment of rare transcendence for me, a chance to rise up out of the scum and bitterness and shame I find on the streets. It’s the only way I can keep being a cop.”

Steve Levitan, the protagonist of my golden retriever mysteries, has an important object in his life as well—the hidden laptop he keeps his hacking software on. It’s secreted away in the attic of his townhouse, so that he has to be very intentional about using it. It represents his downfall—he spent a year as a guest of the California penal system for hacking. But it’s also a tool that he uses to find clues, solve cases and bring justice.

For Liam McCullough, one of the two co-protagonists of my Have Body, Will Guard series, it’s not an object so much as a habit. When he was a U.S. Navy SEAL, he learned to swim with the combat stroke, “a mix of sidestroke, freestyle and breaststroke. The Combat Sidestroke allows the swimmer to swim more efficiently and reduces the body's profile in the water in order to be less visible during combat operations when surface swimming is required.”

This habit characterizes his need to remain a warrior, to protect those around him. And he’s a bit vain about his well-muscled body, so this exercise helps him stay in shape as well. What other characters have an object that defines them? Mary Poppins and her umbrella, Sherlock Holmes and his deerstalker cap, Miss Marple and her knitting needles?

And how about you writers out there? Do the characters you write about have one, and what purpose does it serve?

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Neil Plakcy’s newest release in the Golden Retriever Mystery series is A Litter of Goldens, a collection of short mystery stories in which Steve and Rochester dig up clues and drag criminals to justice. The tenth full-length novel in the series, Dog’s Green Earth, recently debuted in audiobook format. Neil’s website is www.mahubooks.com.

Dogs: Guest post by Thriller Writer Joseph Finder

JOSEPH FINDER:
A DOGGIE POST

A couple of years ago the serial autobiographer Karl Ove Knausgaard asked, in The New Yorker, “Has a single good author ever owned a dog?” No offense, Karl, but that question, to borrow a Chris Evans line from the movie “Knives Out,” was stupid with two o’s. The internet bristles with rejoinders — oh yeah? how about Anton Chekhov’s dachshunds? Or Faulkner’s Jack Russell terriers? Or Virginia Woolf and her beloved cocker spaniel, Pinka? Woolf even wrote a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog, Flush. Emily Brontë’s dog Keeper was so grief-stricken after Brontë’s death that he howled outside her bedroom door for weeks. An early draft of Of Mice and Men was shredded and eaten by John Steinbeck’s setter puppy, Toby. (“Two months of work, gone,” he lamented.) There’s a great picture of Edith Wharton posing with a Chihuahua perched on each shoulder. Anyway I could go on, and on, at the risk of burning out my Google machine.

My point is that right now I am dogless.

This is a sad state of affairs that I hope to remedy soon. A dogless life is lived in black and white.

Until her death a couple of years ago I was owned by Mia, a Golden Retriever. We adopted her from The Seeing Eye in Morristown, New Jersey, which trains dogs — Goldens and Labs and German Shepherds, mostly — as guide dogs for the blind. Some dogs, failing to meet the school’s high standards, are given away for adoption. After some three years on the waiting list, we got a sudden phone call one day: a “gorgeous” two-year-old Golden Retriever named Mia was available. We had twenty four hours to say yes or no.

Understand, we knew nothing about this dog. But she was a Golden, and Goldens tend to be easy-going. She’d also gone through years of training, so we figured she’d be trainable. Mia had already worked with some blind people. She’d flunked out of dog-training school in her senior year, but it was for a good reason: she was too “friendly.” How could you go wrong with a dog that flunked out of training for being too friendly?

So we said yes, and drove down to Morristown to meet this dog whom we’d accepted sight unseen. But first we had to be interviewed, to make sure we were fit adoptive parents. From the next room we could hear frantic canine whining and squealing, accompanied by some kind of crashing sound.

“That’s Mia,” said the woman, Judy, who was interviewing us. She sounded almost apologetic. Once we’d passed, Judy went to get Mia from the room across the hall.

