Till Death Do Us Bark (43 Old Cemetery Road)

Dear Amazon Readers:

I never really know where my stories come from. I only know where I come from, and that’s from a family of morbidly curious people.

One of my aunts told me that my grandparents used to take their three daughters to the Greyhound bus station on Friday nights. They’d watch the passengers coming and going, and make up stories about them. Of course this was in Peoria, Illinois, in the pre-TV era, when entertainment was largely a do-it-yourself proposition.

Still, I think the world can be divided into two camps of people: those who come and go and get on with the business of life—and the rest of us whose business it is to wonder what other people are doing and why and with whom.

The 43 Old Cemetery Road series (so numbered because I was 43 years old when I started writing the first book, Dying to Meet You, and couldn’t remember a three-digit address) is full of faces and places I’ve wondered about over the years. Spence Mansion--home to Ignatius B. Grumply, Seymour Hope, and the ghost of Olive C. Spence--is based on an actual house in Peoria that my sister (and illustrator) Sarah and I rode by on our bikes hundreds of times as a kids. We never knew who lived there--I still don’t--but I’ve wondered about that place for decades. If I were ghost, I know I’d want to hang my hat (or opera glasses) in an old Victorian like that house.

And who wouldn’t want to write their Last Will and Testament in limericks as Noah Breth does in Till Death Do Us Bark? I’ve always loved reading obituaries, especially those of eccentric old millionaires. They’re the ones who can afford to do the really loony things the rest of us only dream about doing.

I consider reading obituaries part of my job as a writer--and as a person, too. I think we have an obligation to be interested in one another; to wonder, as my grandparents wondered, about other people’s lives.

So for me, writing fiction is only a small step from watching people at a Greyhound station. The only difference is that the bus station is my desk, and I have to create the passengers and follow them to their final destination, spying all the while, without getting kicked off the bus.