Sandra holding a giveaway so be sure to leave a comment with your E-Mail Addy.
Thanks for being her today, Sandra :)
One day, when I worked in downtown Portland, I was walking across busy 5th Avenue, when suddenly I had the idea of having a female detective named Shirley Combs who would have been teased about her name, but in spite of -- or maybe even because of that -- became the world's greatest living detective. One day she meets her Dr. Watson. A young naturopath, Mary Watson, who becomes Shirley's sidekick and narrator. Once I decided to write the first book, I realized it would make a great series. I’m at work on the second book right now.
The first book, The
Hounding, is a direct descendant of A. Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles in every way. It is not a copy or a
rewrite, but a descendant. In fact, the client is a descendant of Sherlock
Holmes’s client. The second book, The
Illustrious Client, is a descendant in another way. Once again the title is
a riff on Doyle’s similar title, and the story is descended from his story, but
my story is of this century, and includes a murder.
Here’s a synopsis of The
Hounding:
Tall, thin, androgynous Shirley Combs considers herself the
world’s greatest living detective because she uses the methods and casebook of
Sherlock Holmes to solve crimes of the gentry of the American city most closely
resembling London, England -- in terms of the weather, at least.
Sidekick/narrator Dr. Mary Watson both delights in and is frustrated by her
partner’s behavioral resemblance to Sherlock. Combs is unemotional, analytical,
and given to pacing through the night in the streets of the almost perfectly
livable city of Portland, Oregon. Her ability to observe details and understand
their relationship to a case is unmatched; her demands on Watson’s time are
too.
Shirley
Combs bills herself as the world’s greatest living detective, and why not?
Taunted and teased as a child because her name sounded so much like Sherlock
Holmes's, she developed an early obsession with the adventures and methods of
Sherlock himself. She considered her fate sealed when she met up with Dr. Mary
Watson. Shirley adds the technology of today to Holmes’s 100-year-old casebook
and solves the mysteries of her much-beloved hometown. Mary Watson assists, and
- of course - chronicles their exciting exploits. The planned series of novels
incorporates and explores current events, types of people, social/economic
situations that occur in Portland and the Pacific Northwest.
In
their first documented adventure, Shirley is hired by 19-year-old Goldenhawk
Vandeleur to investigate her wealthy mother’s untimely death. Timber heiress
Priscilla Vandeleur Leoni, direct descendant of Sir Charles Baskerville,
decides to spend the family fortune saving the old-growth forests of Oregon.
She is a product of the 1960’s - former hippie and free-love advocate who
gave birth out-of-wedlock, experimented with lesbian separatism, and married
late. When faced with midlife, she tries to outrun her fears and give away her
huge fortune. Haunted by a phobia of dogs, she is literally frightened to death
by a pair of pit bulls.
And now for a sample, Chapter One:
Cilla can’t seem to shake the nightmare. She almost gives up
her daily run rather than face the possibility of meeting those dogs in real
life. Dogs are reality for every marathon runner, and each runner finds a way
to deal with them. But for Cilla, the fear of being attacked runs so deep she
feels it is part of her genetic makeup.
She jerks awake at 5:37 a.m. the sky barely light as she
sits up, shaking, sweating, her heart pounding as she listens for the heavy
breath, the pounding footsteps that haunts her awake.
Breakfast, newspaper, even the Today Show doesn’t erase the
feeling that the giant hound is waiting for her around the next corner.
Finally she dons her running gear and sets out, determined
to do her eight miles anyway. The Portland Marathon is seven weeks away, and
Cilla intends to achieve her personal best. She adds a light windbreaker to her
outfit, tying it loosely around her waist by the sleeves, because even though
the calendar says August second, the temperature at ten a.m. is only 51
degrees.
As she crosses Highway 43 at Glenmorrie Road and starts the
three point one mile trek that becomes Old River Road, Cilla breathes one small
sigh of relief. She knows this stretch of road like no other. This is the one
she includes on every run, every walk, and every bicycle ride. This beautiful
road along the Willamette River has more trees and fewer dogs per square foot
than any other property she knows.
Oh sure, there are houses, particularly at the beginning and
end of the road. And yes, homeowners have dogs, but for some reason not so many
dogs, and so far, she hasn’t hurt any of them.
Cilla always carries a pocket-sized can of mace and an
umbrella, for the express purpose of warding off dogs. She read somewhere that
letter carriers open automatic umbrellas in the faces of their canine foes and
the dogs back up or run away. She tried it a few times herself and the element
of surprise gave her enough lead-time to run away.
