Carole douglas: Cat in an Indigo Mood

Tailpiece:

Midnight Louie Frets About the Future

It is certainly not flattering, no matter how well intended.

Here I sit, the star of my own mystery series, my name on everybody's lips and e-mail and snail-mail list, and what do they want?

What do they want?

Do they want to know what mean streets l will be impressing with my stealthy footsteps in my next adventure?

No.

Do they worry about the sinister forces gathering on all fronts?

The magical Synth, the international terrorists, the lethal Siamese conspiracy?

No.

Do they worry if my midlife energies will be drained by the onslaught of my darling daughter (maybe), Midnight Louise, who seems bound and determined to elbow in on my detecting business?

No.

Do they worry if my human acquaintances will come out of the next episode with their respective epidermis intact?

No.

No, the inquiring public wants to know what only your hairdresser should know, and a private dick should be hired to find out, and then well paid to keep quiet about.

Who is steeping in whose bed.

This is not Goldilocks, folks. This is not even Puss in Boots. This ls My Life!

Can you imagine? There is even lascivious speculation about whether I will end up with the silver sweetheart, the Divine Yvette, or the Sublime Solange, her golden soul sister.

Granted, my amatory exploits would make a good book. Perhaps I will write it one day: Midnight Louie tells all, names names.

There may be some household names in the roster, like you remember that sleek little black number on the "Gary Seven" episode of classic Star Trek? Well, so do I. Not that I am claiming anything a gentleman should not, but you are free to draw your own conclusions. Those who are good with numbers will realize that there is a considerable age difference. Not that this ever stopped a determined dude. It one will examine the careers of such silver-screen mainstays as Paul Newman, Clint Eastwood, and Warren Beatty, one will see that as the dudes go silver, the dames go jail-bait.

So who ends up with whom is still very much in the air. No doubt there are dames as yet unmet who would be perfect partners for a suave dude such as I. On the other hand, I would not mind tangling with that witch-goddess Hyacinth again, or winning that spokescat position and reuniting with Solange and Yvette, the stunning Ashleigh sisters. I am open to all possibilities, it is just that the humans should get their acts together and settle down to a nice predicable domestic life, one that will not distract from my doings both predatory and amatory.

Of course, that is asking a lot of mere humans.

So, all I can say is, do not despair. I will work things out to my best advantage in the end, and everyone else will be all the better for it.

Very best fishes,

Midnight Louie. Esq.

P.S. You can visit Midnight Louie on the intemet at:

hflp:}lwww.catwriter.oomIcdouglas

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write: PO Box 331555, Fort Worth, TX 76163.

Carole Nelson Douglas Ruminates on Doing Time

For once I think that Louie has a legitimate complaint.

His feline hijinks have been upstaged by the human gavotte.

That is what happens when one species out numbers another, even in novels. Natural selection.

The observant reader (and aren't we all?) will have noticed that after Louie's debut in Catnap and Pussyfoot , the series developed a title pattern with Cat on a Blue Monday . Cat, and a color, and also an internal alphabet, beginning with B as in Blue Monday , continuing with C as in Crimson Haze etcetera.

Louie, being a sensitive soul (and also being a midlife male) is worrying about longevity these days, but l want to reassure him that his adventures in this incarnation will last for a total of twenty-seven books (one longer than Sue Grafton's alphabet series, because Louie's third novel started with "B"). Louie likes that hit of feline one-upmanship, but since Sue Grafton likes cats, she shouldn't mind too much.

The passage of time in a mystery series is a subject worthy of study, or at least of a few scholarly monographs.

Some series characters abide in an Eternal Now. No names, places, or brand names date the setting. Think Erle Stanley Gardner, whose Perry Mason dwells in a generic landscape (except for things never expected to change, like men wearing fedoras).

Now that mystery series are able to indulge more fully in the pleasures of character development and setting as well as puzzle and plot, time has bent, warped, become a thing of mystery and magic.

Sue Grafton has pointed out that Kinsey Milhone began in 1982 and, because of the time between books, remains anchored in the eighties even as the author and the rest of us approach the millennium. Grafton is now writing recent-historical novels.

The opposite is true in the Midnight Louie landscape. Because of the Las Vegas background, something every tourist can check for veracity every day of every month of the year, time has gone schizoid. While the first Midnight Louie novel came out in 1992, and while the ten so fat document the cataclysmic and constant changes on the Las Vegas map, the time elapsed for the characters is only nine months.

Think of it as an early film: the main characters are shown conversing in the foreground roadster, while behind them the background of passing scenery reels by at a cosmic speed.

When a hardcover Midnight Louie book comes out saying New York-New York Hotel and Casino is opening, that is exactly what is happening in the real-time world on the book's first appearance. This is the only way to handle an endlessly evolving setting like Las Vegas: make the physical setting as contemporary as possible; let the characters develop at their own, slower pace.

Time for a pregnant pause: Although ten Midnight Louie books have passed through our hands and before our eyes since 1992, the actual time passage in the books is only nine months.

I didn't plan this; like Topsy, it "just growed."

Yet, while writing these books, I've become aware that -our culture is becoming Omni-Eratic. The television shows and film reruns l grew up seeing as a child are still running on cable and overseas, enticing today's and yesterday's children. They are being remade into major film releases for a new generation, a next and Future generation of rerun-watchers. Star Trek . Zorro.

We are all fluid and coming to share a culture devoid of time- lines. So any status quo in any of the Midnight Louie books is bound to change. Except for Louie, of course.

As he knows (and we always suspected), cats are too good just the way they are to change, very much at least. No matter how much time elapses.

Remember. It isn't over until the fat cat sings. Stay tuned.

CND