My Writing Saga: The Early Years
Often people ask me how I started writing mysteries. In today's post, I reminisce about what I did before the Rick Montoya series, and how it led to trying my hand at crime fiction. We often hear that small businesses are the heart of the American economy, and I'm proud to have started one. Mine was a very small business – just me.
When I retired from the foreign service, we moved from Rome to New Mexico, a bit of a change in cultures to be sure. Since I was still relatively young, I thought I needed to find another career, or at least get some kind of job. Also, I found quickly that I couldn't make much money on the golf course. My wife, having always wanted to study art history, had signed up for classes at UNM (and would later become my go-to source of information on the topic). So, what would I do? After a leisurely check of the local job market, specifically in public affairs which had been my specialty, I couldn't get excited about anything. Then something happened which pushed me in a new direction.
An old friend from our Peace Corps days called me up and said he had rented a villa in Italy for a couple weeks. Since you lived there for nine years, he said, could you recommend some things to see in the area, and perhaps some good restaurants? So I pulled out my old guide books on the shelf, put together a couple pages of suggestions, and sent them off to him. Then I said to myself, “Self, do you think people might pay me for this kind of thing?”
Thus Italia Roadrunners was born. I contacted a couple villa rental companies who asked me to send them a company brochure. So I quickly had to write one up and get it printed. What evolved was a service providing day trips to interesting towns reachable from the client's villa, along with driving directions and practical travel tips. In the walking tour of the town they got lots of history, architecture, and of course restaurant suggestions. It was a nice little packet of info, and people liked it. Many came back in later years, sometimes renting the same villa, sometimes a different one.
Naturally I couldn't just rely on my library of books, extensive as it was, and on my memory of visiting locations; I was forced to travel back to Italy various times to do research. We went back to places we knew well, but mostly to new ones, where I crafted walking itineraries. It was always the small towns, places the normal tourist misses and which to me make up the best of Italy. A business trip that involves visiting museums and trying out restaurants? It doesn't get any better.
The trips were great, but one of the aspects of Italia Roadrunners I most enjoyed was chatting with people about Italy. I had an 800 number (remember those?) and talked to every client to find out their interests and give them the choices of day trips that could be reached from their villa. There are a lot of nice folks out there and it was fun to meet them, albeit by phone.
Most of my business was done in the late winter, spring and summer, since that is when people are planning their trips. By the summer of 2001 I was having a record year, and booked my own trip for October to update my itineraries. Then there was 9/11. Several of my clients, I heard later, were stuck in Italy for days when the flights were grounded. I went ahead with my October trip. (One of my stops was Lucignano, which years later became the setting for Tuscan Bloodline, my last book.)
But by the end of 2001 it became clear that overseas tourism was going to take a big hit, including travel to Italy. People were afraid to fly, and the economy sagged, taking its toll on vacation spending. The next year my booking dropped considerably and I started thinking about what to do next.
The answer, of course, was to go from writing factual tourist materials to making stuff up. Why not use what I knew about small towns in Italy and write a book set in one? And it could be a mystery, my favorite genre. After all, what is more mysterious than the foggy, narrow, medieval streets of somewhere like Mantova? I had dozens of possible settings to chose from using my Italia Roadrunners files, so I just had to decided where to start.
That turned out to be Volterra, in western Tuscany. It had everything that could work for a mystery: an interesting history, a sometimes eerie atmosphere, and a great spot for a murder, all of which I could work into the plot. And it was off the usual tourist track, introducing the reader to a place they might never have considered visiting. That became the formula for all the books in the series, to pick a town that most readers might not have heard of and sending my intrepid protagonist there to solve a murder while immersing himself in the local culture. (The exception was the prequel, Roman Count Down, going back to Rick's arrival in Italy.)
I don't remember exactly when I closed down Italia Roadrunners for good, it just kind of trailed off. For a few years after I started writing the novels I would get calls from old customers telling me they were going back and asking if I could prepare another packet of day trips. I'd tell them I had moved on, but I always tried to give them some suggestions of what to see near their villa. There are few things more satisfying to me than telling people about Italy. Especially the small towns.
As I usually write at the end of my posts, this substack is free, but the way you can support it is by getting one (or more) of my mysteries. Now there are nine of them and here's the complete list.. click here.