Saturday, April 6, 2024: Dandy Detects
Background on my first short story.
Daily Diary, Day 1313:
Welcome, I’m Mary Louisa Locke, the author of the USA Today best-selling Victorian San Francisco Mystery series and the Caelestis Science Fiction series. In this daily newsletter, I reflect on my life as an indie author trying to age gracefully, including my struggles to maintain a balanced life, what I listen to, read, and watch for entertainment, and occasional bits of information I’ve gleaned from doing the research for my novels.
In addition, now and again I will provide some of my fiction to read, for free, on this newsletter. Everything is available to anyone who subscribes, but I am always pleased when someone shows their appreciation for the newsletter by upgrading to paid.
As an experiment, I am going to put up my very first short story in the San Francisco Victorian mystery series, Dandy Detects, scene by scene on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. If this goes well, I will do the same for my other stories.
But today I would like to provide some background on how I came to write this story and the role it played in my publishing career.
As I have mentioned before, I grew up with a Boston Terrier named chosen by my Dad because he had a Boston Terrier growing up. I named her Misty (short for Miss Tea of the Boston Tea Party) because I was already interested in history at an early age. I loved that funny, sweet dog, so, the moment I decided to write a series of mysteries set in late 19th century San Francisco, I knew that I was going to introduce a Boston Terrier as one of the continuing characters.
But, before I was ready to write the first book in the series—over ten years later, another Boston Terrier came into our life. We got a male Boston puppy for our daughter named Sammy, named for Samuel Adams of the Boston Tea Party, and this dog became the real-life model for Dandy in the subsequent series.
Before publishing the first book, I wanted to make sure that it was within the bounds of historical accuracy that such a breed would exist in the late 19th century. As a result, I was greatly relieved when after a little research I found that the breed originated in Boston in 1870 from a mixture of English bull-dogs and English white terriers (and possibly French bull-dogs.)
By the time I started on Uneasy Spirits, the second full-length novel in the series, I had done some additional research on dogs in the 19th century in America. As the urban population of the nation grew, there was increasing concern over the threat large packs of roaming dogs represented, with stories about them attacking children and spreading rabies, for which there wasn’t yet a vaccine. As early as 1862, San Francisco responded by passing a city ordinance that required that dogs be on a leash or muzzle, and hired dog catchers to round up stray dogs, putting strays in a pound until the owner paid a fine. Dogs not redeemed were executed. Of the over 4000 dogs caught yearly in San Francisco between 1863 and 1895, over two-thirds were not redeemed. This fact will explain why the mother of the boy who finds and adopts Dandy as a pup, keep reminding him to keep him on a leash.
At the same time, however, Americans moved away from rural areas, where animals were bred for practical economic reasons, some began to adopt a new positive attitude towards dogs as pets. This helps explain the popularity of two stray dogs, Bummer and Lazarus, who many San Franciscans took to their hearts in the early 1860s. These two canines were made famous by the local newspapers that stressed their loyalty and bravery. This new attitude towards dogs as pets also explains the willingness of someone living in the expensive Palace Hotel to offer a $10 reward in the San Francisco Chronicle (more than most city residents made in a week) for a lost “… Terrier Dog, with clipped ears, answering to the name of Dandy.”
While Dandy had only a small walk-on part in Maids of Misfortune, I so enjoyed writing about him, I decided to give him a starring role in a short story that I wrote and published while I was working on Uneasy Spirits. One of the motivations for this was that a couple of the early indie authors suggested writing a short story that you could charge only 99 cents for, the theory was this would tempt reader to try an unknown author such as myself. So, I wrote and published Dandy Detects in April 2010. At that point Maids of Misfortune had been out for about four months and sold no ebooks on Amazon, just paperbacks, probably to my family and friends.
Then over the 2010 July 4th weekend, Kindle Nation Daily, one of the earliest websites to promote ebooks, offered to feature Dandy Detects in their newsletter as a Kindle Short. As hoped, many of the people who read the short story for free went on to buy the novel, and over that weekend I sold over 70 copies of Maids of Misfortune (an enormous number in those days) pushing it to the top of the historical mystery bestseller list.
Maids of Misfortune stayed on the top of that list for the next year and a half, and since Amazon had just given indie authors the option of getting 70% royalties for books selling at $2.99 and above, I made enough money over the next years so that I could retire completely from teaching to become a full-time author.
Needless to say, I owe a lot to that first short story and Dandy the Boston Terrier.
Photos are of Sammy with one of our wolfhounds. As you might imagine, Sammy ruled the roost!
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Little dog, huge personality!
What a wonderful background "success" story!