I have two authors scheduled for spotlights this weekend, because I want to highlight their books.

I hope some of you recognize Wendall Thomas’ name. She’s the author of the fun Cyd Redondo mysteries featuring a travel agent. At the beginning of the series, Cyd has never been farther than New Jersey. However, she’ll get her chance to travel, have some exotic adventures, and get involved in the international world of animal smuggling. Lost Luggage is the first Cyd Redondo adventure, and Cheap Trills is her most recent one. You can find out more about Wendall and Cyd at Wendall’s website, https://www.wendallthomas.com/. Wendall also blogs at https://murderiseverywhere.blogspot.com/, along with some other authors. Check it out!

Or, you can read today’s Saturday Spotlight to discover a few things you might not otherwise learn about Wendall Thomas. Thank you, Wendall, for taking the time for the interview.

Wendall, would you introduce yourself as a mystery writer, screenwriter, and
lecturer?

Ha! Nightmare, Lesa, but I’ll try. I took a pretty circuitous route to writing fiction. I was obsessed
with music when I was a kid, hiding in the closet with my transistor radio, listening to Casey Kasem’s
countdown from age nine. So my first writing efforts were songs. I was playing guitar and singing in
bars and pizza joints all through high school and college and actually had one of my songs recorded
when I was 19.

I studied literature in college and taught English at a couple of boarding schools in my twenties
(including Deerfield Academy, where much of The Holdovers was shot…) but when it came to
writing books, I remained completely intimidated by the likes of Henry James (my favorite!),
Dickens, Faulkner, Austen, O’Connor and even popular novelists like John Irving or Anne Tyler. It’s
like they all hovered over me anytime I would try to write a sentence. So I felt totally unqualified to
write fiction in any form.

Because I’d always heard that those who can’t, teach, I went back to graduate school at UNC to try to
become an English professor. This inadvertently led to an increasing interest in film (more on this
below) and to my moving to Los Angeles in the mid-80s and working in the film business. Once I was
here, I felt like screenplays— with all their white spaces and shorthand—might be less intimidating.

It turns out they weren’t, but I managed to write a series of spec scripts and commissioned work over
the next 20 years, doing everything from adapting Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone for the PBS show
Wishbone and Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories for Disney, to writing the A&E biography of
Maureen O’Hara. I was lucky enough to have original scripts optioned as well.

I started teaching part time at UCLA to stay afloat between writing jobs and that job led to my
lecturing on screenwriting in England, France, Denmark, Holland, Northern Ireland, and Italy, and
in Australia and New Zealand. That’s also how I met my English husband, which was the best part.

Meanwhile, I was reading a lot of mystery and P.I. novels. I’d always loved Agatha Christie, Ngaio
Marsh, and Dorothy L. Sayers, but in this period I was burning through Sue Grafton, Sara Paretsky,
Michael Connelly, T. Jefferson Parker, Patricia Cornwell, Minnette Walters, Frances Fyfield, and
most importantly, Janet Evanovich.

I had a favorite rom/com adventure “spec” script that didn’t sell called Animal Instincts, featuring
an untraveled travel agent named Cyd Redondo. I’d heard a piece on NPR about National Novel
Writing Month and I decided to try it and see whether there might be a book in that script. I
surprised myself by finishing most of a draft during the event. I realized I loved writing prose, so now
I write more fiction than film, but still love both.

Tell us about your passion for film, please.

I guess my passion for film started with television—specifically with Captain Kangaroo. There is a
pretty disturbing picture of me at under one year of age, tied by a diaper into a tiny rocking chair
gazing up at our TV.

So I always loved TV and loved going to the movies with my family as a kid–seeing Born Free at a
Florida drive-In, driving to Raleigh (gasp) to see My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music.

We had a great theater about a mile from our house and once I was about 12, I started using my
babysitting money to go to movies by myself. To this day, there is still something sacred for me about
the way you can live in the film when you go on your own. It was the 70s, so I saw so many incredible
movies—What’s Up Doc? The Goodbye Girl, Young Frankenstein, Norma Rae, 3 Days of the
Condor, Annie Hall, Marathon Man, Chinatown, and on and on.

Then, when I was in graduate school, I became a teaching assistant for the Film Criticism professors.
I felt completely unqualified, so I wound up going to the library and watching 400 films in a year.
And that pretty much clinched my obsession. And later made it possible for me to teach film writing
and film history.

Australia. I know you miss your trips there. Tell us what you love about Australia.

Ah, I do miss those trips, so much. There are so many things I love about Australia, probably the
most important being the amazingly kind and hilarious friends I’ve been able to make there.

But in terms of the place, the first thing that comes to mind is the birds. There are completely
different birds there and, especially in Brisbane, their wild and gorgeous calls cut through the traffic
and always make you feel you are somewhere exotic. Now that I think about it, it may be why my
subconscious chose birds as Cyd’s accidental charges in Cheap Trills.

Next, I have to say the museums—art, history, natural history. In Melbourne, I particularly
recommend the Ian Potter Centre and ACMI (Australian Center for the Moving Image), both in
Federation Square. On Brisbane’s South Bank, the Queensland Museum and the Queensland
Museum of Art on the South are so worth a visit. My favorite are perhaps the Tasmanian Museum
and Art Gallery and MONA (built underground, in a cliff!) in Hobart. If you want to know more
about some of these museums and my adventures in Australia, I’ve written a couple of blogposts on
the subject at Murder is Everywhere—links are at the end.

Then, of course, there’s the landscape. The Twelve Apostles rock formations off the Great Ocean
Road, the river that winds through and around Brisbane, the sight of Mount Wellington overlooking
the harbor in Hobart, Tasmania, are all burned in my brain.

Plus, Australia completely lives up to its reputation as a “foodie” country. They take their coffee and
wine extremely seriously, and everywhere I went there was something unfamiliar and delicious on
the menu.

Because of your background, I’m going to switch up this next question. What one
author, director, or actor is your favorite, and why?

Oh, this is truly cruel, Lesa! Honestly. I’ve been thinking about this for weeks. To choose one is
ridiculously hard. But if I have to, it would be writer/director Billy Wilder.

I love him for his sense of irony, his extraordinary, biting, often hilarious dialogue, his completely
realized characters, and his ability to write well in so many genres. The idea that one person wrote
Sunset Boulevard, Double Indemnity, Ball of Fire, Ninotchka, Witness for the Prosecution, Stalag
17, Some Like it Hot, The Lost Weekend, Sabrina, Ace in the Hole, and The Apartment (among so
many others)—in his second language by the way—still astounds and inspires me.

Thanks so much for having me, Lesa!

Murder is Everywhere posts:
https://murderiseverywhere.blogspot.com/2023/02/confessions-of-tasmaniac.html
https://murderiseverywhere.blogspot.com/2023/04/filling-well.html