Wendall Thomas takes us to a fantasy island for CHEAP TRILLS

HALLIE EPHRON: One of the most delightful people writing crime fiction these days is Wendall Thomas. She's hilarious and a wonderful writer and just one of those people you feel so happy to know. Her first Cyd Redondo (great name!) book was notable for, as I recall, snakes in suitcases.

Her new series book, CHEAP TRILLS, takes readers on another memorable trip... I'll let her explain.

WENDALL THOMAS: Whether we favor travel by air, sea, RV, or our own favorite armchair, I believe most of us have one special travel destination we dream about—a place so gorgeous, so romantic, so remote, or so fascinating, that we feel it will change our lives forever.

When Elizabeth Gilbert published Eat, Pray, Love in 2006, she launched a million travel fantasies—or ten million, if you count her book sales. Although the memoir visits Italy and India, her final destination in Bali might be the most fantasy-inducing, since that’s where Gilbert herself found true love—for a few years at least.

The newest Cyd Redondo mystery, Cheap Trills, set in early 2007, finds the Brooklyn travel agent doing everything she can to cool her senior citizen clients’ Eat, Pray, Love Bali fever.

First, there’s the cost, since few of her fixed income clients realize Gilbert received a $200,000 advance to finance her trip which, as Cyd says, “covers a lot of ashram.”

Then there’s the flight—a 51 hour journey with multiple connections and the accompanying chances for missed planes and lost luggage. Further, Bali is full of active volcanos, thieving monkeys, fatal falling coconuts, poisonous snakes, and lacks senior discounts, wheelchair ramps, and emergency rooms. Plus, she’s had clients used as unwilling “mules” before, and Bali is especially harsh on smugglers, like execution harsh.

When Cyd’s mother books an “Eat, Pray, Fall in Love” package behind her back, and the trip goes wrong, Cyd heads to the mystical island armed, as usual, with nothing but theoretical knowledge. And her purse.

Both the plot and the comedy in a fish out of water story come from the space where the known meets the unknown. Here are a just a few of the hundreds of fascinating things I learned about Bali to ambush Cyd with in Cheap Trills.

-Many people in Bali consider redheads—like Cyd—to be demons.

-Bali, the only Hindu island in all of Indonesia, operates on three calendars. The most important in terms of daily life and religious practice, consists of 210 days—not our 365.

-Balinese babies may not touch the ground for their first 105 days (or 210 in some communities). Infants are considered to be holy incarnations of former ancestors, and must be kept off the impure ground until they are old enough for an elaborate ceremony, where they are welcomed to the physical world and receive their names.

-70% of households in Bali and across Indonesia have birds as pets. For perspective, 45% of US households have dogs.

-The only bird which is indigenous to the island is the Bali starling. In 2007, when the book is set, it was reported there were only seven left in the wild.

-Sarongs are mandatory for entry to any temple.

-Gas for scooters and autos is often sold by the side of the road in recycled vodka bottles. 

-Since 2004, the largest global market for Tupperware has been Southeast Asia.


-Almost all Balinese natives have one of these first names, depending on birth order: Wayan, Made, Nyoman, and Ketut. If there’s a fifth child, it starts over.

-Durian, considered a delicacy in Bali, has been described as the most foul-smelling fruit in the world. Its aroma has been compared to raw sewage, rotting flesh and smelly gym socks, combined.

-There is one snake removal expert who services the whole island and everyone knows his name. It’s Ron.

Reds and Readers: Do you have a fantasy destination you’ve yet to visit? And if you’ve been lucky enough have your dream vacation, was there anything that took you by surprise?

More about Cheap Trills: (back cover copy)
It’s 2007 and Bay Ridge, Brooklyn has Eat, Pray, Love fever. Every book club in town is devouring the bestseller and all of Cyd’s Redondo Travel senior citizen clients are dying to head to exotic Bali. But the travel agent in her only sees its dangers—three active volcanos, six venomous snake species, no wheelchair ramps, about fifteen possible tropical diseases, and the death penalty for smugglers. So she’s hurt and furious, but also terrified, when her mother Bridget sneaks off with two friends on a Bali tour booked by Cyd’s arch nemesis, Peggy Newsome. Of course, Bridget and her friends wind up stranded and smack dab in the middle of a local murder investigation. Now Cyd must respectfully navigate Balinese culture, battle songbird smugglers and thieving monkeys, commandeer a funicular railway, infiltrate an underground Tupperware network, frame Peggy, and find the real killer, all while trying to keep three orphaned, endangered Bali Starling chicks alive in her purse.