A moment later there was a blurred motion—a dog came flying through the air into our room—and a cloud of fur floating in the air, and the dog came at me like a guided missile. She knocked me to the floor and proceeded to lick my face, to smother me with kisses.

We’d been expecting a docile, obedient, sober-sided canine and what we got instead was a rebel. Boisterous and affectionate and loving beyond belief, but not a conformist. It took us a while to come to the realization that Mia was in fact clever. She’d escaped a life of servitude. Seeing-eye dogs have to be on duty nearly all the time, doing their wonderful work for the blind. Mia wasn’t having any of that. Let other dogs be dutiful and submissive; Mia just wanted to have fun.

Once we got her home and my wife was eating her lunch, a burger, Mia dove through the air to nab it — but taking only the bun and ignoring the burger, which fell on the floor. She turned out to have a particular affinity for French bread, particularly sourdough. If you left a sourdough baguette on the kitchen counter, Mia would somehow find a way to scramble up there. Goldens are famously food-motivated, but Mia took it to another level. She was an outlaw with a jones for bread. If she saw some, she snagged it. She couldn’t resist. We had to hide our bread in high, inaccessible places.

One day she stole an enormous bar of dark chocolate from Trader Joe’s that my dad had left on the counter, not imagining my dog could easily get up there. We had to make her drink peroxide, in order to make her vomit up the dangerous stomachful. Chocolate can be deadly to certain breeds of dogs, including Goldens.

Make no mistake, she was no blond bimbo. She knew plenty of commands and even obeyed them when she felt like it. As she grew older and her face whitened, she calmed down, mellowed a bit. But she remained adamantly puppyish.

Once I tried bringing her to my office, a few blocks away from our apartment. Writing is a solitary business, and I was maybe envisioning her curled at my feet under my desk, sighing contentedly as I finished a chapter. I’m actually not sure what I had in mind.

But Mia had other ideas. When she wasn’t asking to go out, she just wanted to play. She’d bring me a tennis ball. She’d nudge me. She’d grunt. She constantly wanted attention. She made it impossible to focus. She was not good for productivity. She wasn’t a work dog, but she had other, deeper talents. If you were sad or stressed, she’d come sit beside you and sometimes even pat you with her paw.

Sometimes, when I’m on deadline, I find myself getting up at four in the morning to write. Mia quickly figured this out. So she started waking me up at right around four every morning — I mean, within five minutes either side of four. I have no idea how she did it, but after making sure I got up, she returned to her bed and went back to sleep and didn’t ask for food until it was light outside. She was a reliable canine alarm clock.

Somehow Mia was so tuned into me that she knew when I was returning home from work. Ten minutes before I arrived, she’d start whining, pacing. I could hear her throwing herself at the front door as I approached.

One morning when she was nearly fourteen, she wouldn’t get up. After a few hours of this, we took her to the animal emergency room. They told us she had cancer, that she’d bled internally so much that she lacked the energy to stand. We put her through an arduous and expensive surgery, but the tumors came right back. We made the agonizing decision to put her down, rather than let her die in pain, feeling, our vet said, like she was drowning.

The terrible time came, and we surrounded Mia. My wife was the one who held her, and in the last few seconds of her life, Mia reached out to my sobbing wife and patted her hand with a consoling paw.

No dog can ever replace Mia, I know that, but the author needs his dog. We’re on the waiting list for another dropout.

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JOSEPH FINDER is the New York Times bestselling author of fifteen previous novels, including Judgment, The Switch, Guilty Minds, The Fixer, and Suspicion. Finder's international bestseller Killer Instinct won the International Thriller Writers' Thriller Award for Best Novel of 2006. Other bestselling titles include Paranoia and High Crimes, which both became major motion pictures. In his new thriller, House on Fire, private investigator Nick Heller is hired to infiltrate a powerful family whose wealth and reputation hide something far more sinister.