Photo Content from Logan Terret
retired and devotes himself to desert wanderings, mystery novels, machine learning, dog walking, and other pursuits. He is an inventor and licensed attorney. He lives in Phoenix, Arizona.
Greatest thing you learned at school.
Tough question. Either Latin or the General Linear Model. Latin helped me understand other archaic Indo-European languages. The General Linear Model allowed me to forecast all sorts of things.
If you could have written one book in history, what book would that be?
Don Quixote. Probably the first modern European novel. Part I gets a little repetitive. You know, Don Quixote wants to do something stupid, Sancho Panza tries to talk him out of it, Don Quixote does it anyway, and they both get the crap beaten out of them. But hey, if you have a formula, why not stick with it? And Cervantes acknowledged he went a bit overboard when, in Part II, a character says "Still, there are those who have read the history who say they would have been glad if the author had left out some of the countless cudgellings that were inflicted on Senor Don Quixote in various encounters."
What chapter was the most memorable to write and why?
Chapter 27, From China, with Love. The soldadera’s story was hard to write because it required writing from the viewpoint of a Mexican soldadera in 1916. Anyone who pretends to know how anybody thought in 1916 is crazy.
The US-Mexico border was a complete zoo from 1848 until post WWI, with hostile Indians, freebooters, robbers, smugglers, rogues and vagabonds, all both Anglo and Mexican, and the U.S. Cavalry trying to keep a lid on things. The crisis came with the Mexican Revolution, which was a very big deal for Mexico and the United States. It occupied much of President Wilson’s time, many Americans were killed, and Wilson eventually sent General John Pershing into Mexico to stop Pancho Villa’s freebooting across the border. (Trivia: the last horse cavalry charge of the U.S. Army occurred May 5, 1916 when the 11th Cavalry charged Villistas at Ojo Azules, Chihuahua.)
My interest springs mainly from stories my father told me (he was in the 11th Cavalry when they still used horses and knew people who had chased Pancho Villa.) Also a long survey of Taft and Wilson’s response to the Mexican Revolution of 1910-20, which I did for a noted diplomatic historian when I was at the University of Michigan. Novelists Martin Luiz Guzmán and Nellie Campobello, both contemporaries of the Mexican Revolution, helped. My knowledge of old houses and firearms, and how people lived at the turn of the last century, helped. The fact that my mother was a lieutenant in the Women’s Army Corp in WW II gave me some insight into how hard-assed women think, too.
Can you tell us when you started AGATES ARE FOREVER, how that came about?
It started with an email of the opening scene, which was intended as a joke. I’d been reading some very bad detective novels set in Chicago and written by an Englishman who had obviously never been there. You know, like “Whilst I was stuffing the cadaver into the boot of my car.”
What was the most surprising thing you learned in creating your characters?
If your inspiration is real people you have known, it’s easy to avoid stereotypes because real people are not stereotypes. Stereotypes are generalizations based on group averages, and as with all averages, nobody is really average, at least on any continuous attribute that can be measured with high precision.
What were your inspirations for the character development?
People I have known. Being older, I’ve known tons of people, so this makes it easy. A female Chinese chemical engineer? No problem, I knew one. A crusty Black army retiree? Knew one. An East Indian female computer scientist? I’ve known a few dozen. A gentleman sheriff? I knew one. And so on.
YOUR FAVORITE QUOTES/SCENES FROM AGATES ARE FOREVER
Most guys go their whole lives without finding a corpse. I need to stop finding them.
From her emerald eyes to her marathoner thighs, with stratovolcano breasts in between, she’s hotter than a Soviet drill bit at the bottom of the Kola Superdeep Borehole. She sears her eyes into me—her left elbow is on the table and her chin rests on her knuckles as she scans me like a pyrometer drone checking out hot spots on Stromboli.
“Jägermeister, which is like a handful of black jelly beans with an Everclear chaser.”
“Is he dead?” she asks calmly.
“Yeah. Paco Madero has gone to the big gem show in the sky.”
So now the cops have two murders on their hands with nothing to go on but some low-resolution video showing a short, dumpy guy who looks like a hobo. The action plan? Run around town stopping every short, dumpy guy who looks like a hobo.
In Quartzrock, that’s half the male population.
She’s hotter than a uraninite vein at the Oklo natural fission reactor in the Statherian Period.
“You bastard!” she shrieks, then starts hitting me. “What if that horrible hobo had been here? He might have killed me!”
She grabs a hiking stick from the back seat and chases me down the gulch, madly flailing away and screaming she’ll rip my heart out with a gaff hook and skin me alive with a potato peeler. Presumably not in that order, but she’s agitated.
