Cat In An Alien X-Ray

Tailpiece

Carole Nelson Douglas Goes to the Dogs

Authors often donate character names for charities. Penny and her dog Rens won their names in this book at an auction at Dragon*Con science fiction/fantasy/horror convention in Atlanta, where thousands of readers and media fans congregate every Labor Day weekend.

Rens is really a mini husky Chihuahua, and here is a photo of him. I know Louie will sniff at a dog photo in his book.

Louie’s long-standing feline chauvinism has forced me to mount a defense of dogs.

Not only have they won standing as “man’s best friend,” but they have been a woman’s best friend too. Since I wrote my first novel about fifty-nine novels back, I’ve wanted to be sure that animal companions were in the picture.

Of course, if you put an element into a story, it’s going to spring into life and demand a real role. That’s how Boru, an Irish wolfhound, became a hero at the end of my first novel, Amberleigh, and a King Charles spaniel stood in for the entire doomed class of English Cavaliers during their seventeenth-century Civil War in Fair Wind, Fiery Star.

When I switched from historical adventure to high fantasy, a crabby white cat with ninety-nine lives named Felabba showed up. And she talked too. A lot.

Rambeau, the white Samoyed dog, accompanied my second fantasy heroine, Alison Carver, into the world of Veil. And more recently, noir urban fantasy heroine Delilah Street adopted a huge wolfhound-wolf cross she named Quicksilver, a good survival strategy in a postapocalyptic Las Vegas.

So I find a girl and her dog as natural a fiction partnership as a girl and her cat.

Louie has been no slouch in having close encounters with canine characters either. Consider Nose E., the tiny dope- and drug-sniffing Maltese. Nose E. showed up in a Midnight Louie short story and then appeared in the books. Louie must admit the little fellow has one of the most dangerous jobs in the law-and-order business. Louie, however, would never put up being toted around celebrity events by some burly linebacker. He might subject himself to playing purse pussycat for a gorgeous Hollywood starlet … if she was strapping enough to tote his twenty pounds around on those six-inch heels, that is.

Midnight Louie is the only one of my four-footed characters to have a narrative voice. And that’s because the real and original Louie was a koi-catching stray at a fancy Palo Alto motel, destined for the pound. An out-of-towner flew him back to my home state and put an extravagantly expensive ad in the classifieds (remember them?) at the newspaper (remember them?) I reported for. He was on the block for a dollar bill, but only to the “right” home. When I sat down to write his saga, Louie’s voice took over, and I’ve been Louie’s collaborator ever since.

We wouldn’t have it any other way.