Wendall Thomas bio:
Lost Luggage, the first book in Wendall Thomas’s Cyd Redondo series, was a Macavity and Lefty finalist for Best Debut Mystery, Drowned Under received an Anthony nomination for Best Paperback Original and Drowned Under and Fogged Off were Lefty finalists for Best Humorous Mystery. Her short fiction appears in the crime anthologies Ladies Night, Last Resort, Murder-a-Go-Go’s, and Crime Under the Sun. She also teaches in the Graduate Film School at UCLA, lectures internationally on screenwriting, and wrote the speech for Bonnie Raitt’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

Simple Twists of Fate; a guest blog by Wendall Thomas

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Authors, unsurprisingly, tend to be a somewhat superstitious lot. Not, say, to the extent of the 2004 Red Sox players who refused to shave their increasingly shaggy beards in case it might bust the streak, but still... we have our rituals. We respect (and worry and fear) the mystery of being able to pull a whole novel out of thin air. And we're all very aware that at more than one time, we've been the recipients of luck. That weird idea you have about a Southern vampire mystery romantic comedy turns out to be a massive hit for HBO. Or, more commonly, you meet an agent at a cocktail party you almost didn't attend because you were tired, and she's the one who sells your new series for more money. 

Wendall Thomas is a big believer in luck. Or karma, or doom, to use the old Norse term. Why? Well, let's just say, "Luck plus preparation equals opportunity."

 

 

I believe in fate. 

 

There are so many times a chance meeting or a lucky accident has changed the course of my life or paid off, years later, in unexpected ways. Planning has never worked for me. I’m not just a “pantser” in writing, I’m a pantser in life. 

 

The spring I was due to graduate from The University of North Carolina, I’d managed to accumulate 2500 albums and planned on being a sound engineer. But when an all-male New England prep school called and offered to fly me up for an interview, I went. And got the job. I’ve been teaching, one way or another, ever since.  

 

 

I never planned on getting married. I just wanted to travel. So when I got a last minute job offer to lecture at a writing workshop in Ballygally, Northern Ireland, I took it. When one of the writers dropped out, an Englishman named James Bartlett took his place. At the final night party, James was too late to sit at his friends’ table and wound up next to me. Even though he was fourteen years younger and lived in Belfast, I took a chance and danced with him. That was twenty years ago. Not surprisingly, we got married in Vegas, no wedding planner required.

Wendall and James at the scene of the crime

In 1995, I wanted to go on a walking tour of the East End of London, but only had time to make it to the one in South Kensington. I couldn’t know that the inspiration for my third Cyd Redondo mystery, Fogged Off,  would come from that walk and my subsequent friendship with the wonderful guide, actress Emily Richard, and her husband, Edward Petherbridge—some of you might remember him as Lord Peter Wimsey in the 1987 BBC adaptation of the Dorothy L. Sayers’s novels.

They had met on the epic eight hour production of Nicholas Nickleby and were both trained in classical theatre. They not only gave me their guest room and endless cups of tea, they gave me an entrée into the dressing rooms, cast parties, disappointments, and gossip of the West End. From them, I also learned about the down and dirty “backstage” of the walking tour world, filled largely with out-of-work actors, and retired academics. I was fascinated by the drama behind the guides seen leading groups on every corner in the city. 

Walking (and being inspired) with Emily Richard

And I knew I’d never seen that world in a novel. So, when the pandemic demanded I write about  a place and a world I already knew well and which Cyd might find tough to navigate, I chose London and the “cutthroat” world of Jack the Ripper walking tours—highly fictionalized, of course. It was fate.

One of the last conversations I ever had with my Dad was about fate and opportunity. He’d grown up the youngest of six on a farm outside Charlotte, N.C., complete with outhouse (as a child, he was famous for locking neighbors in and making him sing to get out...). He told me that the whole trajectory of his life, which he thought he would spend as a minor league baseball player or a mechanic, came down to his willingness to veer off course and say yes to random opportunities. This “pantsing” resulted in achievements—a PhD, heading the Speech and Hearing Department at UNC, consulting for NASA—that a farm boy couldn’t have dreamed of. It was only in his later years that he saw the plan that had always been bigger than he was.

Fogged Off is dedicated to him—my role model and cheerleader for flying blind.

Are you a planner or a pantser in life? Do you believe in fate? Have you ever had a chance meeting that changed your life? Let me know, because I'm giving away a copy of Fogged Off to one lucky commenter!

 

FOGGED OFF: When travel agent Cyd Redondo’s client and Jack the Ripper expert Shep Helnikov is found dead in London, she navigates the cutthroat worlds of research librarians, unemployed actors, embassy underlings, rodent smugglers, and more to find his killer and bring his body back home.

