Dream A Little Death
by Susan Kandel
on Tour May 23 – June 23, 2017
Synopsis:
From critically acclaimed author Susan Kandel comes a charming new mystery featuring Dreama Black and a cast of zany LA-based characters.
The first time I set eyes on Miles McCoy, I worried he might try to eat me. He was the size and girth of a North American grizzly, with long, silver-tipped hair, a long silver-tipped beard, and small dark eyes that bore into me like I was a particularly fine specimen of Chinook salmon. It couldn’t have helped that I’d used a honey scrub the morning we met. I should’ve known better. Not just about the scrub, but about a lot of things.
Like braving the freeway during rush hour.
Like thinking you can’t get a ticket for parking at a broken meter.
Like racing up to his penthouse in gladiator sandals, and expecting not to twist an ankle.
Like watching his fiancée shoot herself, and assuming it was suicide, instead of murder.
Meet Dreama Black. A 28 year-old, third-generation groupie trying to figure out who she is after being publicly dumped by the rock god whose mega-hit, “Dreama, Little Dreama” made the name and the girl world-famous. Now Dreama supports herself by running custom-designed, themed tours of her hometown of L.A. When she is hired by a Raymond Chandler-obsessed rap producer to create a “L.A. noir” tour as his present to his soon-to-be bride, Dreama gets pulled into the middle of a possible murder, corrupt cops, and an unforgettable pair of femme fatales.
Book Details:
Genre: Mystery/Thriller
Published by: Witness Impulse
Publication Date: May 23rd 2017
Number of Pages: 304
ISBN: 0062674994 (ISBN13: 9780062674999)
Series: A Dreama Black Mystery, 1
Purchase Links: Amazon 🔗 | Barnes & Noble 🔗 | Goodreads 🔗
Read an excerpt:
Chapter 1
The first time I set eyes on Miles McCoy, I worried he might try to eat me. He was the size and girth of a North American grizzly bear, with long silver-tipped hair, a long silver-tipped beard, and small dark eyes that bore into me like I was a particularly fine specimen of Chinook salmon. It couldn’t have helped that I’d used a honey scrub the morning we met. I should’ve known better. Not just about the scrub, but about a lot of things.
Like braving the freeway during rush hour.
Like thinking you can’t get a ticket for parking at a broken meter.
Like racing up to his penthouse in Balenciaga gladiator sandals, and expecting not to twist an ankle.
Like watching his fiancée shoot herself, and assuming it was suicide, instead of murder.
But I’m getting ahead of myself, which is another thing I should know better about. Because if I’ve learned anything at all from my study of film noir (which got me into the whole sordid Miles McCoy mess to begin with), it is to tell the story in the precise order in which it happened.
The trouble started the day before, which was Valentine’s Day, a pagan holiday named after the Roman priest who defied Claudius II by marrying Christian couples. After being hauled off in shackles, the soft-hearted cleric was beaten with clubs, stoned, and when that didn’t finish him off, publicly beheaded. Makes you think.
It had poured rain for eight days running, which isn’t what you sign on for when you live in Los Angeles. But that morning, as I stepped outside for a run, the sun was blinding—so blinding, in fact, that I didn’t see the fragrant valentine my neighbor’s dog, Engelbart, had left on the stoop for me. Not that I minded spending the next twenty minutes cleaning the grooves of my running shoe with a chopstick. It was a beautiful day. The rollerbladers were cruising the Venice boardwalk. The scent of medical marijuana was wafting through the air. Engelbart’s gastrointestinal tract was sound.
An hour later, I hopped into my mint green 1975 Mercedes convertible, and made my way up Lincoln to the freeway. I was headed to Larchmont, an incongruous stretch of Main Street, USA, sandwiched between Hollywood and Koreatown. This was where studio executives’ wives and their private school daughters came for green juice, yoga pants, and the occasional wrench from the general store that had served Hancock Park since the 1930s. It was also where my mother and grandmother ran Cellar Door, known for its chia seed porridge and life-positive service. I helped out whenever my coffers were running low. Which was most of the time.
You are probably frowning right about now. Surely a young woman who owns a classic convertible—as well as Balenciaga gladiators—should not be perennially low on funds. But it’s true.
