The Adobe Gate

Fall 2006 / Volume #16 / Corrales, New Mexico by Aimée and David Thurlo

WHERE WE REALLY GET OUR IDEAS - PART II - ORIGINS OF OUR SERIES

AIMÉE:

When we began the Sister Agatha series, the idea was to have some fun with her. So even though Sister Agatha loves God supremely, she's not exactly on the fast track to sainthood. The best way to describe a Sister Agatha novel is to reveal a few details. First, the ancient monastery car that Sister Agatha drives is always breaking down. That' why it has been nicknamed the AntiChrysler. When the vehicle is in the shop, she drives a donated Harley motorcycle, bringing the monastery's dog, Pax, along in the sidecar. Pax is a former police dog who washed out because he didn't show enough aggression.

Sister Agatha lives in a cloistered monastery but she's an extern nun. She's the link between the monastery and the outside world. That makes her a part of two worlds - the serenity of the cloister, and the controlled chaos of the towns and communities around Bernalillo, New Mexico, the site of our fictional monastery. Sister Agatha is a former journalism professor, and her background gives her a special perspective into crime scenes which helps her solve mysteries.

What makes each of our lead characters unique is their point of view - how they see the world around them. For example, Sister Agatha wouldn't just see the crime itself, she'd see the devastating impact it has upon the people in the community who are affected by it. She'd want to solve the crime from a humanitarian viewpoint.

For me, writing the Sister Agatha mysteries was a perfect chance to draw from memories of my days at an all girls boarding school. For years I lived at Ursuline Academy, first in Missouri, then New Orleans. Long hallways divided by thin muslin sheets hung on rods were all that separated the girls from the cloister. The lives of silence the nuns on the cloistered side led always enthralled me, and I really wanted to write about the women who chose that particular way to serve God.

Sister Agatha was a character I had always kept in the back of my mind, but because David and I are writing partners, we both had to agree. Since David wanted to write about a Navajo vampire just as badly as I wanted to write about a nun, we decided to go for it and do both.

David's background - a second generation New Mexican who moved from Albuquerque at the age of three to live on the Reservation - led us to write our flagship series, the eleven novels currently in print that comprise the Ella Clah mysteries.

We were driving back from David's high school class reunion in Shiprock late one summer afternoon, talking about possible directions to take our careers, when it came to us. One of my best friends was a police officer, David had a reservation background, and we both loved the mystery elements of our previous romantic suspense novels. So, because we'd been writing so much from the woman's point of view, and Tony Hillerman already had a male investigator on the Navajo Nation, we came up with Ella Clah.

Let me describe Ella. She grew up just south of Shiprock and has an older brother, Clifford, who's a medicine man - a hataalii. Their mother Rose is a staunch traditionalist and member of the Plant Watchers, a group of Navajos who are working to protect the native plants so important to the Dineh. Ella's father was the opposite of Rose, a Bible thumping preacher with a big church in Shiprock and two services every Sunday, one in English, the other in Navajo.

Ella always found herself caught between two worlds, forced to walk a line between modernists and traditionalists, Anglos and Navajos, mother and father. With so much pressure to join one side or the other, Ella decided not to decide. She got married right out of high school to a young Navajo who'd just enlisted in the Army, and left the Rez.

Less than a year later, her husband was killed, so Ella returned to New Mexico and went to college at the university in Albuquerque. After graduation, Ella joined the FBI and became a field agent. Several years later, her father was murdered, and Ella came back to the Navajo Nation to track down the killers.

This is where we began the series, with BLACKENING SONG. The book was so well received critically and by the readers that we wrote a second Ella Clah novel, DEATH WALKER. By then, Ella had resigned from the Bureau and became a special investigator for the tribal police. She was back home.

Ella's difficulties in walking the road between two cultures remain the recurring theme of the series, and these experiences are a mirror of those David and I have both faced. David is an Anglo who grew up among the Navajos, and I'm an immigrant from Cuba who was forced out of her homeland. As a naturalized citizen, I've discovered even more than David what it means to be part of two cultures.

With the Ella series, we've done our homework. In addition to David's experiences on the reservation and our contacts on and off the Navajo Nation, we've spent a lot of time in the field. For example, as a New Mexico native, David grew up with gun racks in the back of pickups, but for me it was different. I received instruction from an APD firearms instructor and federal agents.

We've hiked the mesas, interviewed people in many agencies, fired weapons, gone on ride-alongs, checked out law enforcement gear, blown up cars and contraband, and observed autopsies at the Office of the Medical Investigators. And we have many ongoing sources who've preferred to remain anonymous all these years.

Honing the craft can be compared to a method actor prepping for a role. When Ella does something, it's our spirit that animates her. Her reactions and her thinking processes are ours at the beginning. Yet, as our manuscripts develop, the characters take on a life and personality all their own. Although they begin as an extension of us, they're not us. Eventually you stop thinking about WHAT WOULD I DO? in that situation, and understand and ask the proper question - WHAT WOULD ELLA DO?

DAVID:

I'd like to tell you a little about how we came to write the Lee Nez novels, our third mystery series. I grew up on the Navajo Nation in Shiprock and heard all the local scary stories....a family in their car hit by a train in Farmington, people being murdered at a local drugstore, and tales of ghosts in graveyards and old houses from the territorial days. But in Shiprock, there was a bonus character - the skinwalker, a Navajo witch in coyote skins.