Now clearly, when a woman smacks you in the face, beats you with a stick, and threatens you with grave mutilations, it usually means she’s lookin’ for it. Happens every day, all over the world. So I have a feeling this will be a good night.
Well, that feeling didn’t last long….
She’s hotter than the Liuhuanggou mine fire.
She’s hotter than a pyroclastic flow sizzling down the flanks of Mount Pelée.
Around 01:00 I wake up to the seductive heat of Theo’s soft hands stroking my bare shoulders. She leans close, her warm breath on my forehead, her long, scented hair caressing my chest with a velvet touch. In the dim light filtering through the drapes, her emerald eyes have turned dark and deep, like the green water turns abyssal black when night falls on the lagoon at Midway.
“You were snoring,” she says.
Janie’s there, looking hotter than a pyroclastic bomb in the Lupanar of Pompeii.
She rises, takes me by the hand, and leads me toward the door. My internal seismograph is thrashing. Her hand emits strong compressional waves, coinciding with some thrust faulting on my side, if you get my drift. The sound gets louder. Then she opens the door, and it’s piercing.
A big 3D printer is making a very detailed model of the Car of Juggernaut.
Then she jumps out and runs after him, brandishing her little revolver and threatening to cut out his liver with a filleting knife and skin him alive with a fish scaler. Does she have the hots for this guy?
What is the first job you have had?
Paper route.
What is your happiest childhood memory?
Building a treehouse with my friends in a big oak tree. In beautiful June weather. With some long rope swings.
What was your favorite subject when you were in school and why?
In elementary school,
What decade during the last century would you have chosen to be a kid?
1990’s. Fairly peaceful and prosperous, we had computers and the worldwide web, and the future looked bright. Then, after 2000, the idiocy started.
Name one thing you miss about being a kid.
Having unlimited opportunities before you, and not having to choose.
Best date you've ever had?
There are some things a gentleman does not discuss. As for the WORST date, the woman who raised endangered reptiles and lived in a camper trailer. I’m not making this up.
Which incident in your life that totally changed the way you think today?
An old, rusty pickup truck loaded with firewood and a Volkswagen Rabbit collided at an intersection. I was young at the time. I looked at the scene and assumed the pickup truck was at fault. Not for any good reason, but because I assumed the person in the new vehicle would be the more prudent. I was wrong. This taught me to avoid making inferences based on appearances and stereotypes. It was a vivid lesson and I remember it distinctly today, decades later.
What is the weirdest thing you have seen in someone else’s home?
I was taking singing lessons from an old opera singer. She suggested I say for lunch. She brought me a plate with a hotdog and canned beans. A piece of chewed chewing gum was stuck on the lip of the plate. I didn’t say anything.
When was the last time you told someone you loved them?
Today.
What were you doing the last time you really had a good laugh?
Watching the movie American Fiction
Any Camp stories you would like to share?
I once saved a cat. I was in college and a little cat had climbed up an ash tree and couldn’t or wouldn’t come down. The tree had no branches for the first ten feet, so nobody could climb it. Except me, since I knew how to shinny up flag poles and so forth. So I did. I got to the branch the cat was on, approached the cat hanging from the branch like a sloth, took it in one hand, hung from the branch by my knees, and gently placed the cat in the upstretched hands of the girl who owned it. She looked at me like I was Superman.
What is your most memorable travel experience?
The sewers of Paris are pretty cool, but my most memorable travel experience was staying for a week in a weatherbeaten shack at an abandoned silver mine at high elevation in Colorado. At the time, this was a place nobody knew about except the guys who were hiding out there for some reason or other.
Nick Cameron is a PhD geologist of independent means who boxes for fun, packs a Colt Commander, and has a knack for finding bodies—dead and alive.
When an agate heiress arrives in Quartzrock, Arizona, on the eve of a gem show, she asks Nick for help selling some gemstones—and soon becomes a suspect in the bizarre murders of two prominent lapidaries. Stalked by the mysterious killer, she and Nick dodge police while Nick works with his friend Frankie Benally—a Navajo jewelry artist and brilliant armchair detective—to unravel the case. But even Frankie is stumped—until, at an isolated hacienda deep in the Sonoran desert, Nick meets the great-granddaughter of a soldadera who served with Pancho Villa’s División del Norte.
Along the way, Nick gets help from an old-fashioned gentleman sheriff, a crusty army retiree, and a clutch of feisty dames. He navigates plot twists and red herrings that would make Sam Spade reach for the aspirin. And he does it all with deadpan humor that’ll make you spit up your bourbon.
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