A New, New Car and a Windfall

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1985 Honda

Some say that bad things come in threes, but not in this case.

Thirty years ago, I finally admitted my faithful 1985 Honda Accord was nearing the end of its remarkable life. After almost 250,000 miles, it had earned a dignified retirement. My husband had been urging me to replace it, especially since I drove twenty miles each way to my teaching job. I resisted by buying a cell phone instead. If the car broke down, I’d simply call him to rescue me. Problem solved—or so I thought.

That plan lasted until the mechanic informed me the transmission needed replacing.

Reluctantly, I went car shopping. To this day, I have no idea why I walked into a Saturn dealership. I loved Hondas, yet somehow that day I drove home in a brand-new Saturn.

Within days, I knew I’d made a mistake. The Saturn was perfectly fine. It just wasn’t a Honda. I tried convincing myself I’d get used to it. After all, I kept cars forever. My little red Volkswagen Beetle lasted ten years, and I cried when I sold it. I cried again when I traded in my beloved Accord for a car named after a planet.

A few weeks later, while my husband was out of town, I headed to my favorite coffee shop. Except I never got there. Instead, I found myself pulling into the Honda dealership. There, gleaming in the afternoon sun, sat an eggplant-colored Special Edition Honda with a sunroof. I walked inside and told the salesman, “I’d like to trade my Saturn for that dark purple Honda.”

He looked out the window at my Saturn, then back at me. “Your Saturn looks brand new.”

“It is,” I said. “I just don’t like it.”

He smiled. “Let’s take the Honda for a test drive.”

“I don’t need a test drive.”

1997 Honda

He laughed and later admitted it was the easiest sale he’d ever made. We completed the paperwork, but I told him I’d return the next morning. I always sleep on major decisions. Driving home, guilt crept in. Shouldn’t I call my husband first? Could I really afford this? Was I being completely impulsive?

I decided I needed a sign from God. Without looking, I grabbed a CD—you remember those—and slid it into the player. The first song was Fred Astaire singing:

“Heaven, I’m in heaven…”

Well…that certainly seemed encouraging. Still, the guilt lingered. I walked through my front door, and within ten minutes the phone rang. My agent was on the line. He’d sold my second book—an Alfred Hitchcock trivia book—and the publisher was offering a $4,000 advance. Remember when publishers paid advances?

A few minutes later, the phone rang again. The publisher of a brand-new magazine called AustinFit had gotten my name from another publication I occasionally wrote for. They needed a staff writer and wondered if I was interested.

“Absolutely.”

Then the phone rang a third time. A science textbook company wanted to know if I’d write three chapters for a middle-school science textbook.

“Sure,” I said, figuring it might pay around $3,000 a chapter.

Then they told me the fee for all three chapters. Thirty thousand dollars! I nearly dropped the phone. With that one assignment, I had almost doubled my annual income, and it was more than enough to buy the car.

The next morning, I arrived at the Honda dealership five minutes before it opened. I drove home in my beautiful Honda Accord. I thought about calling my husband. Instead, I decided to surprise him.

Looking back, I like to think those three phone calls were God’s way of saying, Go ahead. Buy the Honda. For the next several years, every time I slipped behind the wheel of that car, I knew I’d made the right decision. Since then, I’ve owned three more Hondas. One of them drove my husband and me around the country on our 47,000-mile retirement trip.

“American Honda Motor Company, I’m available for promo videos.”

Kathleen Kaska writes the award-winning Sydney Lockhart Mystery Series, which won the 2025 PenCraft Award for Best Series, and the Kate Caraway Animal-Rights Mystery Series. Her trivia book, The Sherlock Holmes Quiz Book, is in its third printing. Kathleen recently won the Amity Literary Award for her upcoming novel, Death Without Dignity, set for release in January 2027.

Her latest Sydney Lockhart mystery is scheduled for release on September 8, 2026. Visit Me

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My Path to Fiction Began with The Master of Suspense

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My path to fiction began in the early 1990s, when trivia books were popular, and nonfiction was easier to sell than fiction. I wrote a proposal for my first book, What’s Your Agatha Christie I.Q.?, later retitled The Agatha Christie Triviography and Quiz Book. The first agent I queried accepted the project, and three weeks later, I had a publishing contract.