There were a lot of spooky stories late at night around campfires too. I was a Boy Scout, and I went hunting and fishing a lot with my father and friends. Something about being out at night, only a tent wall away from danger....that was good for the imagination of a future writer.

In Shiprock during the summer we only had the bookmobile, but I read everything I could find. I ate up the stories by Edgar Allen Poe, Bram Stoker, and Mary Shelly. And in those days we had psychologically frightening TV - other than the news - that had shows like the Twilight Zone and the Outer Limits, which took control of your television set and scared the you-know-what out of a twelve year old. Stuff like that could really startle you at night when you saw someone looking in your window - before you realized it was just your reflection in the glass.

But the movies I saw at the drive-ins, even the Big Chief in Shiprock, were about European ghosts, vampires, and the wolf man. Then there were the monsters, like the giant ants and tarantulas, and the Blob - anyone remember Steve McQueen, as a teenager?

The influences of all those ideas were swirling around in my head as I grew up on the Rez, and one particular evening I had a scary experience that I still recall today.

I was around fourteen, and we lived at the Helium Plant housing on the west side of old Highway 666 - across from the Kerr McGee uranium mill. The rest of my family had driven into Farmington to shop and visit relatives, and I'd elected to stay behind. It was during the summer, and I had plenty of reading material, plus the black and white TV with shows like Gunsmoke, Wanted Dead or Alive, and Perry Mason. Computers? Video games? No, this was during the age of board games and cards. But playing chess against yourself isn't very exciting after a while, and the TV reception was bad that night, so I went to bed around ten.

It was hot at night, so the window beside the bed was wide open. The early sixties were quiet in Shiprock, and you could hear the rumble of a passing semi on old Highway 666, or the sound of machinery at the uranium mill, further east. And there were the crickets. They were friendly. It was when they stopped chirping that you had to worry.

I was dozing, in that middle ground where your mind drifts, when I heard a low but regular sound just outside my window. Someone was breathing out there - and it was getting louder. Needless to say, if someone is outside your window, close enough to hear them breathing....add to that the fact that you're fourteen, alone at night in a dark room, and have been reading and watching and hearing all those scary stories....

I was frozen in place, too terrified to move. What if I turned around to look and it was that escaped maniac with the hook from those campfire stories....you know the one? The breathing continued. I was scared, but would it get worse if I turned around to look? Of course it would. They don't attack until you make eye contact.

Well, finally I had to do something. I gathered up my courage, threw off the sheet, and rolled over to look out the window. Nobody was there. But the breathing continued. Inching closer, I thought...hey, he's probably crouched down there, waiting to claw his way through the screen and pounce. But I had to know. I looked down.

It was Buddy, our neighbor's big boxer, sniffing the flowers not ten feet from the wall.

Now I've always wanted to try and package that fear, that edge of your seat experience that is so real coming from your imagination instead of the movie or TV screen, and with Lee Nez, we've finally managed to move in that direction. Lee is a Navajo State Police Officer. He's also a vampire, well, a half-vampire, more of what I call a nightwalker. But I didn't want Lee Nez to be just another vampire. I have a science background - having taught Biology, Earth, and Physical science before I took up writing full time. I wanted to create a vampire who was a victim of the natural world, not the supernatural.

I needed a new reality for my nightwalker. An infection by something smaller than a virus. A condition like that could result in abilities that earlier cultures had always blamed upon demons and evil magic. Something like that could be natural, just unseen and undiscovered, like that giant squid that everyone knew about, but nobody had never seen alive until recently.

What if the stories of vampires, the children of Bram Stoker and those that have followed were fictional offspring, urban legends based upon real humans that existed in the shadows, their lives kept, literally, in darkness and secrecy? And, what if the other creatures often associated with those stories, like werewolves, were also humans with a related affliction.

That's when my memories of the stories I'd heard while growing up on the Rez came to life, and my imagination kicked in. Werewolves, Navajo skinwalkers....they could be related, another name for the same creatures. And then there's the additional twist. How about a half-vampire who had learned to survive in one of the sunniest places in the world, if he was very, very careful - and had the best sun block money could buy?

The Lee Nez series - SECOND SUNRISE, BLOOD RETRIBUTION, PALE DEATH, and now SURROGATE EVIL - has provided the perfect opportunity for me to create stories that combine my background as a science teacher with my experiences growing up on the Navajo Nation. Nothing has pleased us more than hearing from people around the world who've enjoyed reading these cross-genre adventures.

GETTING HUNGRY AFTER ALL THAT READING?

David's Munchies

Directions:
In a big bowl, combine 3 ½ cups uncooked oatmeal and 4 ounces of chocolate chips or peanut butter chips. Set aside. Grab a saucepan, then mix together ½ cup milk and two cups of sugar. Heat on medium, melting in 1 ½ sticks margarine, then bring to a rolling boil. Add one small package of instant butterscotch or chocolate pudding - the dry stuff - then stir in the oatmeal/chips mix until well blended. Remove from the heat, then spoon out in globs onto waxed or parchment paper. Let cool. Munch as needed.

Purple aster photograph by Michelle Martinez

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This page copyright 2006 by Aimée and David Thurlo.