Friends and readers ask me where I find my characters, especially the women. I can’t buy them from Walmart, although I did purchase a nifty shower cap there the other day. Even Amazon doesn’t have such a product. I suspect I could buy a new husband on Amazon, should mine start acting up. But characters? Unfortunately, no. So, I tend to draw traits from women around me.
A lot of people suspect the protagonist in the Alvarez Family Murder Mysteries, Lee Alvarez, is based on me. Nope. Many of Lee’s character facets are actually lifted from my mother. Even her name. While Mom wasn’t christened Lee, she’d taken the name at an early age and when I was born, gave it to me as a middle name. Heather Lee Haven. I dropped the Lee, myself, because I feel that spoken in toto, I sound a bit like a rest home. “You, too, can enjoy your golden days at the Heather Lee Haven.”
But back to my characters. I wanted the protagonist, Lee Alvarez, to be bright, beautiful, quick-witted, spirited, savvy, and a huge lover of life. My mom was all those things. Insecurity was the other side of the coin for her. I never quite knew why my mother had these feelings of insecurity; sometimes people just do. Nonetheless, I handed this dichotomy off to my protagonist. It has a certain charm about it i.e., someone who has everything going for them but is constantly on the lookout for Life’s banana peel.
With Lee, however, I give several reasons for her insecurity. One, since being a small child, she wanted nothing more than to be a professional ballerina but could not make the cut. Mediocre is mediocre. The second reason is having the “perfect” mother. Step forward Lila Hamilton Alvarez, mother and CEO of the family-owned detective agency, Discretionary Inquiries.
Lila is a cool, aristocratic blonde who wears confidence like a crown on a head that’s never had a bad hair day. As a backstory, this Palo Alto blueblood married a Mexican immigrant, Roberto Alvarez, a scholarship student she met at Stanford U. This marriage surprised no one as he was her equal in every way and theirs was the love affair of the century. A running thread in the series is Lila’s inability to recover from his recent and unexpected death. Their daughter, Lee, takes after her father, even to her dark hair and twilight-blue eyes. But most of the things Lila found irresistible in Roberto, she finds annoying in Lee. They have an edgy relationship, as neither understands the other. But genuine affection is there, and they keep on trying. That’s the key to everything, as we know. Keep moving forward, keep trying.
Don’t let this get around the neighborhood, but I based Lila’s character on two people, my mother-in-law and my then boss. Both were highly intelligent women who liked to put you in your place even before you entered the room. I have a certain amount of sympathy for these real-life women – they were not always well liked – but they serve the strained relationship between the mother/daughter Alvarez women well.
Moving on to the Persephone Cole Vintage Mysteries. Percy Cole, the protagonist, is also a PI. Unlike Lee, who sits at a desk wearing designer clothes and sipping a latte, Percy’s a where-the-rubber-meets-the-road sleuth. She’s also a unique kind of woman, one I’d not tackled before. I had been challenged by my writing instructor to come up with a non-conforming female protagonist. Thus, Persephone Cole was born, and I love her. She’s self-assured and sharp, and by no means the average beauty or thinker of the time. Or of any time.
At five foot eleven in her stocking feet and, for lack of a better word, zaftig, Percy is as physically big, if not bigger, than the average man of the time. She handles herself like a champ. She even takes boxing lessons at the local Y should the occasion arise when she needs to slug a villain. My redheaded, green-eyed gumshoe functions in the 1940s man’s world better than many a man and it all comes naturally to her. As for most other 40s women, they may be helping the war effort by temporarily taking a man’s job on the home front, but they know their place is in the kitchen when the war is over. In Percy’s mind, her place is wherever she wants it to be. What softens this steamroller of a woman is a wicked sense of humor, and being the single mother of an eight-year-old boy, Oliver, a child who gives her life meaning.
Her mother, Lamentation Cole, understands her daughter even better than Percy does herself. Indeed, Mother, as she’s called, has a deep understanding of all three of her children and their father. She has a gift for always honing in on the truth and you will never fool her. Mother is reminiscent of a walking dandelion, being five foot eight, weighing maybe a hundred and ten pounds, topped off by long, wild white hair. She may have many of the characteristics of ZaSu Pitts, a well-known comedic actress of the time, but no one who knows her, especially Percy, underestimates Mother’s astuteness or that she is the glue that holds the family together.
The Alvarez Family Murder Mystery series is based in today’s Palo Alto, California, and the Persephone Cole Vintage Mysteries take place in 1940’s Manhattan. They are for the most part humorous. Although you’d never know it by this post. But in order to be funny, truly funny, you often have to base your humor on sadness or loss, confusion or misunderstanding, and sometimes downright anger. But in both these series, there is familial love which rushes in when all else fails.
My job as a fiction writer is to shine a light on the truth. And my truth is that family is what keeps us going. I believe there are two ways to have a family. Some you are born into. Others you create through love, respect, and honor.
As a side note, on September 1st Bewitched, Bothered, and Beheaded was awarded the Readers’ Favorite Bronze for Best Fiction Mystery Sleuth, 2024. That would be Lee. And she couldn’t have done it without her mother, Lila’s, help!
Ladies of Mystery 
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