That success led to The Alfred Hitchcock Triviography and Quiz Book and later The Sherlock Holmes Triviography and Quiz Book. I enjoyed writing all three, but the Hitchcock book was especially memorable. I spent an entire summer watching every Alfred Hitchcock film ever made, all 53 of them.

What an education that was. Hitchcock was a master of suspense and one of cinema’s greatest directors, creating some of the most memorable films and unforgettable characters in movie history. Even his villains could be charming, and his stories kept audiences guessing until the final scene. It was impossible to study his work without learning valuable lessons about pacing, suspense, and storytelling—lessons that would later influence my own fiction.

Intertwining the nuances of suspense and surprise, Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) always kept his audience on the edge of their seats—right where he wanted them. Hitchcock/Truffaut (1983), by Francois Truffaut, details Hitchcock’s views on the difference between these two elements and how their proper use could make a thriller a triumphant work of art. Hitchcock’s technique was knowing exactly what to tell an audience and when. For the sake of surprise, he felt the audience should know very little about what was to occur. In his conversations with Truffaut, Hitchcock gave the example of a bomb exploding without any warning. There was no anticipation of the event. It just happened, and the audience then had to deal with its bewilderment. Surprise alone did not make a thriller more clever unless it was used as a twist at the end.

Hitchcock believed that suspense took place when the audience was aware a bomb was near and an explosion was imminent. The audience always saw the events unfold as they happened, but the characters in the film remained oblivious. The inability to warn the characters of their fate left the audience feeling completely powerless. However, it also drew the audience into the story, creating an intimacy between the audience and the screen characters. Nevertheless, unable to help, the audience could only watch the events unfold before their eyes. This technique was used in many of Hitchcock’s films: in Easy Virtue (192.7), the suspense centered on an offer of marriage made while a telephone operator listened intently for the woman’s reply; while in Rear Window (1954), the audience held its breath as the villain of the piece, Thorwald, entered his apartment while the heroine, Lisa, was searching his bedroom for clues to a possible murder.

Alfred Hitchcock’s masterful weaving of suspense and surprise always gave his audience bone-chilling thrills before flattening them with his typically shocking endings.

Now for an Alfred Hitchcock quiz: What if several of Hitchcock’s notorious and psychotic characters were committed to a mental hospital? Here are six character profiles from six movies. Can you identify the characters and the actor who played them?

 

  1. This character suffers from schizophrenia and amnesia triggered by trauma from discovering his mother in bed with a stranger. It is believed that he murdered them and subsequently assumed his mother’s identity. He failed to develop mature, healthy attitudes toward sex. His anger is deeply suppressed, and his denial of his mother’s sordid past is reflected in his references to her as his best friend.
  2. The character is a cold-blooded murderer. He killed a college friend he deemed dispensable. He’s an egocentric psychopath without a conscience. He suffers from delusions of grandeur and considers murder a privilege reserved for a few exceptional humans, such as himself.
  3. At age five, the character witnessed her mother’s brutal attack by one of her tricks. Trying to protect her mother, she accidentally killed the man by striking him with a fireplace poker. This traumatic experience led to a psychoneurotic condition that developed into amnesia and kleptomania.
  4. A retired San Francisco police detective, this character suffers from vertigo and recurring amnesia stemming from a fall he sustained while chasing a suspect. Soon after his accident, he became involved in two sordid affairs with a woman who posed as two different women. He often confuses fantasy with reality. His mental condition worsened when he witnessed his lover fall to her death, a nightmare he constantly relives because of his initial accident.
  5. The source of this character’s psychosis resulted from a near-fatal injury as a child, but the link between that accident and his crimes as an adult remains uncertain. He is a misogynist. He especially hates wealthy widows. He believes he has the right to murder them and steal their “undeserved” money. His anger often becomes uncontrollable.
  6. A perpetrator of sexual crimes against women, this character’s sexual perversions eventually led to the brutal murders of his victims. Needless to say, he feels sexually inadequate. He is a very dangerous man.

Kathleen Kaska is the author of the Sydney Lockhart Mysteries, winner of the 2025 PenCraft Award for Best Mystery Series, the Kate Caraway Animal-Rights Mysteries, and the Mystery Trivia Series.

