How’s this for a plot line?  Two strangers meet on a train.  The moment they do, there’s an almost magic melding of their minds and spirits.  They understand each other completely.  They can read the other’s thoughts.  It’s as though they were always destined to be together.  Still, in the beginning, it seems like only a passing fancy–that they’d simply meet, spend a little time together, and then move on to someone or something else.  But they don’t.  In fact, they’ve stuck together through thick and thin for the next thirty plus years.

Does this sound like something you may have read in a book?  It’s actually the story of my life, not my life with my husbands.  I met the first one of those in a college dormitory vestibule in October of 1962 and the second one at a widowed retreat in Washington state in 1985.  No, the stranger I met on a train in March of 1983 was homicide detective J.P. Beaumont, and he’s been my constant companion ever since.

In 1983 I had spent the previous six months working on what would become the first Beaumont book, Until Proven Guilty.  The problem was, the story wasn’t going anywhere.  I realize now that I was trying to tell the story through the wrong point of view.  That year, when it was time for Spring Break, I sent my kids to Camp Orkila on Orcas Island for five days and I sent myself to Portland to stay with a friend I had met years earlier while working in the insurance business.

I got on the train with a stack of blue-lined notebooks and a fistful of pens.  As the train pulled out of Seattle’s King Street Station I thought, “What if I tried to write this book through the detective’s point of view?”

I pulled out one of the notebooks and wrote these words:

She was probably a cute kid once, four maybe five years old. It was hard to tell that now. She was dead. The murder weapon was a pink Holly Hobbie gown. What little was left of it was still twisted around her neck. It wasn’t pretty, but murder never is.

In that moment, I was suddenly inside Beau’s head, listening to his thoughts, walking around the crime scene in his shoes, seeing it through his eyes.  You’ll find that those handwritten words made it from the blue-lined notebook stage into the original paperback that was published in 1985.  How do I know that?  The handwritten manuscript for Until Proven Guilty still exists.  That notebook, along with my other papers, are part of the Women of Mystery Collection at the University of Arizona Library.

In Portland that week, I was suddenly one fire.  I wrote 35,000 words by hand and had blisters on my fingers to prove it.  The book had constructed itself in my head.  What I had to do, once I had the right point of view, was to get the story down on paper.  (I had already bought my first computer by then but I still hadn’t learned how to use it, and in 1983 there was no way I could take my Eagle PC with me on a train.)

It’s been more than thirty years and twenty one books between that first book and Second Watch. In the course of writing the stories, Beau and I have lived through plenty of adventures together.  Amazingly enough, he can still surprise me.  We’ve visited lots of places together.  In Partner in Crime it was interesting to see Bisbee, Arizona, through the eyes of a born and bred Northwesterner.  I still laugh at the start of Failure to Appear where Beau is awakened by a telephone call from his first wife’s second husband calling to let Beau know that his daughter, Kelly, has decamped with her boyfriend.  And being a mouse in the corner when J.P. visited the Twelve Step Biker Bar on 85th was an experience to be remembered.

Even now, more than twenty books into the series, Beau still does things that surprise me.  The way he looks at the world and the things he says can make me laugh.  And cry.  As Sancho Panza would say, “I like him.  I really like him.”

As for my husband?  Bill, and I have lived in this peculiar ménage á trois arrangement with that stranger from the train for twenty-eight years now.  I can tell you, and Bill likes J.P., too.