A reader once commented that Jeri Howard, the private investigator in my long-running series, drinks a lot of coffee. Indeed she does. More than I do. Her favorite drink, and mine, is a latte. And none of that pumpkin spice stuff for either of us.

From a writer’s standpoint, there are perfectly good reasons for Jeri’s coffee habit. Attribution for one. And adding flavor to the scene for another.

Let’s look at attribution. When one character is having a conversation with another character, you can get lost in a forest of “said.” He said this, she said that. As a reader, I like it when I can tell which character is talking, and I’ve read far too many books where I lose track of who is saying what. Having Jeri talk with a witness over a cup of java helps.

Here’s an example from The Things We Keep. Jeri leads into the conversation:

“What about you? How did you deal with it?”

He took another sip of his cappuccino and set the cup in the saucer. “Funny you should ask…”

As for adding flavor to the narrative, in the early stages of a book, I often write scenes with minimal details and lots of dialog. Then I’ll go back and add details to flesh out the scene and reveal things about the characters.

Another example, this one from Water Signs, where Jeri talks with a security guard who works on a site where there’s been a death.

Dupre got out, wearing his Manville Security uniform. He walked toward me, gesturing toward the door to the Peerless retail outlet. “Can I get a coffee first?”

I saluted him with my own cup. “Far be it from me to get between a man and his caffeine.”

Dupre laughed and went inside, coming out a moment later with the largest available cup. He took a sip and sighed. “Oh, yeah, I needed that.”

Coffee also gives Jeri camouflage in Cold Trail. Here, she’s trailed a potential suspect to a Starbucks, where he meets up with a defense attorney who hasn’t been returning Jeri’s phone calls.

The two men went inside the Starbucks. I followed. They queued up to order drinks, plain coffee for Scott, a cappuccino for Rhine, who paid for the drinks. When they got their coffees, I took my turn and ordered an iced latte. They found a table near the back. I got my latte and sat down at a nearby table, making sure Scott’s back was to me. . . . I got out my cell phone, pretending to take a call. I snapped a couple of photos of the two men, hoping the noise of the coffee shop would mask the sound of the shutter.

When it comes to food, well, lots of opportunities to flesh out characters. My sleuthing Zephyrette Jill McLeod rides the rails on the old California Zephyr, where her favorite dining car breakfast is French toast with crisp bacon, and coffee, of course. In the first book in the series, Death Rides the Zephyr, Jill has already had breakfast when she encounters two passengers heading into the dining car—Mrs. Tidsdale and Emily, the little girl she’s chaperoning on the trip to Denver.

Mrs. Tidsdale looked as though she wasn’t quite awake. . . . “God, I need coffee, and plenty of it,” she said, in response to Jill’s greeting.

We have really good French toast,” Jill told Emily. “You should try it.”

Mrs. Tidsdale blanched. “Can I get a Bloody Mary instead?”

“You’d have to go to the lounge for that.”

“Don’t worry, I will. As soon as we get some breakfast. Come to think of it, I could make the acquaintance of some ham and eggs.” Mrs. Tidsdale looked down at Emily. “Does that sound good, sweetie?”

Emily looked dubious. “I like French toast. With bacon.”

“Then French toast and bacon for you, ham and eggs for me,” Mrs. Tidsdale said.

Of course, there could be a downside to consuming all that coffee. One of my books features someone whose cup of java has been spiked with a deadly poison. No, I won’t tell you which book.

Good food and good coffee, great ways for this writer to flavor my fiction.

Jeri Howard is aging a lot slower than I am. She was in her early thirties when I wrote and published Kindred Crimes, the first book in my long-running series, in 1990. Last year, I published the fourteenth book, The Things We Keep. By now Jeri is in her late thirties.

As for me, well, we won’t talk about how old I am, but it’s been a while since I graduated from college. I admit to the aches and pains of what I prefer to call upper middle age.

