…Louie and let him speak for himself in first-furperson feline for that newspaper feature.

Somehow Louie's narrative voice occurred to me and was introduced in the romance quartet. I even wrote it so the reader didn't know the narrator named Midnight Louie was not one of the Las Vegas characters hanging around the hotel, but the cat who had been seen coming and going, until the very end -- literally the last few words -- of the first book. Because I had used that device in the romance series, I couldn't repeat it in the mystery series.

At that time, little by way of secondary characters and a strong background were allowed in romance novels, so I had to keep Louie's narrative interludes short and occasional. In the mysteries, his sections run longer, although mystery readers had never encountered a first-purrson feline narrator until Louie arrived on the scene. But mystery, especially noir mystery, is famous for the first-person narration, and that's actually what inspired Midnight Louie's voice way back when.

Crescent Blues: How did you develop his voice? Did the character just start "talking" to you in your imagination? Or did you consciously model his voice and tough guy attitude on an actor, a fictional character like Sam Spade, or someone you know?

Carole Nelson Douglas: Fashions in writers come and go; only a few readers, and even fewer reviewers, have realized that Louie's voice is inspired by the Depression tales of Damon Runyon, whose work Hollywood mined for decades, most famously in Guys and Dolls and A Pocketful of Miracles. Louie's literary antecedents are Runyon, with a bit of generic gumshoe and Mrs. Malaprop thrown in. An alley cat is a lot like the displaced people of the Depression days, surviving as best they can and "conning" those with more means into "contributing" to their welfare.

Crescent Blues: While you're reading the Midnight Louie mysteries, reading the cat's take on things feels perfectly natural. However, take a day or two to step back from Louie's fictional world, and you can suddenly feel like you've been transported to a fantasy unawares. How do you achieve this suspension of disbelief?

Carole Nelson Douglas: I think it's because Louie is a satire on a human model, the hard-nosed, hard-drinking, heavy womanizing rogue male who defined the P. I. genre -- and most American adventure heroes for decades (and for far too long, in my opinion). So Louie is very much in the traditional hard-boiled mystery mode, even if he is a cat. Midnight Louie is Sam Spade with hairballs.

I coined the descriptive name "cozy-noir" for the Midnight Louie mysteries, because they blend amateur and professional human sleuths. And Louie himself is the epitome of the mean-street stalker of the Twenties and Thirties -- the lone guy with his own code and a string of dames behind him. His being a cat allows for satire of both Depression-era and Nineties-era mores.

But Louie, aside from his narrations and the intent to solve the crime he reveals in them, behaves otherwise like an ordinary cat (who happens to have an extraordinary agenda). I do give him a touch of psychic talent, but most cat owners don't find that a stretch.

And Louie often identifies himself with the homeless, the transient, the individual persecuted and discriminated against for the mere color of his coat, the breed subjected to genocide at times, even as -- dare I say -- the underdog?

Crescent Blues: How do you see the Louie mysteries, as "straight mystery" or as a blend of mystery and fantasy?

Carole Nelson Douglas: I see Louie as a "fantasy construct" in a straight mystery milieu.

Crescent Blues: You've written in many other genres romance, historical mystery, science fiction and fantasy: Do you prefer one genre to another or do you feel at home in all of them?

Carole Nelson Douglas: Although I've written in all those genres and enjoy using different voices and unusual backgrounds in all of them, I've never felt completely at home in any of them, which is why I've always blended genre elements. To me, as a reader who began to write in the late Seventies, science fiction and fantasy traditionally skimped on realistic character development, particularly of substantial women. Romance lacked detailed background, social issues and secondary characters. Mainstream/literary fiction stinted on positive outcomes and imagination. Some of this has changed now, but not a lot. I still prefer to bridge many types of fiction, rather than to drop my anchor and harbor in one genre.

Crescent Blues: From a writer's standpoint, how do the genres differ from each other? What are their similarities?

Carole Nelson Douglas: In one sense, all novels are...

Carole Nelson Douglas (continued)

Click here to read the Crescent Blues review of Cat in a Golden Garland.