Kathleen’s hardboiled detective novel, Death Without Dignity, won the Amity Literary Award and is scheduled for publication in spring 2027. Across genres, her work is known for character-driven suspense, socially conscious themes, and a generous touch of humor. She lives in the Pacific Northwest and continues to write both series and standalone crime fiction.

Kathleen Kaska

Her latest Sydney Lockhart mystery, Murder at the Faust, will be out in print on September 8. The eBook now available.

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“Just One More Thing”

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When you hear the phrase “just one more thing,” what comes to mind? If you were around in the 1970s, you probably remember Columbo, starring Peter Falk as Lieutenant Columbo of the Los Angeles Police Department. The series won 22 awards and received 68 nominations, with Falk earning four Primetime Emmy Awards. It aired on NBC from 1971 to 1978 and has since been rebroadcast on numerous networks.

What I liked most about the show was its structure: viewers knew the killer from the start and then watched Columbo patiently unravel the crime. Each episode featured a guest star as the murderer—Martin Landau, Janet Leigh, Ruth Gordon, Vincent Price, Roddy McDowall, Leonard Nimoy, even Johnny Cash, to name a few.

I recently rediscovered the series after making a practical—if slightly risky—decision: changing hairdressers after fifteen years. When I learned my husband’s barber had begun cutting women’s hair for less than half what I’d been paying, I decided to give her a try. I only needed a trim—no shampoo, no styling. The first visit took less than ten minutes, and I was pleased with the result.

On my most recent visit, I didn’t have an appointment. Four people were ahead of me, and I thought about leaving—until I noticed the television was tuned to Columbo. I stayed. The episode featured Ricardo Montalban as a matador in “A Matter of Honor.”

When Columbo arrives on a scene—hair rumpled, trench coat wrinkled, cigar in hand—he’s easy to underestimate. His suspects dismiss him as absentminded, even inept. But his polite, seemingly scattered questions are deliberate. Columbo is a meticulous strategist, noting every clue and quietly assembling the truth. He wears his suspects down with persistence, circling back again and again until—almost as an afterthought—he says, “Just one more thing.”

Alfred Hitchcock also used this technique in his movies Rope, Dial M for Murder, A Shadow of a Doubt, and Frenzy. His forte was suspense rather than surprise. The audience knows what happened as they watch the story unfold. Suspense builds tension, keeping the audience on the edge of their seats as they participate in solving the crime.

Back to my barber. I waited nearly an hour that day and didn’t mind at all. I was hooked as soon as Columbo began his investigation. I knew he’d solve the mystery, and I couldn’t wait to find out how he did it. Next time I need a trim, I may skip the appointment altogether. I’ll take a seat, request Columbo on TV, and bring my writing journal. I’ll study the master detective at work and take notes for the next mystery.

Have you ever written a reverse whodunnit?

Kathleen Kaska

A Voice That Resonates

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A Voice That Resonates

If asked to name writers with a distinct voice, I could rattle off a list: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Karen Blixen, Raymond Chandler, Jane Austen, Harper Lee, Stephen King, John Irving, Anne Rice. Defining “voice,” however, is far more elusive.

When I first started writing fiction, I went to a writers’ conference where the presenter described voice as the emotional connection between the writer and the reader. That idea stayed with me—and clarified something I had experienced but hadn’t named.

Early on, I focused on plot because I didn’t know how to build one. Voice barely registered until I picked up a novel by an unfamiliar author. It was his fourth book—and a bestseller. The characters carried me through more than four hundred pages. I immediately bought his earlier novels and struggled through them, finishing out of curiosity. The difference was unmistakable. In the fourth book, I could hear the characters’ voices. In the first three, I couldn’t. He hadn’t found it yet—or hadn’t learned how to sustain it. Since then, I’ve read everything he’s written. He’s now a favorite.

Voice isn’t plot, character, or setting—though it brings all three to life. It’s the writer’s way of seeing and presenting the world on the page.

Consider The Great Gatsby. From its opening lines, Nick Carraway speaks with an intimate, reflective ease, as if confiding across a café table. That conversational authority draws the reader in and keeps them engaged.

In To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout Finch views injustice through a child’s honest, questioning perspective. Her voice not only narrates the story— it amplifies its moral impact.

And in the novel  Rebecca the narrator—the second Mrs. de Winter—voice carries a quiet melancholy that settles over the entire novel, shaping how we experience Manderley before we fully see it.

