The Genesis of a Kentucky Derby Book . . .

After I finished writing the third book in the Steve Cline Mystery Series, COLD BURN, which is set on a thoroughbred breeding farm in Warrenton, Virginia, and the manuscript went off to the typesetters, it was time for me to come up with a story idea for the next book in the series. I have to admit, a novel set at the Kentucky Derby was not my first choice.



After wrapping up COLD BURN, I spent three months plotting and researching the fourth book, only to have it rejected on synopsis. So, I had to come up with something, and fast, especially if I wanted to maintain a book-a-year schedule. A schedule I’ve since demolished, I might add.

Anyway, while casting around for a story idea, I considered all the people in Steve’s life, and my focus settled on his father, racehorse trainer Chris Kessler. I decided that Kessler finally had a horse capable enough and talented enough to run in the Kentucky Derby. I pitched the idea to my editor. She loved it, so Steve and I were off to Churchill Downs!


View from the Backside


The Backside

After getting permission from the powers that be at the storied track, I set about researching Louisville and the Derby Festival Events and the backside of Churchill Downs.


Riverfront Plaza


A Gallopalooza Horse on Main Street

I came up with the “horse mystery” quickly, but it didn’t feel substantial enough to carry an entire novel; plus, I generally like to layer a second mystery into the story when possible, anyway, so I came up with another mystery that would complicate the plot in a big way. I started my research online, amassing hundreds of pages of detailed notes that would later filter into the story itself. Then, it was time to visit Louisville and Churchill for onsite research.


Morning workout


Afternoon sun winking off Humana Building

Meanwhile, I had to think of a way to get Steve involved in the mystery I’d designed for him, and it had to be believable. So, I turned to real life. I had taken a Private Investigations course a while back, and one of the topics that we studied dealt with the Public Information Act. Essentially, we learned about the amazing amount of information that is available to the public. And we were given a final assignment: to learn everything that we could about a person unknown to us. Our instructor’s parting words were: “Whatever you do, don’t follow your subject.”

He didn’t want to be called by the police when we screwed up.



Well, those words have stuck with me over the years. I had it in the back of my mind that I could use his sentiment somewhere down the line in a story. So, I decided that Steve would take the same PI course. (He loves working with horses, but he’s interested in investigations, as well.) Steve’s course is wrapping up just as he heads to Louisville. While there, he decides to complete the assignment so he can turn it in when he returns to Maryland.

Unfortunately for Steve, the person he chooses to investigate winds up missing under mysterious circumstances, and the race is on . . .



TRIPLE CROSS: A sinister plot of deceit and revenge unravels beneath the famed Twin Spires of Churchill Downs.

Here’s the opening to TRIPLE CROSS:

The assignment was simple enough. Pick a random subject and learn as much as you can about him. Name, address, phone number. DOB, mortgages and property taxes. Car description and plate number. VIN if you didn’t mind being obvious. A simple assignment if I’d been in Maryland. But I was six-hundred miles from home, standing within eyeshot of the famed Twin Spires of Churchill Downs. Logistics would be complicated, but nothing I couldn’t overcome.

First and foremost, I needed to select a subject. But on the backside, with all the “Slims” and “Ricos” and “Willies,” figuring out someone’s real name was a tricky proposition at best. Track employees were supposed to keep their photo IDs displayed at all times, either dangling from straps around their necks or clipped to their shirts, but most backsiders found the practice cumbersome and ended up slipping them under T-shirts or stuffing them in back pockets. And whomever I chose needed to have at least a tenuous tie to the community. On the backside, that could be a problem, too. Of course, I could have picked a jockey or a trainer or a local celebrity, but I wanted someone who wasn’t in the news. Someone ordinary. Normal.

Yet I suspected there was nothing ordinary or normal about this place or time. Not in the town of Louisville, and certainly not in the barn area at Churchill Downs. Not fifteen days before the running of the Kentucky Derby.

Even before the sky had brightened, and the lights illuminating the Twin Spires lost their brilliance to the new day, traffic on Fourth Street had increased until the whine of tires on asphalt pushed through the chain-link fence that separated the backside from the rest of the world.

Today, it seemed like that fence wasn’t doing any damned good.

Also, don’t forget the Kentucky Derby documentary that I mentioned in an earlier post. If you’re interested in viewing it, and it’s playing near you, please try to catch it early because twenty-five percent of the box office from the opening week will be donated to the worldwide leader in equine research – The Grayson-Jockey Club Research Foundation. If you can, please support the film the week of April 18th. To learn more, visit: http://www.thefirstsaturdayinmay.com/

Heroes and Horses

The protagonist or hero of a story is one of the most important elements a fiction author must deal with, one that deserves a great deal of forethought and consideration.