The car came from my grandmother, who received it as part of her third (fourth?) divorce settlement and gave it to me as a gift when I strong-armed my mother into rehab for the fourth (fifth?) time. The sandals I purchased online in a frenzy of self-loathing shortly after watching my ex-boyfriend the rock god serenading his current girlfriend the supermodel on an otherwise uneventful episode of Ellen. I’d tried to return the sandals, but one of the studs had fallen off, making them damaged goods. Like their owner. Not that I’m hard on myself. It’s just that my career—I take clients on custom-designed, private tours of my hometown of L.A.—wasn’t exactly thriving, which is why I was easy prey for the likes of Miles McCoy. But I’m getting ahead of myself again. Here comes the good part. The part where I’m driving like the wind and almost don’t notice the flashing lights in my mirror. I knew I should have fixed that taillight.
I pulled over, cut the motor, handed the cop my license and registration. He looked down, then did a double take. “Dreama Black?”
That would be me.
“The Dreama Black?” he continued. “As in ‘Dreama, Little Dreama’?”
Perhaps I should explain.
I am a twenty-eight-year-old, third-generation rock ’n’ roll groupie—or “muse,” as the women in my family like to put it.
My grandmother, a fine-boned blonde who never met a gossamer shawl or Victorian boot she didn’t like, spent the sixties sleeping her way through Laurel Canyon, winding up in a house on Rothdell Trail (a.k.a. “Love Street”) purchased for her by a certain lead singer of a certain iconic band whose name is the plural of the thing that hits you on the way out.
My mother, blessed with thick, dark tresses and a way with mousse, was consort to many of the pseudo-androgynous alpha males of American hair metal, her chief claim to fame an MTV video in which she writhed across the hood of a Porsche wearing a white leotard and black, thigh-high boots. She also bought Axl Rose his first kilt.
As for me, well, I was on my way to freshman orientation when this guy I’d been seeing, who’d played a couple of no-name clubs with some friends from summer camp, intercepted me at LAX, put his lips to my ear, and hummed the opening bars of a new song I’d apparently inspired. Instead of boarding the plane for Berkeley, I boarded the tour bus with Luke Cutt and the other skinny, pimply members of Rocket Science. Four world tours, three hit albums, two Grammys, and one breakup later, “Dreama, Little Dreama”—an emo pop anthem that went gold in seven days and has sold eleven million copies to date—had made me almost famous forever.
“Step out of the car, please.”
The cop removed his sunglasses. Peach fuzz. Straight out of the academy. “So.”
He wanted to get a picture with me.
“I’d love to get a picture with you,” he said.
I smoothed down my cut-offs and striped T-shirt, removed my red Ray-Bans, ran my fingers through my long, straight, freshly balayaged auburn hair. The cop put his arm around me, leaned in close, took a couple of snaps on his phone. Let me guess. He’d had a crush on me since tenth grade, when he saw me in a white tank and no bra on the cover of Rocket Science’s debut C.D., and now he was going to post the pictures on Instagram to show all his buddies.
“Awesome.” He gave me a brotherly punch on the arm. “No way is my wife going to believe this. She’s crazy about Luke Cutt. Hey, is he really dating that Victoria’s Secret Angel? She is smoking hot.”
At least I didn’t get the ticket.
Excerpt from Dream A Little Death by Susan Kandel. Copyright © 2017 by Susan Kandel. Reproduced with permission from HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved.
Author Bio:
An Agatha, Edgar, and SCIBA nominee, Susan Kandel is the author of the nationally best-selling and critically acclaimed Cece Caruso series, the most recent of which, Dial H for Hitchcock (Morrow), was named by NPR as one of the five best mysteries of the year. A Los Angeles native, she was trained as an art historian, taught at NYU and UCLA, and spent a decade as an art critic at the Los Angeles Times. When not writing, she volunteers as a court-appointed advocate for foster children, and loves to explore secret, forgotten, and kitschy L.A. She lives with her husband in West Hollywood.
Q&A with Susan Kandel
Writing and Reading:
Do you draw from personal experiences and/or current events?
Both! I am a voracious reader, and along with fiction, that includes two daily newspapers and an embarrassing number of magazines. So I am quite attuned to things that are going on in the culture — in fashion, music, art, entertainment, etc. — and embed a lot of these passions and interests into my books. In the current series, the protagonist is a third-generation rock and roll groupie, so popular music is definitely an important subtext. I, however, am not a third-generation rock and roll groupie (nor a first or second), so I can’t draw on my personal experience there. But I absolutely did draw on my own life in delineating the mother-daughter relationships that are the foundation of the Dreama Black series as a whole.
Do you start with the conclusion and plot in reverse or start from the beginning and see where the story line brings you?
