Cat In An Alphabet Endgame

Tailpiece

Carole Nelson Douglas on Getting There

and Back Again

Well, who thought we’d all live this long?

This is the 28th and final title in Midnight Louie’s alphabet mystery series.

Back in 1994, after writing the first two Midnight Louie mysteries, I knew I could not abandon this charming, swaggering, politically incorrect big guy of a stray cat.

So I committed to an “alphabet” title series that would eventually expand to 28 titles. What a rash leap of faith. There was no guarantee that publishers or sales would keep the series (or me) going that long, twenty-four years.

The thick and thin of the publishing industry is legendary, but Louie and I are both stubborn survivors, and I knew that Louie had “legs”. And, thanks to the support of readers expressing love and support from the days of notes and letters to thousands of emails, we made it through.

I “met” Midnight Louie in a newspaper feature I wrote in 1973 about a homeless black motel cat a woman flew two thousand miles home to rescue. The lodgers called him Midnight Louie and he lived off the motel’s expensive koi fish and the kindness of strangers. A trip from the fish pond to the pound’s Death Row was imminent. As a newspaper reporter, I was intrigued when the woman wrote a three-inch-long Classified ad that cost $30 to give him to the “right” home for a dollar. I defied journalistic custom to let him tell his story in his own words.

And he paid me back when I decided to make him a self-appointed Las Vegas PI whose narrative first-furperson chapters framed an innovative four-book “miniseries” inside a category romance line. That started a miniseries trend for trilogies and linked books that spread like wildfire through the many romance lines then, propelling many superstar careers of this day.

Not Louie and me. The editor “gave” the idea to the “real” romance writers she was pushing and kept us from publication for four years, then drastically cut the four books to fit into two volumes and buried them on the publisher’s list. Being done wrong only drove this twenty-pound, hard-boiled, alley-cat charmer into the mystery genre. That’s why I call him “Muscle in Midnight Black”. Louie’s adventures account for 32 of my 63 published novels and he stars in several short stories to boot, including an appearance with Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler.

As for Louie and me now, we’re looking forward to exploring a reimagined world where the familiar remains in place, but fascinating new characters and cases enter stage left, and right. Even Louie can’t reinvent himself single-handedly for such a long-lasting career. Only readers can do that. Thank you all for your support of the journey Louie and associates and I have made in the best of company, you.