When I set out to write my first mystery, AT RISK, on July 22, 1996 (yes, I actually remember the date) I already had the opening scene in mind. What I needed was a character to tell the story. A hero.



First off, I decided that my hero would be a guy, in part, because I like guys and, secondly, because much of the fiction that I’d been reading featured male protagonists. I grew up reading Sherlock Holmes and George Bagby, and later, I fell in love with Dick Francis’s equine novels. And my perception at the time, flawed as it may have been, was that guys had a lot more freedom, took more chances, and were more exciting than . . . well, me.

Then there was the fact that I wanted a lot of freedom writing this character. I didn’t want him to resemble me too closely because I suspected I might feel inhibited if I thought the reader was thinking: this is who the author is.

So, I took a chance, bucked the tradition of women writing female protagonists, and developed barn manager and amateur sleuth Steve Cline. Without realizing it, I bucked another tradition by writing a very young protagonist at a time when older sleuths were the norm. His youth (he’s 21 in AT RISK) was actually trickier than nailing the guy thing.

While I was working through the first drafts of AT RISK and the opening chapters of DEAD MAN’S TOUCH, I took two writing courses offered by Writers’ Digest magazine’s Novel Writing Workshop. Both times, I requested a male instructor and was lucky to be paired with Steven Havill and William G. Tapply. Havill writes a police procedural series set in New Mexico, featuring Undersheriff Bill Gastner, and Tapply’s series features Boston estate attorney Brady Coyne. Both men, along with my husband, were a tremendous help and quick to point out when I got it wrong!

So, who is Steve? To make him more complex and interesting and real for the reader, I gave him personal issues to deal with along with the story problem. He grew up in a wealthy but emotionally distant family with two older siblings. He attended a private school and spent many of his summers “at camp” because his parents were too busy to parent. Despite the excessive wealth, his relationship with them was damaging, and eventually Steve becomes estranged from them when he leaves college to work in the horse industry. Many of the choices he makes, including his penchant for risk-taking, are linked to his strained relationship with his father and a subconscious need to prove himself.

Steve has been so much fun to write. He’s young, reckless, flawed, but also principled. At times, he seems real.

Speaking about real, many of the horses I’ve known and loved, or have just worked with, have found themselves in the pages of my books. A troubled horse in AT RISK, Cut to the Chase, a.k.a. Chase, is modeled after a horse who used to be boarded at a hunter/jumper farm where I worked. The real Chase, whose official name escapes me, was an open jumper: a huge seventeen hand, coppery chestnut gelding with a lot of white on his legs. The barn crew used to affectionately call him “Jaws” because he loved to nip his handlers. What fascinated me about the real Chase was the fact that, though ornery when handled from the ground, he was a sweetheart under saddle. He was a gorgeous, fluid mover and a truly gifted jumper.

What has surprised me most about my fictional horses is the way they magically come to life, seemingly on their own. One of my favorites is Russian Roulette. He’s a character in DEAD MAN’S TOUCH and TRIPLE CROSS.



I didn’t intentionally model him after any horse from my past, but he came to life nonetheless. Here’s a brief excerpt from TRIPLE CROSS:

I gathered my trash together, left it sitting on the tack trunk, and walked over to Ruskie’s stall. He poked his head over the stall guard before curling his neck around to nuzzle my waist. I hooked my arm across his neck and smoothed my hand down his face. Resting my forehead against his mane, I breathed deeply, inhaling the indescribable blended odors: his skin, his sleek chestnut coat, the sweet smell of his breath, all combined with the mix of straw and hay, and I was reminded of the generations of horses who had passed through this barn. Derby runners, most of them.

Ruskie was uncharacteristically still, and I wondered if he sensed the tension fizzing in my nerves and pressing against my skull like a bad headache.

I had no guarantee I’d be here tomorrow. None at all.

He lipped the thin belt keeper at my waist, then smoothed his muscular lips along my belt. Knowing that a nip was likely next on his agenda, I straightened.

I stopped at Storm’s stall and patted him, told him to be a good boy, and when I turned around, Jay said, “What? No hug for me?”

I grinned and told him to wish me luck.

Here are a couple of photos of the actual Derby Barn at Churchill Downs that I took while researching TRIPLE CROSS:


Notice the press. They were everywhere!