 

Wendall Thomas teaches in the Graduate Film School at UCLA, lectures internationally on screenwriting, and has worked as an entertainment reporter, development executive, script consultant, and film and television writer. Her first Cyd Redondo novel, Lost Luggage, was nominated for the Lefty and Macavity Awards for Best Debut Mystery of 2017. Her second, Drowned Under, was nominated for a Lefty for Best Humorous Mystery of 2019 and an Anthony Award for Best Paperback Original. Her short fiction appears in the crime anthologies Ladies Night, Last Resort, and the Anthony-nominated Murder-A-Go-Go’s. You can find more at her website, like her on Facebook, and follow her on Twitter as @EWendallThomas

“Laugh-out-loud, coffee-down-your-shirt, don’t-read-it-on-the-bus hilarious. . . Fogged Off is what the world needs right now.” Catriona McPherson, multi-award-winning author of the Last Ditch Motel series

“A screwball delight. . . If Preston Sturges and Janet Evanovich had a baby, she would be Cyd Redondo.” Haris Orkin, award-winning author of You Only Live Once

Wendall Thomas--Endangered Everything

DEBORAH CROMBIE:-- Oh, my gosh, how much do I love this blog? This week we have gone from Austin, Texas, to Siberia, to Tasmania! Talk about armchair travelers! And maybe some of us will be tempted to do even more adventurous traveling than that. Today, however, is extra special for me, as I have family in Hobart, Tasmania, and have dreamed of visiting.  But in the meantime, I think I need at least a Tasmanian Tiger bumper sticker while I travel along with Wendall Thomas's Cyd Redondo. (And, yes, Wendall, I am an emotional hoarder.)

Endangered Everything

by

Wendall Thomas

When I first decided to set the second Cyd Redondo mystery in Australia, and specifically Tasmania, I wasn’t sure whether I would continue the “endangered animal” theme that had been so central to the first book. I knew I needed a psychic break from snakes, at least.

Then I came across the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger. This fabulous marsupial has the body of a wild dog, the stripes of a Sumatran tiger, the gaping jaws of a wolf, the coughing cry of a human baby, and the pouch of a kangaroo—males too, to prevent their privates from catching on bushes...thistles can be murder! 

At the moment, the thylacine is “functionally extinct.” What the hell, you might wonder, does that mean? 

 It means they’re not entirely sure. Although the last verified tiger died in Hobart, Tasmania’s Beaumaris Zoo in 1936, five minutes on the internet turns up dozens of video clips of potential paw prints and sightings. And the hold the creature has on the Tasmanian imagination is profound and ubiquitous—landing it on the Tasmanian government logo, the Hobart Police Station door, countless murals, beer bottles, coffee blends, magnets, playing cards, and oven mitts in every market and souvenir shop.

           

I loved the idea that there might still be Tasmanian tigers out there and that Cyd might be involved in “un-endangering” them, with the use of her irreplaceable vintage Balenciaga bag. 

And then I realized what the whole series was really about for me—not just animals or accessories—endangered everything. 

           

I long for so many things that seem to have disappeared or are fast disappearing—corded phones, Go-Go boots, Jello 1-2-3, cassette mix tapes, handwritten letters, picking up your own take-out food, manners, the Oxford comma, and democracy. 

Am I just afraid of change? Am I an emotional hoarder? Or is that the human condition—longing for what we’ve lost? Cyd clings to old Fodor’s Guides and Orient Express posters, the ancient compass her late father left her, her brousins’ Linda Ronstadt albums, and her profession. Let’s face it, travel agents are on the endangered list for sure.

           

And what about us? Readers and writers? Popular wisdom says that we are “functionally extinct” too. The internet is always declaring that bookstores are dead, the novel is dead, print is dead, no one reads, etc. But here we are. We’re not extinct. Yet. Functioning? Depends on the day. So while I’m still here, I want Cyd to fight the good fight to keep the best things (and creatures) alive, and I’m determined to do the same.

           

What endangered or “functionally extinct” things do you treasure or miss the most? What objects/traditions/habits are you still trying to keep alive? Or are you embracing the present and future, full steam ahead? I’d love to know.

           

Wendall Thomas teaches in the Graduate Film School at UCLA, lectures internationally on screenwriting, and has worked as an entertainment reporter, script consultant, and film and television writer. Her novel Lost Luggage was nominated for both a Lefty and Macavity Award for Best Debut Mystery of 2017 and her short fiction has appeared in the crime anthologies Ladies Night (2015) Last Resort (2017), and Murder-A-Go-Go’s (2019). Drowned Under is her second Cyd Redondo Mystery.

DEBS: I want to know what Wendall wants to know. What do you hang on to, dear REDS and readers? (And I adore this photo of Wendall!)