To preview Sinister Suggestions, please enjoy my BOOK TRAILER.
The answer to the “why” of the setting and time period chosen for my third novel Sinister Suggestions is found in Chapter Twelve of my first novel, Degrees of Obsession. This chapter contains the most autobiographical material found in any of my works of fiction. My alter ego, protagonist Dr. Charlie Pederson, describes herself and her best friend Marietta growing up in La Jolla, California in the Fifties:
Marietta and I were on the cusp, so to speak, graduating from high school in 1961. We entered puberty in 1955 along with a generation of kids who spent their formative years crouching in dirty hallways, sweaty fingers laced behind their well-scrubbed necks, waiting for the A-bomb. We graduated at the peak of the SAT scores. Our parents were afraid of Sputniks, and we were afraid of our parents. There were rumors about poodle skirts, but I never laid eyes on one. I felt out of kilter with my own generation. My mother insisted I wear sturdy brown oxfords instead of the saddle shoes and Capezios that graced the dainty feet of my peers. Of course, irradiating my toes under the shoe store fluoroscope negated the health benefit of good arch support. Actually, looking at the bare bones in my feet was the closest I ever got to obscenity. My political consciousness peaked at having two parakeets named “Ike” and a German shepherd with the same patriotic appellation. My family was not big on original thought.
In Chapter Six, Charlie describes her and, thus, my transition to college at Stanford University in the fall of 1961:
There was a saying that went: “Nine out of ten California girls are beautiful and the tenth one goes to Stanford.” I went to Stanford. Now, don’t get me wrong. I didn’t break mirrors, but there were thousands of drop-dead gorgeous women in California, even in high school. I was tall and naturally blonde…well, almost. That brief stint in modeling school had served me well. I had outgrown my awkward pubescent years and could manage a graceful stride when I put my mind to it. Any shortfall I had in the looks department had been well compensated in the brain department. Those top grades paid off. Twenty-two of my classmates also applied to Stanford, but none of the others was admitted. The day my letter of acceptance came in the mail, I had more than a few envious friends. My ego was quickly deflated, however, when I arrived on campus, just another clueless freshman set loose in a seething mass of upperclassmen. I struggled through the maze of registration, jostled by the milling masses at Memorial Auditorium. I fretted as I watched the IBM cards, each printed with one class opening, disappear into the greedy hands of the students ahead of me in line. I breathed a sigh of relief when the precious card for Chemistry for Chem Majors fell into my possession. My relief was short-lived, however. After I collected the rest of my class cards, I realized that two required courses had been assigned to me on the same days at the same hour. I stared in dismay at the placards overhead that forbade any changes to the pre-assigned sections of either Freshman English or Western Civ.
In Sinister Suggestions, my alter ego morphs into a new character named Mattie Thorne, a frosh student at Stanford that fall of 1961. She is suffering from amnesia due to unknown trauma from her past or present. Her journey and that of her rescuers, a determined and rebellious group of student staffers working on the campus newspaper, The Stanford Daily (click for archival issue from September 25, 1961), is told in this first book in a series of four murder mysteries entitled The Stanford Daily Mysteries.
In addition, staying true to my goal of blending truth into fiction, I have taken social, political, and lifestyle stories from the pages of the Daily from that 1961-2 academic year, added my own memories from the same period of time, and combined them with the requisite murders demanded by the mystery genre. The world itself was caught between Camelot and catastrophe in 1961 and many of the societal and political issues of that day plague us in the present, such as nuclear threats and sexual violence on college campuses.
Evidence that we had moved past Fonzie and the Happy Days of the 1950s, is shown in this list of a few of the world events that occurred in 1961:
- UN General Assembly condemns apartheid in South Africa
- Berlin Wall is built, dividing East and West Germany
- American-backed Cuban exiles fail in an attempt to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs
- Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo is assassinated
- Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin completes the first orbit of Earth by a human
To preview Sinister Suggestions, please enjoy my BOOK TRAILER.
One of my fondest memories from my wacky sophomore year at Cal Berkeley in 1962-63 was chugging $1 a pitcher beer at the Monkey Inn on Thursday nights. Proof that it cost $1 a pitcher is right there on the wall behind the bar in this photo. 25 cents a mug and a guarantee of 5 mugs to a pitcher. Such a deal! My three roommates and I would hop into my 1959 Morris Minor and drive the mile or so from our off-campus digs in a Parker Street duplex just off Telegraph Avenue. This was the year before Sproul Hall and the Free Speech Movement, so frat parties, beer kegs, and panty raids were still in. And I had in hand. not a fake ID. but a real CA driver’s license saying I was 25 that I’d obtained by taking an actual driving test and dressing “older”. Later my mother, viewing a Berkeley police report when I went temporarily AWOL would see a reference to a certain Karen Veazie AKA Karen Scott Billings and would exclaim, “My daughter’s not a criminal!”
Thursday night was indeed Monkey Inn night. The superb Bill Erickson jazz combo: Frank Goudie (clarinet), Jimmy Carter (drums), Bob Mielke (trombone) and Bill Erickson (piano) held sway Thursday nights at the Monkey from the late 50s up through 1962. Do I remember the music? No. I called my best friend, and she didn’t remember it either. Just the beer and the frat boys (mostly the bad boy Betas AKA Beta Theta Pi’s or the notorious Fijis AKA Phi Gamma Delta’s). Needless to say our little quartet from Parker Street did not represent the prim. round-collared, pearl-bedecked sorority girls of the day.
But when I read about what happened the next year, I was even more astounded. By 1964 my best friend and I (I’m the tall one!)had returned to La Jolla where we had grown up and found a minuscule apartment under the front stairway of a Spanish mansion across from the famed Wind ‘n’ Sea beach. I attended the 3rd and 4th of my undergraduate schools (yes, Berkeley was school number two after a freshman year at Stanford, but I finally went to grad school, got a Ph.D., and was a therapist for 40 years and still work in the mental health field at age 73–so there!). My best friend got a totally cool job at the new Saks Fifth Avenue store in La Jolla.
I usually don’t whine on my blog but today is a good whining day. Have a terrible cold this week which isn’t fun to begin with. Then last night, there was a sudden drip, drip, drip from the ceiling in the living room of my new condo. Out went the buckets which held me until this morning when a crew of construction workers came, packed up the living room and proceeded to rip out one third of the ceiling. Don’t have a definitive diagnosis yet but they think it’s coming from the roof two floors up. Someone had the bright idea that a roof replacement on my condo building was a good idea in the rainy season!
Now for the gratitudes. The cold is improving. My son and daughter and friends all texted their condolences. I can still watch the Cubbies in the den this evening. I have enough food in the house to last a couple of days. And I certainly am not in the position of those in this world who are really suffering from hunger, illness, and other deprivations. Thank you, God.
Dr. Karen Stephen aka Doc Flamingo 