Morning bath.


One of the last chores: cleaning saddles and tack.

“The horse: friendship without envy, beauty without vanity, nobility without conceit, a willing partner, yet, no slave.” ~ Anon

Until next time . . .

Scenes from TRIPLE CROSS:

Back to TRIPLE CROSS . . .

During my very first post to this blog, I had intended to talk about researching TRIPLE CROSS, but I got sidetracked with the Czech review. So, I thought I'd dive into that subject now.

First off, I never intended to write a "Derby" book. But, after I finished writing COLD BURN, the third book in the Steve Cline Mystery Series, I spent three months plotting and researching the next book only to have it rejected on synopsis. I was really behind schedule then and had to come up with a story idea fast. So, I looked at Steve's past and the people in his life, and a trip to Churchill Downs for the running of the Kentucky Derby was doable and logical since Steve's biological father is a racehorse trainer.

The next thing I did was get permission from Churchill Downs; then I began researching. Whether the book is set in Maryland or Pennsylvania or Kentucky, I love to write about real places, because I imagine that readers enjoy coming across a setting that they're familiar with in a book. The pressure is there to get it right, so I do a lot of research. One of my criteria for choosing a locale is the availability of good maps. Of course, Louisville being a major metropolitan area, that was no problem. I did stumble upon a cool, highly-manipulative aerial map of Louisville, where you can adjust the view from 700' all the way down to 35'. You can get close enough to make out lane markings on city streets. I almost felt as if I could look into windows with that feature.

During the research and plotting process, I did a great deal of Internet research before I ever had the chance to set foot on the backside of Churchill Downs or visit the town of Louisville, but once I had the chance to travel to Louisville, I took pictures of most of the places where I would later set scenes.

Here are several shots of Louisville's waterfront and the Belle of Louisville:







And of course, I had to visit the restaurants (and bars) that Steve visits in TRIPLE CROSS. Here's one of my favorites. The Bristol Bar and Grille located at 614 West Main Street. If you have the chance to visit, you have to try the Green Chili Won-Tons with guacamole. They are out of this world!

This striking Gallopalooza horse stands on the sidewalk outside the Bristol Bar and Grille. To view more Gallopalooza horses around Louisville, click here.





Some "horsey" art inside the Bristol.



Cheers!

Getting Started . . .

I've thought on and off about starting a blog and decided, finally, to give it a try. I've been wanting to write about researching TRIPLE CROSS (my latest mystery which is set in Louisville and on the backside of Churchill Downs in the weeks leading up to the Kentucky Derby) and the fun I had doing it, but what pushed me over the edge and really got me thinking about a blog was finding a book review in the Czech Republic. Not of TRIPLE CROSS, but of an earlier title.

TRIPLE CROSS is the fourth installment in the Steve Cline mystery series. Visit my website to learn more.

Anyway, back to this book review. Recently, the entire Steve Cline Mystery Series (except for TRIPLE CROSS, because it's too new) has been released in the Czech Republic, and as is customary, an author will receive a complimentary copy of each title released in a foreign language. These are always a thrill to receive. In Czech, I'm Kit Ehrmanova, btw. So, I was finally getting around to putting the foreign covers on my website when I discovered a review of DEAD MAN'S TOUCH in IN Magazin in Czech.

Of course, I can't read the thing, but it looks promising.

Kit Ehrmanová: Dotek mrtvého muže Mladý ošetřovatel koní Steve Cline, který se stal tak silným a sympatickým hrdinou v předešlé autorčině knize V nebezpečí, vyhledá otce, kterého nikdy nepoznal. Ten je trenérem plnokrevných koní na dostihovém závodišti v Marylandu. Steve se od otce dozví, že si někdo nekale pohrává s jeho koňmi, aby ovlivnil výsledky dostihů, a rozhodne se mu pomoci. Přijme v jeho stájích podřadné místo vodiče, aby mohl nerušeně přijít věci na kloub. Jeho tajná role mu navíc umožní vyzkoušet si život v zázemí a dostat se blíže k těm úžasným a nádherným zvířatům, která mají lepší povahu a srdce než ti, kteří je považují za pouhé zboží. Ehrmanová, která má pracovní zkušenosti ze sportovních stájí i hřebčínů, zaujala dalším dobrodružným příběhem, kterým vstupuje do tohoto odvážného a odhodlaného prostředí. Příběh začíná tam, kde Dick Francis skončil. Ve stáji. Olympia

And I can only hope that that reference to the master, Dick Francis, is a positive one.