Jeri is a private investigator in Oakland, California. Way back when, she used paper maps to find her way from place to place and worked on a dual disk drive computer with floppy disks. Remember those? I do! Jeri was always looking for a pay phone when she needed to make calls.

How things have changed. These days, she relies on her smart phone to make calls and get her where she needs to go. She still gumshoes around and talks to people in person, so she can read facial expressions and body language. The internet has been a great help in her detective work. Using the technology available to her, she researches online. In The Things We Keep, she uses a missing persons database as well as online copies of old newspaper articles to get information about the people who inhabit the book, past and present. And that cell phone comes in handy when she needs to take photos or record an interview with a witness.

I recall Sue Grafton, whose book A is for Alibi was published in 1982. Through 25 books, Grafton made the decision to leave her character Kinsey Milhone fixed in time, in the 1980s. She didn’t have to deal with the world progressing and tech marvels like smart phones and the internet.

I chose to go another way. That means I ignore the fact that the Jeri books are getting a bit long in the tooth. It seems that readers don’t mind. Jeri is as popular as she ever was, discovering new readers via ebooks. I’m happy to report that they want more. Thank goodness for that! Note to readers—the plot for the next Jeri Howard case is currently bubbling in my head, waiting to get out.

My series featuring protagonist Jill McLeod is a different matter. Jill is a young woman in her twenties who works as a Zephyrette, or train hostess, on the streamliner train known as the California Zephyr. I’m talking about the original that ran from 1949 through early 1970, not the Amtrak version of the train. These are historical mysteries, set in a particular time. The first in the series, Death Rides the Zephyr, takes place in December 1952 and by the time Death Above the Line rolls down the tracks, it’s October 1953. So, less than a year has passed in Jill’s life.

There are advantages to a series that’s fixed in time. I don’t have to worry that a reader will notice that the books have aged. They’re supposed to be historical. I concern myself with researching what was going on in a particular month in 1953, so I can drop in details that give the flavor of life in the fifties. That includes the books Jill is reading, the music she listens to, and the movies she sees.

My third series takes place in the present day and it features Kay Dexter. She’s in her fifties and has her own business, working as a geriatric care manager, one who assists families with care of older adults, usually aging parents. Kay puts in her first appearance in The Sacrificial Daughter. I figure Kay is not aging as fast as I am either. Like the Jeri books, Kay operates in the contemporary world, so she’s using the technology that implies.

As always, it will be a challenge to keep writing contemporary stories without letting the ages of characters, and events, get in the way.

I was recently in New Mexico, where I spent several days in Lincoln and nearby Fort Stanton, in the mountains in the southeastern part of the state.

I call it location research. I look at places, landscapes, and buildings, poking around in old buildings and imagining what they looked like 150 years ago. Did this valley have that many trees way back when? Was that building there during the time of my novel? If not, what was in that spot, and what did it look like? I need to figure out what a character might see when exiting a store or residence.

That’s why I also went to Santa Fe, where I spent productive hours in the Fray Angelico Chavez Library at the New Mexico State Historical Museum. My time in the document and photo archives at the history library gave me access to maps and old photos of the places for my work in progress, a historical novel taking place in New Mexico in the late 1870s and early 1880s. It involves the Lincoln County War and yes, Billy the Kid puts in an appearance, along with a number of other historical figures.

While in Lincoln, I stayed at the Wortley Hotel, now a bed and breakfast. The original hotel was built in 1872 and in operation during the troubles in Lincoln County. I spent a lot of time sitting on the front porch of the hotel, rocking, watching the passing parade of people visiting Lincoln. I mean, the whole town is a New Mexico state historical monument. I also watched the birds, watched the flowers, watched the light change. When I sat on the back porch of the hotel, I heard water rushing by in the nearby Rio Bonito, in addition to the clucking chickens from the proprietors’ coop down the hill.