The sky is overcast. The low clouds and tall trees seem to
enforce a certain silence. Cilla’s breathing is the loudest sound she hears.
Her feet hit the ground rhythmically, one two, one two. She breathes in for
four counts, out for four. Her thoughts seem to float just ahead of her,
pulling her onward, coaxing her step-by-step, mile after mile.
As she reaches the halfway point on Old River Road, she is
halfway through her eight-mile training run. Tomorrow she will run thirteen.
Today is an easy day. She can feel herself begin to relax. Her breath, still
keeping the beat, comes into her lungs a little easier. The ground isn’t quite
so hard as it was a moment ago.
In the distance she hears a car door open. There are no
houses for another half mile; either the sound carried along the river, or
someone is parked somewhere ahead, probably enjoying the quiet.
Suddenly Cilla hears the pounding footsteps, the heavy
slobbering breath of her nightmares. She stops for a second to hear which way
the sound is coming from. At the same time, she readies both mace and umbrella.
The dogs are coming toward her. She whirls and begins retracing her path.
They are coming too fast. She piles on the energy, grateful
for her years of running, proud of her ability to create bursts of speed when
needed.
The hounds begin to bark. They see her. She glances over her
shoulder. There are two of them — wedge-shaped heads, powerful legs, wiry
bodies — pit bulls. Adrenalin shoots through Cilla’s body like lightning. She
knows she cannot outrun these dogs for any great distance. She heads for the
river. She feels sure she can outswim them, and doubts their ability to attack
while in the water.
Cilla slides and falls down the embankment toward the
Willamette. Damn! A barbed wire fence. She stands up, desperately hanging onto
her weapons, steps on the bottom wire, and prepares to step over the top one.
The wire snaps and the barbs from the top wire rips through her pants, tearing
her flesh and causing her to cry out. As she bends to crawl between the wires,
one of the dogs leaps onto her back, bites into the back of her neck and begins
to shake her head viciously from side to side.
The powerful jaws of the second terrier snaps into her left
side with a terrible force. Cilla fights for her life. She sprays the mace as
best she can, pops open the automatic umbrella, and waves them both in the
direction of the two canines. She knows that pit bulls are rumored to fight for
hours, but she has the experience of years of nightmares, of horrible fantasies
and planning how she will escape should she ever actually be attacked by her
greatest enemy. She can’t believe it is actually happening; yet the pain is
excruciating and she feels herself fighting to stay conscious.
When the dogs refuse to succumb to the mace, and merely rip
the umbrella skin from its ribs, Cilla drops the weapons and tries desperately
to pull herself through the fence, not aware that the barbs are by now embedded
into the palms of her hands. The first dog continues to shake her by the neck,
the second is barking, snapping, tearing flesh from her leg. She can’t see it,
but she can smell the hot blood intermingled with the scent of the dogs’ bodies
and breath, and the fresh green smell of the undergrowth only inches beneath
her nose.
She struggles beyond human strength to shake the dogs free
and at last manages to rid herself of the first one. Then suddenly, from
somewhere far away, she hears a low buzzing sound. The dogs hear it too. They
stop their attack; they run away. Cilla disengages herself from the barbed
wire, stands up and begins to survey the damage. A wave of dizziness causes her
to sway, and a crushing pain hits the middle of her chest.
As she becomes aware that she is losing the battle for
consciousness, Cilla thinks that in spite of the pain, in spite of the horror,
the actual reality was not as bad as her fears, because she felt proud of her
fight, and comforted by the approaching darkness.
The last thing Cilla ever hears is the sound of a car door
slamming shut.
****
Buy the book here:
http://www.amazon.com/THE-HOUNDING-ebook/dp/B0011UNKUK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1335982040&sr=8-1
I am doing a giveaway the day the paperback of The Hounding is officially released
(soon!) Leave a comment here or at Red Crested Chatter blog. You can leave a
comment (plus your email, so I can contact you) at each blog, to get more
chances, but no more than one per blog, please. The giveaway is a signed copy
of The Hounding. This is only
for USA commenters though (due to price of mailing outside of US). For
those outside of US, I will give instead a gift cert for price of the book at
amazon.com, so that I can email you.
Sandra de Helen lives and writes in Portland, Oregon where
she is a member of Penplay. See more of her work at www.SandradeHelen.com. de Helen is also
a proud member of the Dramatists Guild and International Centre for Women
Playwrights.
