guest post by Carole Nelson Douglas
Midnight Louie is thrilled that I was invited to write about him for the mindful cat and delighted to see photos of attractive torties on the site. (Frankly, like any hard-boiled PI, he can’t resist a female of any species.) and that may be mutual, much as I dislike to encourage him. He looks gorgeously dapper on the cover of his latest release, cat in a White tie and Tails.
We have a tortie at home, rescued off the neighbor’s roofing at 6 a.m. She’s called Amberleigh because she has green eyes and (some) red hair, like the Irish heroine of my first book of that name.
Midnight Louie was a rescue cat before he ended up being a literary lion. Actually, he would deny he had needed “rescuing.” He was a motel cat. They normally have horrible lives, even in moderate climates. I’ve seen them eating chocolate cake from room service trays, poor things.When Louie was rescued, however, he weighed eighteen pounds from living off the expensive koi–he adores those large, juicy upscale fish to this day–at a swank Palo Alto motel. He’d relaxing as much as the ankles of female guests at the outside soft drink maker to cadge a soft, warm bed for the night. trouble was, the management couldn’t absorb the koi losses and he was about to be sent to the local pound for a hasty exit.
A woman from St. Paul, where I was writing for the daily newspaper, flew him home in a borrowed puppy crate, but then put in an expensive three-inch long classified ad. All she desired was the ideal home and he’d be yours for a dollar bill. I just had to do a feature story on this cat’s saga, and he did get a good home. (Mine was full up.) When I sat down to write the piece, I made what proved to be a momentous decision. I let Louie “write” his tale himself.
Louie proved to have a lot of cattitude and a strong noir voice, so a lot more than ten years later when I was writing fiction fulltime in Fort Worth,Texas, he came to mind as a part-time narrator of an innovative romance-with-mystery quartet. The (no longer to be found even on the Internet) editor reduced his already-light contributions by forty percent without telling us.
Uh-oh. Louie demanded a rematch, so I flipped the concept to mystery with continuing romantic relationships, and we’ve just turned in our 25th collaboration in an alphabetical series, cat in an Alien X-Ray. considering that the Midnight Louie series is set inLas Vegas, Louie has a high old time playing “Sam Spade with hairballs” in the world’s biggest and glitziest sandbox. and so do I.
Cat elegant magazine has listed Midnight Louie 17th on its top 40 list of iconic media and literary cats. Together, we have won lots of first place writing awards from the cat Writers’ association and others, including a lifetime achievement award in mystery from RT book evaluations magazines.
My early life with cats was frustrating because my mother (irrationally, of course) disliked them and refused to let me have one. We resided in cold country, so I ran a one-night rescue operation, hoping my mother would break down and let me keep one stray someday, but when she finally did, it had to stay in the basement. I had to give it up because I discovered that’s just not ideal for cats.
It’s no surprise my spouse and I have taken in lots of strays. Besides Amberleigh, we currently have Midnight Louie III, a Humane society adoptee; Topaz, a Persian whose owner died and was embraced as an adult; Winter, a successor to a cherished backyard-bred shaded-silver Persian I had for a lot more than 20 years; and Audrey, a feral trapped, fixed and brought inside your home at eighteen months.
Audrey isn’t pettable, but enjoys life “inside” and was deeply connected to Midnight Louie, Jr., a Lubbock shelter adoptee we drove a lot more than six hundred miles to get. After deep mourning for Junior, she’s finally transferred her affections to the new midnight kid in town, Trey.
A lot of writers favor cats as companions (although we’ve had three treasured dogs), and that’s partly because cats are content to stay quietly beside us and muse or sleep as we writers think deep word-searching thoughts. Or not.
When I set out to write that first novel, Amberleigh, I was figured out to put pets in the background of my books. most novels I’d read didn’t even mention them. The book was a mainstream historical Gothic set inIreland, so I put in a gigantic Irish wolfhound. I swiftly found out that you don’t put anything into a book unless it relates in a bigger way, so Boru ended up a hero at the climax.
I’ve written 60 novels in lots of genres. In my high fantasies featuring Irissa and Kendric, animals are crucial in lots of of the invented worlds they visit, but Felabba, a speaking white cat with 99 lives, is the featured player.
In the Taliswoman eco-fantasies that have both a modern and fantasy-world setting, Alison’s travel partner between worlds is a white Samnullnull
