How’s this for a plot line? \u00a0Two strangers meet on a train. \u00a0The moment they do, there’s an almost magic melding of their minds and spirits. \u00a0They understand each other completely. \u00a0They can read the other’s thoughts. \u00a0It’s as though they were always destined to be together. \u00a0Still, 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. \u00a0But they don’t. \u00a0In fact, they’ve stuck together through thick and thin for the next thirty plus years.<\/p>\n
Does this sound like something you may have read in a book? \u00a0It’s actually the story of my life, not my life with my husbands. \u00a0I 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. \u00a0No, 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.<\/p>\n
In 1983 I had spent the previous six months working on what would become the first Beaumont book, Until Proven Guilty. \u00a0The problem was, the story wasn’t going anywhere. \u00a0I realize now that I was trying to tell the story through the wrong point of view. \u00a0That 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.<\/p>\n
I got on the train with a stack of blue-lined notebooks and a fistful of pens. \u00a0As 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?”<\/p>\n
I pulled out one of the notebooks and wrote these words:<\/p>\n
She was probably a cute kid once, four maybe five years old. It was hard to tell that now. She\u00a0was dead. The murder weapon was a pink Holly\u00a0Hobbie gown. What little was left of it was still\u00a0twisted around her neck. It wasn\u2019t pretty, but\u00a0murder never is.<\/p>\n
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. \u00a0You’ll find that those handwritten words made it from the blue-lined notebook stage into the original paperback that was published in 1985. \u00a0How do I know that? \u00a0The handwritten manuscript for Until Proven Guilty still exists. \u00a0That notebook, along with my other papers, are part of the Women of Mystery Collection at the University of Arizona Library.<\/p>\n
In Portland that week, I was suddenly one fire. \u00a0I wrote 35,000 words by hand and had blisters on my fingers to prove it. \u00a0The book had constructed itself in my head. \u00a0What I had to do, once I had the right point of view, was to get the story down on paper. \u00a0(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.)<\/p>\n
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. \u00a0Amazingly enough, he can still surprise me. \u00a0We’ve visited lots of places together. \u00a0In Partner in Crime it was interesting to see Bisbee, Arizona, through the eyes of a born and bred Northwesterner. \u00a0I 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. \u00a0And being a mouse in the corner when J.P. visited the Twelve Step Biker Bar on 85th was an experience to be remembered.<\/p>\n
Even now, more than twenty books into the series, Beau still does things that surprise me. \u00a0The way he looks at the world and the things he says can make me laugh. \u00a0And cry. \u00a0As Sancho Panza would say, “I like him. \u00a0I really like him.”<\/p>\n
As for my husband? \u00a0Bill, and I have lived in this peculiar\u00a0m\u00e9nage \u00e1 trois<\/i>\u00a0arrangement with that stranger from the train for twenty-eight years now. \u00a0I can tell you, and Bill likes J.P., too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
How’s this for a plot line? \u00a0Two strangers meet on a train. \u00a0The moment they do, there’s an almost magic melding of their minds and spirits. \u00a0They understand each other completely. \u00a0They can read the other’s thoughts. \u00a0It’s as though they were always destined to be together. \u00a0Still, in the beginning, it seems like only […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[33,143,7],"tags":[47],"class_list":["post-347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-second-watch","category-writing","tag-beaumont"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-5B","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=347"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":348,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347\/revisions\/348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}