I walked the historic grounds of Fort Stanton, a well-preserved frontier fort, though it has been amended, remodeled and tinkered with since it was founded in the 1850s. Since my protagonist is the daughter of an Army officer stationed at the fort, I wanted to see what the officers’ quarters looked like, keeping in mind that they were rebuilt in the 1890s, with a second story and kitchens added. However, during the era I’m writing about, the kitchens were in separate buildings out back. That’s important information to have when my protagonist is cooking dinner. Fortunately, when I toured the unit that’s open to the public, I found an architectural drawing showing how the old quarters looked.

Talk about history. This particular unit had been occupied in the 1880s by Lieutenant and Mrs. John J. Pershing. Recognize that name? They called him “Black Jack” Pershing, perhaps because he commanded African American troops known as Buffalo Soldiers. He’s the one who led an expedition to Mexico in 1916, going after Pancho Villa, and when the United States entered World War I, he was named commander of the American Expeditionary Forces.

While at Fort Stanton, I learned that the landscape around me looked very different way back when. Now the pinon and junipers dot the rolling hills around the fort, but back then it would have been grassland. The photos I got from the history library underscore that.

I also learned about the murder in the dining room at the Wortley Hotel, back in the bad old 1870s. What? I’d never heard that one. It seems the victim was a Buffalo Soldier stationed at the fort, which was home to several units of the Ninth Cavalry. The soldiers would often come to town and have a meal at the Wortley. At that time, the hotel dining room had a big table and people sat down where there was a vacant seat. In this case, a white patron took offense at a black soldier, pulled a gun and killed him.

After Fort Stanton was decommissioned in the 1890s, it became a hospital for people with tuberculosis. That era lasted for decades. Then, in World War II, the fort housed German prisoners of war. The information gained about this is outside the focus of research for my current WIP, but full of potential for historical mysteries. My little gray cells are already thinking about plots and characters, even as I sit at my computer.

And I’m recalling how good it felt to be sitting on that hotel porch in Lincoln, NM, rocking, watching the world, and the birds.

Mom would have been 100 years old this summer. The year she was born, Calvin Coolidge was president, having taken that office on the death of Warren G. Harding. Seventeen presidents later, Mom was still hanging in there. We hoped she would make it to that centenary celebration. We were planning a hell of a party! But she didn’t. Her mind and wit were still sharp—her body was wearing out.

Though Mom didn’t get a 100^th birthday party, Aunt Flo did. Mom was the baby of the family and Aunt Flo was seven years older. They were the only two siblings remaining of six brothers and sisters. That year, plans were in the works for a big celebration down in Texas. Mom wanted to go but she hesitated. She was on oxygen then, requiring an oxygen concentrator and all the stuff that goes with it. The thought of traveling, let alone flying, was daunting. She told Aunt Flo she wouldn’t be there.

I finally called my brother and said, I don’t want Mom to regret not seeing her sister one more time. He agreed. We bought the tickets and told Mom she was going. He flew with her, and I met them at the airport. Money spent and lots of logistics to deal with. But the look on Aunt Flo’s face when her baby sister walked into the room was worth all the effort. I have pictures!

When we celebrated Mom’s 90^th birthday, we had several tables displaying photos of Mom at various stages of her life. I recall sitting on the floor in the basement, going through photo albums. I found pictures that I could tell were taken in the 1930s, based on the clothing and hairstyles the people in the photos were wearing, as well as the cars in the background.  hairstyles and autos. But I didn’t recognize any of those people and no one had written anything on the back to identify them. People, write stuff on the back of your pictures!

I found plenty of photos of Mom, though. It was a treat to see her as a little girl and a young bride. Since Mom passed, we did it again, going through albums, slides and framed photos all over the house. One find was a tintype from 1892. I’d never seen it before. According to the note from Aunt Flo written on the back, the woman in the photo was my great-grandmother and the two children with her were my grandmother, at age six, and her younger brother, who would have been three years old. My grandmother’s sister, a baby at the time, is not pictured. It’s only the second photo I’ve seen of my great-grandmother, who died that same year at the age of 30.

