Omnimystery News is pleased to welcome Linda Lombardi, whose debut mystery is The Sloth's Eye (Five Star, May 2011 Hardcover, 978-1-59414-962-7).
Today Linda is writing about two firsts: her first book and her first time at Malice Domestic, the recently concluded convention for authors and readers of books best typified by the works of Agatha Christie.
And she's also providing our readers with an opportunity to win a copy of her book. Visit Mystery Book Contests, click on the "Linda Lombardi: The Sloth's Eye" contest link, enter your name, e-mail address, and this code (6773) for a chance to win! (One entry per person; contest ends 05/26/2011.)
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Photo provided courtesy of
Linda Lombardi
When you write in the first person, readers sometimes have difficulty separating the author from the character. And it's true that I and Hannah, the narrator of my mystery The Sloth's Eye, have a few significant features in common. One is her job as a small mammal keeper at a zoo, which is something I did for a time. Another is the fact that she's definitely NOT a morning person.
I have so much sympathy for Hannah's problem, in fact, that I couldn't bear to make her get to work at 6:30 AM, like I used to. The workday at her fictional Small Mammal House mercifully begins half an hour later, although she still rarely makes it on time.
These days I am a more or less full time writer, and one of the biggest attractions of that profession (it's not the pay or benefits, believe me) is that I never have to be anywhere at 7 in the morning. Or so I thought, until I got the exciting news that I was going be on an author panel about animals in mysteries at the Malice Domestic mystery convention. In addition, I was to invited participate in the New Author Breakfast for writers who'd had their first mystery published in the previous year.
The latter sounded like a great opportunity: I would be briefly interviewed about my book in front of a huge room full of the sort of people who actually buy books like mine — people who are such devoted fans that they actually spend a whole weekend (and a good chunk of money on) sitting around listening to people talk about those books.
But there was that tricky little word in there ... "breakfast."
If you've never been to Malice, let me tell you, these people mean business. The days are packed with events. The author panel sessions start at 8:45. The dealers' room opens at 8 AM. And that New Authors Breakfast? It begins at 7:30. That's for the fans. The authors are encouraged to get there at 7 to set up their table with giveaways and beat the line for breakfast, so they'll be ready to be charming to strangers and brilliant at public speaking at an hour at which I am normally dead to the world. And did I mention that I live in the area where the conference takes place, so I wasn't staying at the hotel where I could roll out of bed at the last possible second?
The result was that I saw 6:15 AM for the first time since my small mammal keeping days. Maybe there was a bright side: getting up at the same time Hannah does was a good way to immerse myself in the mood to describe my book.
And I did get a laugh when I described how I came to write it: In a former life, I was a college professor with a long-time side gig as a zoo volunteer. Fed up with the academic life, I took a leave to take a temporary keeper job. It turned out that I was crazy about the work - and perhaps equally crazy to resign my tenured position at the university before I was sure if the job would become permanent.
Then, after some months of Woe and Intrigue, I didn't get to keep the job — but I did come away with LOTS of ideas for why people might want to kill each other at a zoo.
Yeah, that's where I always get the laugh. But to be a little more serious, what I also came away with was a million reasons why the zoo was a fantastic setting for a mystery.
For one thing, there are so many ways to get hurt. Dangerous animals, of course, but also old rickety buildings that are full of tools, toxic cleaning chemicals, high places that have to be climbed around ... And it's a place where a mistake can have life or death consequences for the animals in your care and in some cases, for you and your fellow workers.
Also, working as a keeper is sort of like they say about war — long periods of tedium are punctuated with heart-racing emergencies. You know, there's that weird thing about amateur detective mysteries that we all have to suspend disbelief about: really, how likely is it that a tea shop owner or a petsitter is going to stumble across a dead body? But at least in the setting of a zoo, it's natural for these people to be dealing with life and death situations, and having a bit of peril drop into their everyday lives.
But how about the animals? They play a lot of roles, both as the cause and the victim of your usual mystery-plot perils and the source of clues and (appropriately, perhaps) red herrings. They also provide a good deal of comic relief. I wanted to write a book that was funny, and there are so many ways animals make fools of us. If you have pets, you know how they never do their tricks for company, right? Zoo animals are no different, always choosing the worst times to refuse to eat their nice medicated grape or shift out of their exhibit when you're in a big hurry to clean it.
What I think is most interesting, though, is how useful animals are for human character development. Attitudes towards animals tell us a lot about people. Take just the main character: Hannah is a person who makes fun of "bunnyhuggers," the people who think that animals are adorable fluffballs with mystical souls, instead of the real-life creatures she deals with who poop, bite, and trip up the keepers at every possible turn. She also laments how people have such boring taste in animals, preferring the big dramatic species to the odd, specialized pleasures of sloths, armadillos, and rodents of unusual size.
And yet ... take her to the Halloween event where the elephants stomp pumpkins, and she'll start out complaining about how the big animals get all the attention, and end up moaning at the cuteness of the baby elephant. And when the zoo director offers to add a wombat, her favorite animal, to the Small Mammal House collection, her adoration for this plain brown snoozing lump of fur draws her into complications - and peril — she hadn't anticipated.
But the most obvious reason the zoo was a great setting? I'm the type of mystery reader who loves a book where you learn something about a place, a subject, a lifestyle that's unfamiliar, and that's the kind of book I wanted to write. Zookeeping is a profession most people know nothing about, and my book immerses you in the details, from what marmosets will and won't eat to why keepers really hate people who tap on the glass. So if you're that kind of reader — and if you're a person with the good taste to go look at the sloths when you're done with those dumb old pandas on your trips to the zoo — I think you'll get a kick out of The Sloth's Eye.
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As a child growing up in the Bronx, Linda Lombardi liked to play with a basket full of plastic animals instead of human dolls. Later in life, she gave up a position as a tenured college professor to take a zookeeping job and wrote a column about pets and animals for the Associated Press.
You can read the first chapter of The Sloth's Eye and see more of her work on her website, LindaLombardi.com.
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About The Sloth's Eye: Everyone comes to the zoo to see the charming yearly ritual of elephants playfully stomping pumpkins at Halloween. Small mammal keeper Hannah usually thinks it's not fair--why do the big animals get all the attention? But this year the fun turns deadly: Victor, lover of charismatic zoo director Allison, is found dead in the elephant yard--where he'd been left with a pumpkin carved to fit his head.
Just when Hannah's feeling lucky to be in the background, Allison reveals her plan to distract the media from the murder: it's a celebration of the new wombat that she promised to the Small Mammal House. Now Hannah's swept into the spotlight and into the middle of some mysterious conflict between Allison and her boss Chris, with whom she's trying halfheartedly not to fall in love.
But the real trouble begins when she discovers that her favorite sloth has been kidnapped -- obviously an inside job -- and then she and Chris are threatened as well. Desperate to find her sloth, Hannah finds out almost too late whom she should have trusted.
For a chance to win a copy of The Sloth's Eye, courtesy of the author, visit Mystery Book Contests, click on the "Linda Lombardi: The Sloth's Eye" contest link, enter your name, e-mail address, and this code (6773) for a chance to win! (One entry per person; contest ends 05/26/2011.)