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter, for the way was barred to me. There was a padlock and a chain on the gate. I called in my dream to the lodge-keeper and had no answering and peering closer to the rusted spokes of the gate I saw that the lodge was uninhabited.

A strong plot, character, and setting are essential. But voice is what makes a story personal—what transforms pages into an experience. It’s the difference between a book we finish and one we remember. It’s the icing on the cake.

What are your favorite books with strong voices that speak to you?

https://kathleenkaska.com/

Kathleen Kaska

The Anthropomorphizing of an Octopus

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The Anthropomorphizing of an Octopus

I just finished reading Shelby Van Pelt’s delightful novel, Remarkably Bright Creatures. Van Pelt tells the story of an octopus named Marsellus who lived in an aquarium and befriended the elderly nighttime cleaning lady. Several chapters are written from Marcellus’ point of view. It is an excellent example of anthropomorphizing, the attribution of human form, personality, or emotions to something nonhuman.

This book brought back a lot of memories. My degree is in physical anthropology. I’ve only met two other people who also hold this degree. True, it’s not easy to find a job in this field, but I loved the coursework. When people hear the word anthropology, they think of the study of the development of human societies, cultures, languages, and social organization. They think of Margaret Mead. That is cultural anthropology. Physical anthropology is the scientific study of human biology, evolution, genetics, and variation, both past and present. It was a perfect field for me because I love these scientific fields. I could read a biology text as if it were a compelling novel.

One of my college courses was primate behavior. I was assigned to work with a professor who was studying vervet monkeys to compare their behavior with that of humans. My lab work involved observing and documenting monkey behavior, and I was instructed not to anthropomorphize, just to record their activity. Each monkey was assigned a number. My documentation went like this:

  • Number 1 ran up to number 6 and slapped it, then ran away. It was hard not to anthropomorphize and accuse number 6 of being a bully.
  • Number 18 stole number 4’s banana. Number 4 bit number 18 on the ear. I couldn’t report that number 4 retaliated by biting number 18’s ear.
  • Number 7 is sitting in the corner, nipping at any monkey who comes by. It was hard not to believe that number 7 was having a bad day or feeling sad for some reason.
  • Numbers 14 and 10 were inseparable. I couldn’t report that 14 and 10 were friends.

Needless to say, the class was the highlight of my day. Years later, I taught life science to middle school students. Watching those active preteens, I was often reminded of the vervet monkey I studied. Their behavior was not that different. My teaching curriculum covered the classification and taxonomy of living things, as well as evolution, so my degree proved useful. One of my lessons focused on the octopus, the most intelligent invertebrate. Other members of the invertebrate group include insects, spiders, clams, oysters, corals, and earthworms. Intelligence is not typically associated with these animals. It involves learning, problem-solving, and a higher level of understanding—traits usually attributed to vertebrates, animals with backbones. However, many studies have shown that octopuses can solve problems, remember, and respond to different situations; in other words, they demonstrate a higher level of thinking. I believe the octopus is a bridge species, and if evolution continues, it might eventually develop a backbone and join the class shared by other backboned animals.

Marcellus, in Van Pelt’s book, figured out how to escape his tank, roam the aquarium at night, and dine on his fellow captives: sea cucumbers, mussels, clams, and more. He could open locked cages, read, and respond to people’s emotions.

How often do we anthropomorphize? For example, saying your dog’s feelings were hurt when you stopped throwing him the ball, or that your cat shredded your drapes because you bought her the wrong cat food. The humanizing of animals appears in many children’s books and adult novels. Think of all the cozy mystery series featuring animals as the protagonists: Spencer Quinn’s Chet (a dog) and Bernie (his human) make up the Little Detective Agency series, all of which I’ve read. The stories are told entirely from Chet’s point of view. There’s also The Cat Who series by Lillian Jackson Braun, Rita Mae Brown’s Mrs. Murphy series featuring a cat and a Corgi, and The No. 2 Feline Detective Agency by Mandy Morton. I remember a Martha Grimes mystery, The Grave Maurice, where a horse’s point of view adds a touching depth to the story that a human character couldn’t express.

What about writing a series with an octopus as the detective? I could call it the Tentacle Tales series. I’ll add it to my very long list of projects to write, but if you beat me to it, that’s okay. I know I’ll read it.

