Today is Anna Bowman’s 37th birthday.

This isn’t going to be a great post in terms of structure, organization, and [third synonym]. It’s more of a free-flowing expression of my thoughts around the debut of Bigger Fish, my writing style, and the reason Anna’s birthday is May 5th.

So before I lose you, let me throw in a link to the Anna Bowman Thrillers, two of which are free today and tomorrow in honor of her birthday.

And if you stop reading here, you might as well enjoy this snapshot of my orange cat slapping LRRR, RULER OF THE PLANET OMICRON PERSEI 8!

Now for the meat and potatoes.

Fans of Sue Grafton’s alphabet murders may note that Anna shares her birthday with Grafton’s MC, Kinsey Millhone. That was deliberate, something I hope will be considered a respectful homage rather than a lazy sort of literary theft. There are only 366 possible birthdays anyway, and Anna is such a Taurus.

My top 5 favorite authors, in order, are Stieg Larsson, Sue Grafton, Michael Crichton, Elizabeth George, and J.R.R. Tolkien. I know, it’s not exactly a list of super cool authors you’re not cool enough to know about yet. As the list goes on, you won’t find any surprises. JK Rowling, C.S. Lewis, Kathy Reichs, Brian Jacques, and George R. R. Martin round out the top 10. (What? You’ve never heard of Brian Jacques? Oh my goodness, you must check him out!)

I don’t read much, especially for a writer. Friends have helped me discover new writers (or are themselves writers whose work I enjoy), but I always go back to the same books I’ve read many times before. Many people, maybe all the people, appreciate the easy comfort of a book or movie that contains no surprises and asks nothing  of us. That’s certainly part of the reason I re-read books, but it’s not the only reason.

My favorite books, like my favorite movies, absolutely must be read or watched many times over. Like the Bible I grew up reading (occasionally attempting to read cover-to-cover only to crap out two chapters into Leviticus), they give you something new every time you care to look.

Like any good preacher, I came prepared with exactly three examples:

1

I have to start with the movie I will watch again and again and again until someone makes it illegal, and then I will keep watching it until I get caught and sent to prison, and then I will break out of prison and steal a VHS player so I can take my 30-year-old copy of it up into the mountains with a solar-powered CRT TV and keeping watching it.

I speak of course, of Jurassic Park.

It’s not merely because I’m the Cards Against Humanity white card, “A little boy who won’t shut the f*ck up about dinosaurs.” I appreciate the part where I see something new every time I watch the film.

To wit, the scene where Hammond and Sattler are eating melting ice cream in the cafeteria and talking about the illusion of control. As a child, all I noticed about the mural behind Hammond was that it was a black-and-white painting of some dinosaurs. As a woman with a shiny new bachelor’s degree in art history, I watched it again c. 2012 and saw something new. The mural is Picasso’s Guernica, re-imagined with dinosaurs. Passages of the movie artwork are copied directly from the artist’s monochromatic mural. Don’t believe me? Look it up.

It is the opposite of Chekhov’s rifle. It is definitionally superfluous, an homage to a mural only an art historian (or a Spaniard) would recognize, an admittedly heavy-handed metaphor if you know why Picasso painted Guernica. When I spotted it over a decade ago, a quick Googling generated no relevant hits. If anyone else had noticed it, Google wasn’t blabbing. In 2024, the homage is common knowledge.

It takes a deep devotion to storytelling to even think about tossing in a detail like that, let alone doing the requisite work to make it a reality. It takes a nuanced understanding of the writer of the novel that inspired the film. It takes a pedantic insistence on intellectual challenge that most people are too damn lazy to appreciate even if they notice it.

I love it. I love it.

I am not only, as you might reasonably assume, a jackass who likes to feel smarter than other people. I am that, but I’m not only that. I’m a devoted follower of minutiae, a small-picture person, a human microscope. Through conditioning I’ve learned to zoom out and look at the big picture as needed, but only briefly. My default zoom is 1600%. I read no faster than I speak because each word is an entire universe of meaning that deserves my full attention.

And I’m prone to burrowing down into self-indulgent nonsense instead of moving on to the second example.

2

Knowing I’d find something new, I re-watched my second favorite movie, Clue, just for this post. If my accounting is correct, this was my 8 billionth viewing of the 1985 cult classic.

