by
JOHN SCHERBER
People
sometimes ask how I come up with the ideas for my mysteries. The truth is that
I have no consistent system for doing it. Many of these nooks are based around
artifacts, for example the first one, Twenty
Centavos, which uses a story I had once heard about a master clay artist from
the Yucatán who worked in the style of ancient Mayan ceramics. He did not
reproduce any specific piece, but he knew the differing techniques and themes so
well that he could make plausible objects from all regions and periods that
could pass the scrutiny of experts, which was not his principal goal. He mainly
meant to be a true Mayan and an artist of those
times.
To avoid
prosecution for forgery, he baked a small change coin (ten or twenty centavos) into
each one, and since they were fired only on low heat, the coin did not cause
them to fracture or explode. This gave him the ability to claim he never
intended to deceive anyone, since they could simply be x-rayed to reveal the
coin.
This mystery
came into being when I began to imagine what uses these expert pieces might be
put to in the hands of a high-end antiques dealer with low-end ethics. Not
exactly ripped from the headlines, but the story had its roots in the real
world nonetheless.
As I was
thinking about where to go for the thirteenth Paul Zacher mystery, I recalled
hearing about a young movie star in the Philippines whose body was exhumed so
that her bones could be buried with her recently deceased father. By then she
had been in the ground for 29 years, but she was not hard to find on the
Internet. Her stage name was Claudia Zobel. Her real name was Thelma
Maloloy-on, and she was killed in an auto accident a few days short of her 19th
birthday in February 1984. I’m not going to post the photos of her body, even
though they’re not at all shocking. For those who wish to see her and why her
survival in this condition was so startling, they can be found here:
I was suddenly
inspired with a new plot line. What if Claudia had been born in San Miguel de
Allende? It’s another Latin Catholic culture where the story might easily
transfer. Using the same concept of her body being exhumed so the bones could
be placed into the father’s coffin on his burial, I opened the story as Paul
and Maya are driving past the cemetery, when they spot a hearse leaving the
grounds with a casket on board. An ecstatic crowd follows shouting that it’s a
miracle.
Well, as we say
here, Nothing goes to waste in México,
and I saw in this introduction the possibility of a commentary on religion,
greed, and politics. Where you have that volatile mix, can murder be far
behind?
In my story, Claudia
Zobel became Claudia Arango, a name I borrowed from the real last name of
Pancho Villa. In the book, her final movie was called Angel Face. Here she was old enough to do some sexy scenes, and
with her sudden death coming near the release date, it was a blockbuster
success. The posters I’ve included here show the real Claudia going beyond the
modest limits I used, but I wanted to make her life material for at least a
preliminary consideration for sainthood. After all, Eva Peron, who also had an
entertainment background, was briefly thought of in that way.
In the book, Angel Face, Claudia has two surviving
brothers, one an embarrassed restaurant owner who feels she ought to be
reburied immediately with no fanfare, and the other, a defrocked priest looking
for a new income stream. Since the ex-priest is the older of the two, he
controls the father’s estate, which in México includes the remarkably intact remains
of his late sister Claudia.
Then I revived
a favorite character of mine, one I had developed for a book I never published
because I wasn’t happy with it. But this character, the urbane Monsignor Will
Priestley, is an expert in vetting relics and antiquities for the Vatican. Naturally,
he is summoned to take a look at the Saint Claudia Arango phenomenon. Is she
something the Church should be getting involved with, or should they run in the
other direction?
A cultivated man
of the world with no pastoral duties, running a kind of ecclesiastical Antiques Roadshow, the Monsignor drives
down to San Miguel in his Audi to scope things out. But, as it develops, the
woman who catches his eye is not so much Claudia Arango, as our own Maya of the
Paul Zacher Agency. Until this thirteenth entry in the Zacher series, Paul has
always been the one to be tempted.
The road to
sainthood is no easier to navigate than any other road in México, and as people
who drive here know, all the well-paved ones have high toll rates. Angel Face may have the most dramatic
ending I’ve used in any of the mysteries, right up there with the finish to The Devil’s Workshop.
Some readers
tell me I write women well, and implicit in that is that I also write men well.
After all, aren’t men easier than women for a man to write? But I will confess
that this book greatly challenged me in getting the interaction right between
two men key to the plot.
As always, and
rightly enough, the reader will be the judge. Let me know what you think in your review on Amazon.
There’s also a button called CONTACT on my website:
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