Do you ever anthropomorphize in your writing?

Check out my Sydney Lockhart mysteries and my Kate Caraway Animal-Rights mysteries: Kathleen Kaska’s Books

Kathleen Kaska

Treasure Hunt: A True-Life Indiana Jones Saga

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Treasure Hunt: 

A True-Life Indiana Jones Saga

When you hear the phrase treasure hunt, you might imagine a chest of gold or a legendary artifact. But what if the treasure was a bird—and the hunter an ornithologist?

In the mid-1990s, I joined a field trip to Aransas National Wildlife Refuge on the Texas coast to see the endangered whooping crane. That experience changed my life. I became captivated by the crane’s story—and by the man who saved it from extinction. That fascination grew into a seven-year research journey and ultimately my book, The Man Who Saved the Whooping Crane: The Robert Porter Allen Story.

In the spring of 1941, the whooping crane population had dropped to just fifteen birds. Written off as doomed, the species survived because one man refused to accept extinction as inevitable. Robert Porter Allen, an ornithologist with the National Audubon Society, launched a conservation campaign unlike anything America had seen before.

Long before television or the internet, Allen ignited a nationwide media blitz. Posters flooded public schools. Children wrote letters to lawmakers. Radio stations tracked the cranes’ migration from their winter home near Austwell, Texas, to a mysterious nesting site somewhere in Canada. Life magazine published a rare photo of a whooping crane family, and even an oil company altered its operations to avoid disturbing the birds.

By 1947, fewer than thirty cranes remained. Their nesting grounds—hidden somewhere in northern Saskatchewan, possibly near the Arctic Circle—had never been found. Without protecting that site, the species would vanish. After two failed searches, Audubon turned to its most tenacious ornithologist: Robert Porter Allen, newly returned from World War II.

What followed was a real-life treasure hunt—one that helped save a species and changed the course of conservation history, ultimately paving the way for the Endangered Species Act.

The story of Robert Porter Allen is best described as Indiana Jones meets John James Audubon—and it remains one of the most inspiring conservation adventures ever told.

I wrote the book to pay homage to a man who was all but forgotten. My research led me on my own journey from Texas to Florida to Wisconsin and beyond in an adventure I like to call “On the Trail of a Vanishing Ornithologist.”

Excerpt:

It was April 17, 1948, in the early hours of a muggy Texas morning on the Gulf Coast. The sun at last burned away the thick fog that had settled over Blackjack Peninsula. The world’s last flock of wild whooping cranes had spent the winter feeding on blue crab and killifish in the vast salt flats they called home. During the night, all three members of the Slough Family had moved to higher ground about two miles away from their usual haunt to feed. The cool, crisp winter was giving way to a warm, balmy spring. The days were growing longer, and territorial boundaries were no longer defended. Restlessness had spread throughout the flock. 

            As Robert Porter Allen drove along East Shore Road near Carlos Field in his government-issued beat-to-hell pickup, he spotted the four cranes now spiraling a thousand feet above the marsh. He pulled his truck over to the roadside and watched, hoping to witness, for the first time, a migration takeoff. One adult crane pulled away from the family and flew northward, whooping as it rose on an air current. When the others lagged behind, the crane returned, the family regrouped, circled a few times, and landed in the cordgrass in the shallows of San Antonio Bay. It was Allen’s second year at the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge. He had learned to read the nuances of his subjects almost as well as they read the changing of the seasons.

            In the days preceding, twenty-four cranes departed for their summer home somewhere in Western Canada, possibly as far north as the Arctic Circle. This annual event, which had occurred for at least 10,000 years, might be one of the last unless Allen could accomplish what no one else had.         

            The next morning, when Allen parked his truck near Mullet Bay, the Slough Family was gone, having departed sometime during the night. That afternoon, he threw his gear into the back of his station wagon and followed.

The Man Who Saved the Whooping Crane was published by the University Press of Florida in 2012. It’s still available in bookstores upon request, Amazon,  Barnes & Noble, and University Press of Florida. It’s also from my website: Kathleen Kaska

Contact me at kathleenkaska@hotmail.com for information on my presentation of The Man Who Saved the Whooping Crane: The Robert Porter Allen Story

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