Who knew I was in for a career revival? When my Miss Temple comes home and falls on her knees before me and nuzzles my neck I know something fishy is up and it is not Chicken of the Sea.
I also know I am not Bast with a gender adjustment and do in no way merit bowing and scraping.
“Oh, Louie,” she exclaims. “It is so exciting.”
Yeah? Say Fancy Feast is importing sea scallops on the half-shell for my personal supply and that would be exciting.
She then unrolls this media deal and tells me what a star I will be and how we will work together again and be able to use the new zebra-stripe carrier I abhor while flitting from city to city to do talk shows.
At last! My previous on-camera brilliance has been identified. I have even been able to drag Miss Temple along in a bit role, obtaining her a certain fame and a slew of new high-heeled shoes for me to embrace in a little game of Kick and Bite the Leather. Plus she will get a payment almost as handsome as I am, and residuals. Perhaps a Pixar movie someday.
But then…she starts sweet-talking me into the infamous plan to conceal my svelte athletic form in a stupid zebra-striped zoot suit, not to mention a matching new version of the previously offending fedora hat. Using the Fontana brothers as a backup act in similar baggy pants and zebra-print lapels does nothing to assuage my sense of being presented as a figure of fun rather than of 007-level rakish charm. Is this proper attire for one who has been favorably compared to Sherlock Holmes (without the aversion to females), Columbo, and Mike Hammer?
Who does she think I am, Lord Peter Wimsey?
I turn my head and look at the ceiling, all disinterested like, so she will owe me. However, after my transcendent experience with Elvis and the gang at Zebra Zoot Suit Choo-Choo, I figure I owe it to my public to get out there again and cut a rug and earn my treats. Karma is not the only one who can channel the past.
Now on to the nitpicking. No good deed goes unpunished, it is said, and here all we of Las Vegas Cat Pack nation are indeed going unhailed and unheeded.
After running our footpads off on the piping-hot Vegas pavements from the edge of Downtown to the Lower Strip turf to track a murderer, tail sleazy purveyors of naughty entertainment and foil scheming mobsters, we have been left high and dry. With not even a little catnip to make the “high” part of the state pleasant.
And these are not the only sins Miss Temple has committed recently.
I can eavesdrop on a cell phone call. My burning ears tell me Miss Temple may be rushing off to an alien clime called Wisconsin, leaving Mr. Matt Devine in the lurch and surely miffed. I cannot blame him. My Miss Temple may mean well, but she can exhibit a shocking disregard for her nearest and dearest in her quest to solve everyone else’s problems personally. I too suffer from this tendency.
I am mightily miffed myself, and have hied myself up a floor to Mr. Matt’s residence, where we can hang out together as two wronged bachelors. Miss Midnight Louise argues that only Miss Temple can “compensate” for Mr. Max’s memory issues on the momentous occasion of reuniting with his family and his newly found-alive cousin Sean. Miss Midnight Louise was always partial to Mr. Max, who has always been overrated in my opinion.
We shall see whether my candidate or hers will win out in the end.
Very Best Fishes,
Midnight Louie, Esq.
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Tailpiece
Carole Nelson Douglas on Where
Midnight Louie is Going…or Not
Some readers have been fretting in recent years that arriving at the Z book in Louie’s Alphabetical adventures means saying “Goodbye”. We were flattered. We were also worried about reassuring readers in a New Media world where book format, distribution, and sales has changed, changed utterly in just a few years.
First, the next book is Cat in an Alphabet Endgame.
Well, doesn’t that mean “the End”?
It means the end of the alphabet titles, but not of Louie and his world. Now, because of cataclysmic changes in the publishing industry, books don’t need title signals to the order in which they were written to be read.
After Louie debuted in Catnap, not wanting to imitate an established, hugely successful cat mystery series’ title format, I used Pussyfoot for my next title. (This is admirable ethics, but very bad marketing.) In fact, I refused to use the publisher’s proposed title sequence as “too close,” but did come up with a format with “cat” in it. By then, I realized that the series would unreel like an ensemble-cast TV series that lasted several seasons. So when the publisher accepted Cat on a Blue Monday, I realized the titles could continue with an internal alphabet on the color (or pattern, later) word.
That solved a problem of book marketing then. Mysteries series couldn’t be numbered, because if every title was not currently on the store shelf, readers wouldn’t pick up a series at Book Four, say. And all books sold on shelves, not websites. For a lovely long while my Midnight Louie and Irene Adler series occupied two entire shelves at the chain bookstores. Then chain stores started stocking fewer books. (Independent bookstores offered book-savvy clerks to advise readers about book order, but began to suffer from the Big Box competition.)
As Crimson Haze and Diamond Dazzle came out, readers began noticing the internal alphabet, just another fun little “clue” they figured out. Meanwhile, I was constantly explaining that the alphabet started with the second letter on the third book, after Catnap and Pussyfoot. I suggested to the publisher that we combine the first two books under a new “A” title, Cat in an Aqua Something. They graciously took a hard look at doing that, but the combined “A” book would be too long to market at a low-enough cover price.
Then came ebooks and bookselling websites. All of an author’s books were on virtual “shelves” together. Authors whose print books would have eventually moldered into forgotten dust now had a “literary legacy” with copyrights that would last for seventy years after their deaths.
I took this as time to tidy up the things that “can’t be helped” in the way traditional publishing worked. Catnap in eBook became Cat in an Alphabet Soup. Taking that as a “foundation” title, I changed Pussyfoot to Cat in an Aqua Storm, after the car Temple drove when the series began. Cat on a Blue Monday now fit in place. And I had an extra “concluding” book after Cat in a Zebra Zoot Suit to wrap up the continuing personal storylines and crime plots, Cat in an Alphabet Endgame.
As for Louie and me, we’re looking forward to exploring a reimagined world where the old remains in place but fascinating new characters and cases show up. Louie’s a veteran at this, having debuted in the first category romance quartet (with mystery) and then moving to this mystery series when, as I found myself searching for a way to explain to a library audience recently, I came up with “he was violated by a romance editor”. We all laughed hysterically. The fact is forty percent of his narration went to the cutting-room floor, without me being notified.