My process in the past has been to start writing when I have the opening scene and the closing scene — in other words, I know how it begins, I know how it ends, but I don’t have the slightest idea about how I’m going to get from A to Z. It seems like a fairly intuitive way to structure an amateur sleuth mystery because what you are essentially doing is following along as the character herself sees where each clue leads her. What I found was that if I tried to plan too much in advance I would inevitably come up against impasses, or have to write myself out of dead ends, or have to make illogical leaps to get to where I needed to go next as per my outline. With this latest novel, DREAM A LITTLE DEATH, I worked somewhat differently. I started with a scene in mind — a film noir-ish burlesque performance that ended in a shocking mock-suicide — and built the entire plot and all of the characters around that!
Are any of your characters based on you or people that you know?
God, yes. It’s risky knowing me — everything and everyone is fair game. In my very first book I based one of the murder victims on my mother-in-law; the LAPD detective boyfriend from Buffalo, N.Y. on my husband; and yes, my sleuth Cece Caruso (at least in parts) on myself. Bad guys are my favorite to write, of course: the villain in one of my books was a dead ringer for my least favorite neighbor (who, thank goodness, does not like to read). In the new Dreama Black series, the protagonist is 28 years old, which is closer to the age of my daughters than myself, so many of Dreama’s observations and experiences (apart from the stumbling on dead bodies part) is stolen from my children & their friends. But I will admit Dreama’s ‘80s-era MTV video vixen mom, Desiree, is my fantasy version of myself.
Your routine when writing? Any idiosyncrasies?
My office is my converted garage, so it’s out of the house, which is a plus, because I’m not constantly distracted by the siren call of laundry, dishes, etc. Nonetheless, the battle against distraction — especially since I’ve become active on Twitter — is ongoing and brutal. There is nothing worse than the feeling of having sat at your desk all day and accomplished nothing. So I use something called the “Pomodoro” method, which I learned from my husband, who is an academic. Twenty-five minutes of total concentration — no checking email, Twitter, Daily Mail, answering the phone, wandering aimlessly, playing with the dog, eating, rearranging pens, etc. You just write, and after the twenty-five minutes, you get a five-minute break, and then you do it all over again. I find I have about five of these sessions in me before lunch. Then I take a break for an hour, and after I am well-fed, I do the whole thing all over again. It works! And the day literally flies by.
Tell us why we should read this book.
You should read DREAM A LITTLE DEATH if you like your mysteries on the cheeky side; if you are enamored of rock and roll, Hollywood history, and retro fashion; and if you want your guilty pleasures to be as smart as you are.
Who are some of your favorite authors?
Tana French, Lawrence Block, Thomas Perry, Georges Simenon, Elinor Lipman, Patricia Highsmith, Ian McEwan, Jeffrey Eugenides, Ruth Rendell, Thomas Hardy, Mary Higgins Clark, and Carolyn Keene.
What are you reading now?
Currently on my nightstand are: M.C. Beaton’s latest Agatha Raisin mystery, PUSHING UP DAISIES; Dennis Lehane’s new Boston noir, SINCE WE FELL; an academic treatise on Sofia Coppola’s films; a coffee table book about Yves St. Laurent’s “shocking” ‘40s-throwback collection of 1971; and groupie extraordinaire Pamela Des Barres’s new book, LET IT BLEED: HOW TO WRITE A ROCKIN’ MEMOIR.
Are you working on your next novel? Can you tell us a little about it?
So excited about this one! It is the next installment in the Dreama Black series, and in this book, Dreama is organizing a tour of spiritual/holistic L.A. for a group of sexy yoga mommies, and gets into hot (alkalinized) water when someone takes a whack at a former teen star turned New Age guru, and Dreama has to channel her kundalini energy to figure out who it is.
Fun questions:
Your novel will be a movie. Who would you cast?
Tippi Hedren as Gram, Melanie Griffith as Desiree Black, and Dakota Johnson as Dreama Black; alternately, Susan Sarandon as Gram, Brooke Shields as Desiree, and Eva Amurri as Dreama.
Favorite leisure activity/hobby?
Reading, watching any of the Housewives on Bravo while paying bills because then I feel less guilty, hiking in Runyon Canyon, Pilates, SHOPPING
Favorite meal?
This is a great question because I love to eat! I think my favorite meal is the meal I had after giving birth to each of my daughters: an egg salad sandwich on rye toast dry, French fries, and a vanilla malt. It’s the ultimate reward for a job well done.
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Tour Participants:
This book sounds soooo good! Definitely going on my TBR list.
Great interview! Thanks 🙂