I always knew I wanted to write, but I thought I had nothing to write about yet. So I majored in journalism. My role models? Brenda Starr. Lois Lane. Hildy Johnson, played by Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday (based on the play The Front Page). Being another “Watergate Bob” Woodward held no interest for me. My fictional heroines were (and are) all beautiful, smart, sassy, and very well-dressed.

          After graduating college with these lofty goals, I interviewed by phone for a small-town reporting job posted with my journalism school placement office. My editor-to-be, I'll call him “Sweeney,” in a little town I'll call “Sagebrush,” had just three questions for me: “Do you have your degree? Do you have a car? Do you have a camera?” I said yes to all three. “You’re hired!” Sweeney shouted over the phone. A little warning bell rang in my head. Two weeks, I thought, I’ll give it two weeks. “Sagebrush” turned out to be a shambles of a dusty Western boom town, where tumbleweeds, tractors, ranchers, and miners rolled in, and it took me two years to roll out.

Sweeney was a local legend, a lunatic whose saving grace was that he loved his little Daily Press with a maniacal joie de vivre. You hadn’t really worked for Sweeney till he “fired” you--and in the next breath shouted out your next assignment. Another reporter Sweeney often fired would tell me, “This time he means it!” He never did. He called me “Scoop” when he fired me. (He didn’t mean it.) Local high school teachers used the paper in English classes. As a bad example. The writing varied, but the typos were great. The Daily Press once reported that a local man, identified by name and address, was cited for “having his dong [sic] loose and at large.” His “dong”? They may have meant his dog, but he never complained. No one in Sagebrush would have been surprised either way.

There was something different about “Sagebrush.” For instance, the town was full of people missing fingers and teeth, from the mayor (missing his wedding ring finger) to the tubercular waitress at the coffee shop (missing many of her teeth). The paper’s advertising saleswoman (missing a finger) could be very friendly if you bought a full-page ad. The alcoholic staff photographer (missing most of his teeth) started refusing to take photographs for reporter’s stories. Later he refused to develop film for reporters who took their own photos. Then he refused to even let reporters use his darkroom to develop their own film. Finally Sweeney fired him (but he didn’t mean it). The printer, a paroled armed bank robber, was hired because convicts can’t quit until their parole is up. (Or so Sweeney said.) He was a nice guy, with all of his fingers and many teeth, who one winter accidentally drove through the wall of the Daily Press while “parking” out back with a girlfriend and keeping the engine running to stay warm. In a moment of passion he'd hit the accelerator pedal with both feet. Sweeney fired him. (No, not really.) 

Sagebrush gave me golden memories. Climbing through a massage parlor window to interview the girls inside. (I got offered a job too. It would have paid more, a lot more. But Sweeney wouldn’t fire me that time.) Going on wild goose chases, excuse me, wild horse hunts with the Bureau of Land Management. Observing the FBI SWAT team “training” the local police. Hunting for stolen dynamite with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. The agent made me sit in the back of his car with the unhappy suspect, who was very anxious to learn what I was going to write about him in the Daily Press. I told him we'd write about “his dong being loose and at large.” (Only kidding!) Those halcyon young reporter days of sleep deprivation, sheer exhaustion, hunger, and lunacy ended one winter when the water in my toilet froze solid. It was 40 degrees below zero and in a flash of clarity I decided I could be just as broke in a better and warmer place.

Eventually I moved to the Washington, D.C., area. I got better reporting jobs and my toilet didn’t freeze anymore. I started writing plays, and later, mystery novels. I will swear in court that everything I write is fiction, but “The Case of the Pink-Clad Corpse at the Country Club” did inspire a scene in my play Remedial Surveillance. Sagebrush, Sweeney, and the Daily Press figure in another play, Boom Town Blues, and in my heroine Lacey Smithsonian's reporting background.

Lacey was a character in my imagination long before she appeared in the Crime of Fashion mystery series. For years I carried around in my head the first few lines of Killer Hair and the image of Lacey Smithsonian looking down at a beautiful young woman in a coffin with the worst haircut she’d ever seen. Lacey was amusing and persistent, and luckily she and I got along. Now she’s striding stylishly through her mysteries, in her high heels and her knockout vintage suits.

Besides, she had a journalism degree and a car and a camera, so I said, “You're hired!"