Thursday, January 23, 2025

Q&A with Logan Terret

 


 

 

Logan Terret is the author of the new novel Agates Are Forever. Also an inventor and licensed attorney, he lives in Phoenix. 

 

Q: What inspired you to write Agates Are Forever, and how did you create your character Nick Cameron?

 

A: I was reading some bad 1950s detective novels set in Chicago and written by an Englishman who had probably never been there. If he had been there, he never learned that a Chicago shamus does not say “whilst” or call the trunk of his car the “boot.” 

 

Anyway, a friend returned from Northern Wisconsin with some Lake Superior agates, and as a joke, I wrote the opening paragraphs of Agates are Forever in an email, making the detective a “consulting geologist.”  She liked it.

 

A few years later I stumbled upon  the email and decided to continue the joke. The first draft was less than 50k words and quite rough, but thanks to an excellent developmental editor by the name of Jodi Fodor, I made many improvements and ended up with Agates are Forever as it exists today, at about 75,000 words.

 

As for Nick Cameron, clearly he needed to be named Nick because Nick is a classic tough guy name. As for Cameron, having been the Clan Cameron Convenor for Arizona for a few years, Cameron was an easy choice for surname. This also made Nick a Highlander and contributed to his character. 

 

I took a few geology classes in college, so making Nick a consulting geologist was easy enough, though I had a professional geologist do fact checks.

 

Physically Nick is a blend of a geology professor I know, a badassed group VP, and me. Mentally he is a blend of me and the group VP. 

 

I’m not sure I could create a character from whole cloth. It’s easier to base a character on real people, and doing that makes the character a real person, not a stereotype.  All the characters in Agates are Forever are based on real people, or a mix of real people.

 

What about Nick’s role? In her excellent book Talking about Detective Fiction, P.D. James discussed the role of the “Watson.” He (or she) questions the Holmes, clarifies his character and methods, and ties together the progress of the investigation. In some ways, he represents the reader, especially if the narrative is first person.  

 

Nick is the Watson, a Ph.D. and not an M.D. His friend Frankie Benally, son of an Italian mother and a Navajo father, enrolled tribal member, jewelry artist, and brilliant armchair detective, is the Holmes. Frankie calls the shots, but Nick does the detective work. 

 

This reverses the trite habit of making the Native American character the White guy’s sidekick. 

 

The relationship is perhaps more like Frankie as Nero Wolfe and Nick as Archie Goodwin. In the Nero Wolfe cycle, Archie is really the main character: smart, streetwise, with an eye for the dames, while Nero is more remote, distant, and enigmatic. 

 

Nick’s background is gradually revealed, “Grandpa Cameron” playing a significant part, while Nick’s parents are never mentioned.

 

As the Kirkus review says, “The author conveys real feeling with Nick’s origin story: At age 13, he discovered his grandfather’s stash of 1950s detective novels, and the two bonded over their mutual enjoyment of the genre, using the books’ tough-guy lingo whenever they got together until the older man’s death.”

 

Q: The Publishers Weekly review of the novel said, “Terret works in a grinning, self-aware register, piling on red herrings and suspects to deliriously entertaining effect…” What do you think of that description?

 

A: “Deliriously entertaining” is rather high praise, so I’ll take it. All advance readers agree AAF is entertaining, humorous, and in its historical and geologic aspects, informative. The Kirkus reviewer summarizes it as “An engaging mix of humor, mystery, history, and geologic curiosities.” 

 

What interests me is the variation in what readers find most interesting. 

 

One reader, with an MA in English Literature, found the Mexico sequence, particularly a metastory told in a letter written by a soldadera, most engaging. It’s my favorite part, too.

 

The aristocratic, tall, dark, intelligent character of Doña Cartucho, the soldadera’s great granddaughter, is really a present-day incarnation of the soldadera herself. Both are anima characters, in Jungian terms, encountered at an isolated hacienda deep in the Sonoran Desert of far Northern Mexico. Ambiguously spectral events occur.

 

Q: Without giving anything away, did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?

 

A: I did not know how it would end, exactly. I made an outline, but the plot is complex and tuning it to avoid plot holes required work. 

 

The excellent developmental editor suggested further amplification of various points. This is the first novel I have written, so coaching was required. But the editor never told me what to write, saying, instead, “You could get more out of this,” and so on. 

 

The ending required research and passing it by a board-certified cardiologist to make sure it was factually believable. He loved it and especially liked the reference to one of the AHA journals.

 

Q: What do you hope readers take away from the story?

 

A: Pleasant memories. A feel for the beauty of the desert. Hopefully, an interest in the Mexican Revolution and respect for Pancho Villa, who was a major revolutionary figure and not just the bandit most Americans think he was.

 

And humility. A pervasive theme in AAF is how little we really know, and the dangers of making hasty and stupid inferences to fill in the gaps. 

 

“I don’t have any evidence A is true, so it is false,” and vice versa. Trying to prove a theory by cherry-picking supporting evidence, instead of looking for contradicting evidence. Silly statistical syllogisms and stereotypes. We all do these things, but they can lead to very bad decisions and terrible public policy. 

 

Q: What are you working on now? Will there be more Nick Cameron mysteries?

 

A: Frankie wants to solve the historical mystery of the Dogstone – a legendary Petoskey stone presented to Louis XIV by Jesuit missionaries from New France and set in the jeweled collar of his beloved dog Bonne.

 

He wants to recover the Dogstone and return it to the Council of the Three Fires, who gave it to the Jesuits as a personal gift to the dog, not to France.

 

An unpublished Dumas manuscript, Le Fils de d’Artagnon et la Pierre de la Chienne, contains clues to where the Dogstone was hidden after it was plundered, along with the other crown jewels, from the Royal Treasury during the French Revolution. Confusion and danger await.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Publication date is January 21, 2025, but you can pre-order from the Logan Terret web site, https://www.loganterret.com/.

 

The site contains blog entries about Lake Superior agates, hydrogen wells, maudlin tropes, references, and so on, and you can comment and agree or disagree as you like.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

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