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| Permanent Vacation: An interview with Taffy Cannon By Susan McBride  After a three-book relationship with Fawcett, Taffy Cannon bid bon voyage to both her New York publisher and to protagonist Nan Robinson. She set up a new literary itinerary for herself, signing on with Perseverance Press, the mystery arm of John Daniel & Co., and inventing Roxanne Prescott and the Irish Eyes Travel Mysteries. The first to debut last year was the highly acclaimed Guns and Roses, which takes readers along on a sometimes murderous tour of Colonial Williamsburg and its surroundings. Read our review of Guns and Roses. SUSAN McBRIDE - Let’s start with Guns and Roses. How did you go from doing the Nan Robinson series at Fawcett to creating Roxanne Prescott and Irish Eyes Travel for Perseverance Press? TAFFY CANNON -The evolution of GUNS AND ROSES had less to do with the end of the Nan Robinson series than it did with my own curiosity. I love to travel and visited Williamsburg and other historic sites in Virginia for several years in a row with my husband and daughter, right after Malice Domestic in the late spring, which is a truly beautiful time in that part of the country. I live in Southern California and have to cluster my East Coast activities; this year I managed to work in a college reunion on the Outer Banks after Malice. The second time we were in Williamsburg, I started looking around and saying to myself, "There has to be a way to get a book out of this." The third time we went, I had most of it written and talked to the local cops about procedural issues. The fourth time I had a completed manuscript and wandered around making sure the little details were correct. Are you a travel buff? Because I'm sure that researching these books must entail visiting the locales and ascertaining how certain tours in those areas would operate. I've always enjoyed travel; though when I was a kid, our family trips were severely limited by the fact that my younger sister and brother both got carsick in a major way. When you have to stop every twenty minutes for someone, it really limits your options. Once I was old enough to travel without my family and began to go places with my boyfriend (who became, and remains, my husband) everything changed. He's a fabulous person to travel with because he's interested in so many different types of places and things, and because he shares my curiosity. Our interests tend to be overlapping and complementary. Traveling to do research for a mystery however, is very different from traveling just for fun. In a travel mystery, you have to be dead-on accurate about detail, because people who really know the area will be reading very critically. Researching a book on location when you know you won't have ready access to those sites again is tricky. I try to absorb as much as I possibly can about an area while I'm there, transcribe all my notes as soon as possible when I get home, and collect reams of printed matter. A lot of times I'll find something interesting and/or useful in a location that I wasn't aware of before I started. I try to stay flexible enough in my plotting and characters to be able to take advantage of what I discover in this location research. Your choice of Roxanne as a protagonist is wonderful. A tour guide who was formerly a cop in Austin, Texas makes for an interesting combination. How did you dream her up? I had felt really limited by Nan Robinson's amateur sleuth status. She was an attorney-investigator for the California State Bar, but her work didn't lend itself to murder in the ways I'd hoped it would. So she ended up having to stumble over bodies just like all the rest of the amateur sleuths. When I started thinking about new characters, I was drawn to policewomen because of their training and capabilities, but I didn't want to write a procedural. So I had Roxanne be a cop, but on indefinite leave because of the death of her partner when a routine call turned sour. That way I had a character who had cop instincts and cop skills. She could interact realistically with police in other locations because she spoke the lingo. And if she needed to, she could wrestle a bad guy to the ground or shoot off his kneecap. I love the feeling one gets of Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians throughout Guns and Roses. There's a murderer among this group of travelers with people getting knocked off in one way or another along the route. Was Christie an influence? If not, what authors have had an impact on you as a reader and a writer? Of course Agatha Christie was an influence! I started reading her and Erle Stanley Gardner when I graduated from Nancy Drew, and loved the intricacies of her plotting. I remain extremely fond of Miss Marple and St. Mary Mead, but detest Hercule Poirot, who seems an insufferable prig. Some other early influences included John D. MacDonald and Rex Stout (who shares my birthday along with Woody Allen, Bette Midler and Richard Pryor). I discovered both Sara Paretsky and Sue Grafton fairly early on in their careers. But what really opened my eyes to the possibilities of the field was the emergence of Sisters in Crime in the late 1980s. Marilyn Wallace edited a series of short story anthologies, also called Sisters in Crime, and I was stunned. All of a sudden there were more female mystery writers than I could keep up with. It was wonderful and overdue. I remember going to a fairly informal Sisters in Crime signing and reception at Small World Books in Venice around 1989. The featured guests included Nancy Pickard, Sue Dunlap, Lia Matera, Marilyn Wallace, Shelley Singer, Julie Smith and Faye Kellerman. It was as if my bookshelf had suddenly come to life. Outside the mystery field, I love Larry McMurtry, who can make me laugh out loud and cry in the same book, even one on so unpromising a premise as a cattle drive. Gone With the Wind is my favorite book of all time, and True Confessions by John Gregory Dunne remains my favorite L.A. novel. Do you have a favorite of all the books you've written? I've heard lots of talk about Convictions and wonder if that has a special place in your heart. CONVICTIONS is indeed my favorite book. It's the story of a friendship between two women through the sixties and seventies, with one of them politically underground in the second half of the book. I loved researching that book and writing it. I think it humanizes a very complicated political and social period. What's particularly gratifying is that when people read CONVICTIONS today, they are as drawn into the period and characters as the first wave of readers when it was published in 1985. In a very real sense, it's a historical novel, and I think that one measure of its success is that readers who are too young to have experienced its events firsthand are still able to find it compelling. Can you give us a peek into Dying on the Vine, the next Irish Eyes Travel Mystery? DYING ON THE VINE is set in the Sonoma Wine Country of Northern California. I was just up there last month, doing all manner of grueling research in various winery tasting rooms. Let it not be said that I'm unwilling to suffer for my art. Also, I know you have a project in the works that features lawyers. Can you tell us about that? OPEN SEASON ON LAWYERS is another personal favorite, a non-series book featuring LAPD Robbery-Homicide detective Joanna Davis. Somebody is killing the sleazy attorneys of Los Angeles. Can this person be stopped? And should this person be stopped? It's more in the vein of a thriller, and it was also a lot of fun to write. It will be published in the spring of 2002 by Perseverance Press. How do you come up with ideas? I order them from the Sharper Image catalogue. Anything else you'd like readers to know about Taffy Cannon? I recently completed a book that was started by my friend and colleague, the late Rebecca Rothenberg. THE TUMBLEWEED MURDERS is the fourth, and regrettably the final book in Becky's Claire Sharples Botanical Mystery series. Because she was such a gifted writer, I had to really immerse myself in the project to try to capture her style. This is the hardest thing I've ever done in the world of writing. Perseverance Press is publishing this book in Fall 2001. How can fans reach you? My web site is at: http://www.TaffyCannon.com and by email at: tcannon@nctimes.net |
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