During our recent labors to clear out Mom’s house, we discovered a video of Mom and Dad’s 50^th anniversary and we watched it before taking it to be digitized. What a treat it was to see aunts, uncles, cousins and family friends who were still alive then—and now no longer with us.

Those of us who write fiction create families in our books and stories. Jeri Howard isn’t just a lone private eye who has an office and a home in Oakland. She has a father, a mother, and a brother. Each in turn has been featured in books—her father in Till The Old Men Die, her mother in Don’t Turn Your Back on the Ocean, which also features appearances from cousins on the maternal side of things. And Jeri searches for her missing brother in Cold Trail. Jeri’s grandmother is a major character in Bit Player, which touches on her experiences working as an actress in Hollywood in 1941, just before the start of World War II. Aunts and cousins show up in that one, as well.

I also write a historical mystery series set in the early 1950s, featuring Zephyrette Jill McLeod, who lives at home in Alameda, California with her father, mother, and siblings. In my Kay Dexter series, featuring a geriatric care manager, Kay Dexter lives just down the street from her elderly mother.

So family pictures inhabit our fiction as well as our real lives. With words we photograph these people and enable our readers to see them. It makes our stories so much better.

I don’t consider myself a pack rat. Others may differ. Well, maybe I will admit to pack rat tendencies. But not the whole rat. I don’t have empty plastic yogurt tubs and months’ old stacks of newspaper cluttering up my home. I really do try to recycle and reuse, and throw out, if need be.

I am, however, a paper magnet. It’s a tendency acquired early in my writing career. I spot something in the newspaper or a magazine, clip it out and set it aside, thinking I might use that someday, in a story or a novel.

And I have. Here’s where recycling comes in. Back in 2005, I clipped a short article from the San Francisco Chronicle. The story concerned a stash of old wallets found in the rafters of a barracks at Camp Roberts, in central California. It’s a California National Guard base now, but during World War II it was an Army training base. The contents of the wallets dated back to that era, the 1940s. The theory was that the wallets had been stolen, all valuables removed, and the wallets then disposed of in the rafters. I was so intrigued by the story I kept it pinned to my bulletin board. And indeed, I did use the story in a Jeri Howard novel—Bit Player.

I started writing in the ancient times before computers and the internet, so I would stash all these clippings and assorted notes in file folders. Some of those folders date back decades and are still hanging around in file boxes, taking up space in my office. I really would like to purge that paper. But I am reluctant to get rid of anything that I might use someday. I know, I know, the mantra of a pack rat.

These days, with the internet, I can save the article onto my computer, or at least the URL. Saves paper and space, that’s for sure. I can even use my iPhone to scan documents. I have file folders of clippings and notes awaiting such action. Then maybe I can throw out all that paper and free up some space in my office.

There’s another kind of throwing out. I’ve excised scenes from novels and told myself the finished work is better for it. At times, though, I reuse a scene. In the Jeri Howard novel Nobody’s Child, Jeri gets shoved off a BART platform in San Francisco. That scene originally appeared in an early version of Till the Old Men Die. I really like the excitement of the scene, with Jeri’s narrow escape from an onrushing BART train. Too good not to reuse.

I also recycle and reuse characters. An earlier unpublished novel had a character named Lowell Rhine. He was a shifty character. I liked the name, so I recycled it in Cold Trail, using the moniker for a somewhat shady lawyer. As for that unpublished novel, and another lurking in my files, I have some recycling and reusing in mind.

Frequently characters who appear in my books wind up in other books. History professor Lindsay Page first appeared in the Jeri Howard novel Witness to Evil. Later she had her own book, my standalone novel What You Wish For. After attending my 50^th high school reunion, I wrote a novella, But Not Forgotten, about a semi-retired reporter named Maggie Constable, who attends her reunion, determined to solve a long-ago mystery. I like Maggie a lot, so she appeared in my most recent Jeri Howard book, The Things We Keep. Maggie is going to have a book of her own, as soon as I can get around to it.

And yes, I did write a short story about a pack rat. Entitled Pack Rat. I’m not as bad as the guy in the story. Really.