Book Review/Even Cat Sitters Get the Blues
Even Cat Sitters Get the Blues
A Dixie Hemingway Mystery
By Blaize Clement
Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s Press
$23.95 hardcover
By BILL DUNCAN
The News-Review
The late Fred Reenstjerna did a study of mystery writers when he was a cataloging librarian for the Douglas County Library System
at the Douglas County Library and was intrigued by the number of ways writers developed their protagonists, mostly around professions not connected to crime investigation. The sleuths came in all sizes, gender and professions, Reenstjerna discovered.
So it is with Blaize Clement who has just completed her third mystery story about Dixie Hemingway, a pet sitter in Siesta Key, a subtropical barrier island off Sarasota, Florida. Yes, there is a Siesta Key off Sarasota, a sort of paradise island of upscale homes and beach sand so white you think you are walking on sugar.
Her latest book follows two others about the pet sitter sleuth. Her first was, "Curiosity Killed the Cat Sitter," and her second, "Duplicity Dogged the Dachshund." You can tell by the titles, Clement puts plenty of humor in storytelling, without skipping the main ingredient, intrigue and mystery.
Now what would interest Reenstjerna were he alive, could be from whence Clement came. "Before I became a mystery writer, I was a family therapist in Houston, Texas," she said in an interview. "Being a therapist is a lot like writing a mystery. In either case, you have clues that help you find the thread that explains how something unwanted came to be. Therapists work their way backward, finding clues in the past to explain the present. That’s how I write a mystery, too."
One of the popular trends that Reenstjerna thought so interesting was that the authors were including recipes, advice and ideas that went with the protagonist’s particular profession other than their sideline of sleuthing. In Clement’s case, it is pet-care tips.
Dixie’s sleuthing in this book reveals a complicated tale of stolen secrets and she puts her life on the line to save a pet and solve a crime. Dixie discovers the dead body of a gate keeper at a mansion on Siesta Key where she has been engaged by a client to pet sit an iguana named Ziggy. She really has more important pet sitting jobs to do to be saddled with a corpse, so she leaves the body to be found by somebody else and that only compounds her involvement in the gatekeeper’s death when that somebody sees her leaving the scene.
From that moment to the exciting end of this mystery the reader is held captive by the clever twists and turns Clement weaves into her story, even to the iguana eventually saving her from death at the hands of one of the bad characters in a mystery story peopled by interesting characters.
One of the most interesting ones I found was Abuela Rosa the grandmother of one of her pet sitting clients who was famous for her menudo and who believed menudo, a Mexican soup made from tripe, hominy and chili, would cure everything after its rich, red, garlicky broth cooked for hours and was eaten steaming and fiery hot. Abuela means grandmother in Spanish.
Clement admits she patterned Abuela Rosa as a composite of all my Mexican friends’ mothers or grandmothers. She said she loves the Mexican culture and lets Hemingway unwind from her scary ordeal by going to a midnight Spanish Mass at St. Martha’s after she made sure Ziggy, left orphaned, was in the care of the head of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Florida in Gainsville.
To be successful as a mystery writer, the author has to come up with a protagonist’s name that will stick in the reader’s mind like Agatha Christie’s "Miss Marple," or Arthur Conan Doyle’s "Sherlock Holmes." In Clement’s case, she spent weeks deciding on her protagonist’s name. "I wanted the name to reflect the tone of the series — something light-hearted but with an underlying depth. Names with an X in them always seem friendly and approachable to me, so I finally decided on Dixie. I don’t remember how the name
Hemingway popped up, but it seemed right as soon as I thought it. The name brings the depth I wanted, and I like the music of the two words together."
With these three books already gaining her a fan base, Clement said she plans to continue the mystery series with Dixie Hemingway the pet sitter crime solver, stumbling into one adventure after another.
"I’ve had more fun writing about Dixie than anything I’ve ever written," she said. "It has also been gratifying to get mail from readers saying how much they love Dixie and all the other characters. Pet lovers and professional pet sitters write to tell
me about pets who are just like the ones I write about. I’ve discovered a whole new world of friends through the books."
She has a unique blog www.BlaizeClement.com called "Kitty Litter."
In the book Dixie declines pet sitting for clients who have pet snakes and if she’d thought it through probably would not have taken on an iguana, but then the readers would have missed a great mystery.
(Bill Duncan is editor of The Senior Times. He also writes a weekly column every Thursday on the Opinion Page of The News-Review.)