There was something different about “Sagebrush.” For instance, the town was full of people who were missing fingers and teeth, from the mayor (missing his wedding ring finger) to the tubercular waitress at the local coffee shop (missing many of her teeth). The paper's advertising saleswoman (missing a finger) could be very, very friendly if you bought a full-page ad. The alcoholic staff photographer (missing most of his teeth) started refusing to take photographs for reporter’s stories. Later he refused to develop film for reporters who took their own photos. Then he refused to even let reporters use his darkroom to develop their own film. Finally Sweeney fired him (but he didn’t mean it). The printer, a paroled armed bank robber, was hired because convicts can’t quit until their parole is up. (Or so Sweeney said.) He was a nice guy, with all of his fingers and many teeth, who once accidentally drove through the wall of the Daily Press while parking out back with a girlfriend with the engine running to stay warm. In a moment of passion he'd hit the accelerator pedal with both feet. Sweeney fired him. (No, not really.) 

The  Daily Press gave me many golden memories. Climbing through a massage parlor window to interview the girls inside. (I got offered a job, and it would have paid more. A lot more. But Sweeney would never fire me.) Going on wild goose chases, excuse me, wild horse hunts with the Bureau of Land Management. Observing the FBI SWAT team “training” the local police. Hunting for stolen dynamite with a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agent. He made me sit in the back of his car with the unhappy suspect, who was very anxious to learn what I was going to write about him in the Daily Press. I told him we'd write about his dog being loose and at large. (Only kidding.) Those halcyon young reporter days of sleep deprivation, hunger, and lunacy were destined to end one winter when the water in my toilet froze solid. It was 40 degrees below zero, and in a flash of clarity I knew I could be just as broke in a better and warmer place.

Eventually I moved to the Washington, D.C., area. I got better and better reporting jobs and my toilet was never in danger of freezing. And I started writing plays, and later, mystery novels. I will swear in court that everything I write is fiction, but “The Case of the Country Club Corpse in Pink” did inspire a scene in my play Remedial Surveillance. Sagebrush, Sweeney, and the Daily Press figure heavily in another, Boom Town Blues, and also in my heroine Lacey Smithsonian's reporting background before her series begins.

Lacey was a character in my imagination long before she appeared in the  Crime of Fashion  mystery series. For years I carried around in my head the first few lines of Killer Hair and the image of Lacey Smithsonian looking down at a beautiful young woman in a coffin with the worst haircut she'd ever seen. Lacey was amusing and persistent. Luckily she and I got along, because now she’s striding stylishly through her first mysteries in her high heels and her knockout vintage suits, and more of her adventures are on the horizon.

Besides, she had a car and she had a camera, so I said, “You're hired!"