Here’s what I and others have noticed in the past:

• The characters’ cars – at least the ones we see – match their game piece colors. Ms. Scarlet’s is red, and Professor Plum’s is a dark purple. When they’re running into the house, you see a green car and a white one (Mr. Green and Mrs. White, respectively) next to Wadsworth’s black car. We don’t see Mrs. Peacock’s car at all – could that be because peacock isn’t a color?
• When Wadsworth tells them all the police will be there in about 45 minutes, start a timer. Almost exactly 45 minutes later, another undercover policeman shows up. It only works if you stop the timer while Wadsworth is going through his theories of the murders  and restart it when “But Here’s What Really Happened:” comes on the screen.
• All the characters have a lot of trouble fitting through doorways, between furniture, etc. They try to go through at the same time and get bunched up. Could that be a reference to the way the game pieces move?

This time around? I chose my top three observations, but there were about 20:

• Everyone ogles Yvette except Mr. Green, who is undercover as a gay man. He volunteers this information during the “Who’s Being Blackmailed for What?” scene because it’s not actually in Wadsworth’s notes. You can see Wadsworth going through them looking confused while Mr. Green is talking. Except for ignoring Yvette, he’s not that great at his cover and acts like a cop the whole time. For example, he tells everyone tape recordings aren’t admissible evidence – something not many people would know back then. He finally “unmasks” himself by taking off his glasses right before he shoots Wadsworth.
  (Here’s a not very fun fact: Until 1995, being homosexual was grounds for being denied a security clearance; and until approximately 2015, it was considered a matter of security interest in the conduct of background investigations, allowing investigators to ask subjects if their sexuality could be used against them by a blackmailer.)
• After Mr. Body is supposedly killed and they all return to the library, they play musical chairs and Mr. Green is left standing – there was one seat per game piece, and Yvette, a non-piece, took one of them.
• Ms. Scarlet makes fun of Yvette’s French accent because she knows it’s fake.

I still have some unanswered questions about this movie. I thought I was keeping pretty good notes about who had what weapon where when, but it all fell apart. Tim Curry’s powerhouse silliness distracted me.

3

Sorry, the last example is from my own novels. Come on, you knew this was a self-promotion.

To get the manuscript for Bigger Fish ready for my editor, I read through Enemy Closer and House on Fire again. I didn’t want to miss any minutiae! Lo and behold, something popped out at me. Unfortunately, to adequately impress you, I’ll have to get into the details and drop some nasty spoilers for anyone who hasn’t read any of the Anna Bowman Thriller series:

In the prequel 2.15.2020, Anna and Tommy are undercover in Houston and get ratted out. Anna gets out alive, Tommy doesn’t. Though the trauma and near-death experience weren’t part of Jim’s plan, the part where Anna has to track down Luke to question him about that night (in Enemy Closer) is central to it, as explained in House on Fire. In Bigger Fish, when Tommy shows up not dead at all, the question is asked: Why did they (meaning Jim and Anna) think Anna and Luke were the only people who made it out of that warehouse alive that night?

Why did I, the writer, also think that?

Apparently because Philip (the person who personally killed everyone else) told Anna as much not halfway through Enemy Closer.

“Well, DUH!” You’re thinking. “You wrote it, dummy.”

Yeah, I wrote it about a decade ago. It’s tucked away in a section of text I hardly ever review because there’s no sex or car chases in it. It’s all plot. I forgot I wrote it.

When I read it this last time I realized Philip had told Anna something imminently germane (thanks, thesaurus), my jaw dropped. That one line of dialog had been sitting there for ten years just waiting for me to go back and read it and understand that this story had been alive in my head, as near sentience as a fictional story can be, all that time. I had been writing and re-writing Anna’s story for years without consciously knowing I knew parts of it.

So Anna’s birthday is May 5th because Kinsey Millhone’s birthday is May 5th, because I want to write what I want to read: books people buy physical copies of. Books people take on vacation, books people pack up and move umpteen times because giving them away would be like turning off the part of your brain that dreams crazy ass dreams from time to time, books you keep cracking open even though that stack of TBRs is right there waiting to become new favorites.

My editor said Bigger Fish is not a standalone book. She said it “REWARDS the readers who have already read Books 1 and 2.” I agree. Bigger Fish rewards people who take the time to store Anna’s story in their precious brains and actually care about the questions that plague her, too. I can’t describe how much it means to me that anyone (besides me) would give up room in their brain for Anna’s story. People like that deserve a reward. So I’ll publish it knowing more than one person will buy Bigger Fish, attempt to read it, be angrily confused, and leave me a bad review because it doesn’t make sense — and I’ll do it again next year when Book 4 is published, and again when Book 5 is published in 2026 (unless I get hit by a bus).

I might even try to make the books in my mystery novel series more standalone, but probably not.

P.S. Bigger Fish comes out on June 4, which is National Cheese Day in the United States. I bet you can guess what Anna’s favorite food is!

– AK