Back down the old i-10

Hi there.

I wrote a mystery novel.

It’s called Tucson ’93.

It involves a mystery and takes place in Tucson during the summer of 1993.

And I’m excited for everyone to get a chance to read it.

This is the City

Let’s get the obvious out of the way.

I was born and raised in Tucson, Arizona

I lived there for the first 22 years of my life.

I lived there in 1993.

I moved away in 1996, so the version of Tucson from the early 1990s is frozen in my mind like that mosquito preserved in amber in Jurassic Park. Nothing changes and if I want to mine its DNA and clone it, I have a perfectly preserved specimen.

Given those facts, it seems obvious that I would set this novel in Tucson.

But… I could have also set this novel in Twin Cities (where I’ve lived for almost 30 years) or Switzerland (where I lived for almost three years). And while I love those places, they are missing a few key elements that are unique to Tucson (and maybe a city like Albuquerque) that play a key role in my novel. Let’s break down three of the most important.

Swamp Coolers

It’s very possible that most people reading this blog have no idea what a swamp cooler is. I’m going to do my best to explain. A swamp cooler is a device that allegedly can cool your house at a fraction of the price of air conditioning. I say allegedly because in my experience growing up, when we had the swamp cooler running, our house maybe went from a roiling boil to a steady simmer. In other words, it was still hot, it just wasn’t as hot. The way they work is that water is pumped into sponge-like pads that sit around the perimeter of a metal box on top of your house. As the water is absorbed by the pads, a fan draws in air from the outside of the box, which go through the wet pads and again, allegedly cool the air as it is blown through your house.

Again, in my experience, the results were lacking.

It may seem strange now, but in the 80s and most of the 90s, air conditioning, like long distance phone calls, was something people thought about before switching on. In my house, it was a luxury and only used when necessary.

None of that is really that important to my book. What is important is that a swamp cooler can sit on top of your house and that the pads are removable and need to be changed out after awhile due to corrosion. And Tucson ’93 opens with private investigator Uri LaFleur up on a roof examining his friend JoJo’s vandalized swamp cooler.

Classic Cars (the wrong kind)

With low humidity and mere rumors of rain, cars in Tucson are rust-free for a long time. Growing up it wasn’t uncommon to see Corvettes from the 50s, Mustangs from the 60s and Porsche 911s from the 70s. Unfortunately, that lack of rust didn’t just apply to the cool cars. The boxy, boring, and just plain ugly cars of the late 1970s/early 1980s also kept rolling.

We didn’t score the cool classic of cars when we started driving. Nope. Instead, we got behind the wheel of Dodge Omnis, Plymouth Horizons, Chevy Cavaliers, and Olds Omegas. If you were lucky, you got a more modern ride like a Ford Taurus or a Honda CRX. And to be honest, we didn’t care.

Having a car in Tucson, whose metro area spreads out over hundreds of square miles, equaled freedom. We could get from Park Mall to Tucson Mall on our own. We could start the night in the foothills and end the night at Club Congress. But even with that freedom, the trips across town could take a long time. Unlike most cities this size, there wasn’t a freeway that cut through the city. Instead, a phalanx of traffic lights lined up to stop your progress. As annoying as that was, it also presented an opportunity. When stopped at a light, you never knew who might pull up next to you, so you did your best to look cool. Usually that meant turning up your stereo as loud as possible and hoping that the bass didn’t blow out your stock speakers.

For Tucson ’93, I never wanted Uri to have a cool car. He’s the anti-Magnum PI, doing his best just to scrape by. That means he’s cruising in a beat-up ’83 Old Omega. A car impossible to look cool in, but that doesn’t stop him from trying.

Poisonous Animals

I currently live in a Minneapolis suburb. The scariest animals that I see on a regular basis are a pack of wild turkeys who strut up and down the block like they own the place. And while I’ve been told that turkeys can be aggressive, they don’t instill the sense of danger that come with the poisonous animals that slither and scurry around southern Arizona. For the purposes of Tucson ’93, the primary inciting incident involves a rattlesnake bite, which Uri is later hired to investigate. In an early version of this book, I wrote a prologue from the rattlesnake’s point of view (it liked hanging out by pools and listening to Soundgarden). The prologue didn’t make it into the book, but I may share it in my newsletter.

A rattlesnake may get the spotlight in Tucson ’93, but they aren’t the only venomous creature that is referenced. Gila monsters, black widow spiders, and scorpions all make cameos. There may even be a (drug induced?) sighting of a mythical creature out near Sabino Canyon.

I could rattle off so much more

Those are just three things that make Tucson such a unique and amazing place. You can be sweating from a swamp cooler one minute and then cooling in pool the next. You can be riding a hooptie down Speedway on your way to speeding towards the hoop at the JCC. And you can hear that goose-bump inducing rattle out hiking, before hiking over to Club Congress to hear a band that gives you goose bumps. It’s a city of extremes and contradictions and the perfect setting for a damaged private investigator whose grip on reality should be questioned.

As always, thanks for reading and if you haven’t, please sign up for my newsletter.

See you on the flipside.

-BV