Thank you, Elizabeth, for hosting my guest posts about my experiences revisiting my first mystery series which featured Iris Thorne–a single, sexy, and savvy Los Angeles investment advisor. The books were originally published by Simon and Schuster in the nineties. All five Iris Thorne Mysteries—Cold Call, Slow Squeeze, Fast Friends, Foolproof, and Pushover are available for the first time as e-books and trade paperbacks.
This post is about Pushover, the fifth and mostly likely final Iris Thorne Mystery (although never say never), and thus the last entry in this blog series.
When I sat down to craft Iris #5, I was weary of writing about an amateur sleuth. I was tired of finding ways for Iris to stumble over dead bodies and outsmart cops. I was tired of Iris’s job and the office politics. Even after the series debut, Cold Call, was sold in a two-book deal and I learned I was writing a series (yes, I was that naïve), I strived to make the subsequent books darker. Once I pitched my editor the idea of Iris as a murderer and was quickly (and rightly) laughed down. I pitched the idea of setting an Iris book in another location such as New York City, San Francisco, or, how about the Caribbean? My editor tartly responded, “So is this ‘Iris Takes a Vacation?’” I was feeling more than a little trapped.
The easiest question is usually the most complicated. A couple years ago I published my first novel, The Terror of Living, and as part of that process I gave several interviews. Interviews are always fun. The questions make you think, usually for the first time in a year, on the themes of your work, on where the characters came from, on the goals you were trying to achieve. 
I’m on the road – driving through the night to Houston, my first stop – before I remember that (a) I’m highly uncomfortable driving in cities and (b) I find doing new things more slightly stressful. 
By 2005 I was barely published. My first novel, Fast Lane, had been published by a tiny micro press in the US and a small publisher in Italy, and I had two stories in magazines. I also had three finished novels, two of which, SMALL CRIMES and OUTSOURCED, I was sure would get published but my agent was getting no interest for them. Eventually all three would get published—BAD THOUGHTS in 2007, SMALL CRIMES in 2008, where it would end up topping NPR’s list of best crime and mystery novels of the year, and OUTSOURCED in 2010, but at that moment things were looking bleak and I was ready to toss in the towel . What kept me going was a phone call from my agent telling me that one of the more influential film agents in Hollywood wanted to take on Outsourced.
I have discovered, after writing five novels, that my characters take on lives of their own. They have pre-novel lives and post-novel lives. I get to know them in ways somehow more intimate than the real people in my life. My book of short stories, Anyone Can Die, was a joy to write, because it gave me a chance to reconnect with the central characters in my first novel, A World I Never Made. I just finished a sequel, called The Fifth Man, to Sons and Princes, my third novel, in which the Massi family lives and breathes again. 
Putting together a short story collection is a little more complex than just binding together a bunch of short stories. I have done three story collections (the first two used the tales from my private detective series). I took some time deliberating over which of my yarns to include in my new Smoking on Mount Rushmore. In the end, I opted to go with a little variety (soft-boiled, medium-boiled) rather than concentrate on the narrow scope of hardboiled/noir short fiction I like to work in.
One of the really fun things about writing a series is having the opportunity to revisit one’s characters, to pry open their lives and explore their personalities a little more with each book. Or in some cases, to write them the way you should have done the first time around. 
“Forgive me, Father, for I am about to sin oh so grievously.” – Milo Nieminien
