Guest Post: Where I’m From by Neil S. Plakcy

 

Please welcome back prolific author Neil S. Plakcy today. His new book, Dog of Thieves, comes out Tuesday from Samwise Books. This is the 16^th book in his Golden Retriever Mysteries which began with In Dog We Trust.

 

 

          Where I’m From by Neil S. Plakcy

 

Here’s an easy way to confuse people who ask where you’re from. Tell them, as I do, that you grew up in the suburbs of Trenton, New Jersey-- but in Pennsylvania.

Huh? Unless you come from the Northeast, you probably don’t realize how close Pennsylvania and New Jersey really are. But my parents and I crossed the Delaware for family visits, Sunday and Hebrew School, even grocery shopping, and most of the kids I knew were going back and forth across the Calhoun Street Bridge, too.

I was born in St. Francis Hospital in the Chambersburg section of Trenton-- the same neighborhood where Janet Evanovich has set her Stephanie Plum books. My mother’s aunts lived on either side of Trenton High, and we continued to patronize the same stores she did when she was growing up in the city. I know the back streets of Trenton as well as I know those of the small town where my parents and I lived.

Before the riots came in 1967, there was a vibrant life in the inner city, and it was exciting to a little kid from the suburbs. We bought Hungarian style stuffed cabbage from a grocery across from the War Memorial and ate in the park surrounding that obelisk. We went to the planetarium at the state capitol complex, to the New Jersey State Museum, and shopping along State Street.

In Pennsylvania, alcohol was only sold in the State Stores, with a limited selection, so my parents traveled to La Casa Liquors in Chambersburg (owned by the father of a classmate, who was also my great-uncle’s best friend) whenever we had to stock up for an event. When I was a teenager, the drinking age was eighteen in New Jersey and twenty-one in Pennsylvania, and all those bars in Trenton were awfully easy to reach for a kid with a driver’s license with a plan to party.

I left Trenton, and its suburbs, when I went to college, and haven’t lived there since. But when I wanted to set my golden retriever mysteries in a small town where my hero was likely to run into old friends and classmates, I went back myself to Bucks County. My protagonist, Steve Levitan, has the same relationship to Trenton and to New Jersey that I had growing up.

Steve has been across the river many times in the series—tracking down suspects, connecting with family traditions, and so on. He’s been to the flea market in Lambertville where my parents used to take me every Sunday, and to the site of the synagogue where he and I both celebrated a bar mitzvah. It’s now a Baptist church.

My father used Belgian blocks (brought over in colonial-era ships as ballast) to build a retaining wall along our lakefront. There was a crumbling block wall alongside an empty lot on the way to my grandmother’s house, and I can remember my dad pulling up and hustling over to the wall to pick out loose blocks to bring home with us. There’s a convenience store there now, with no sign of that original wall.

That memory has already been written into a previous book, so I couldn’t use it in Dog of Thieves, the 16^th book in the series, which debuts May 2. But I’m sure the Garden State has more to offer me in the future. After all, when there’s a whole state full of potential plots and murder victims right across the river, how can a detective (or a mystery novelist) resist?

 

Neil S. Plakcy ©2023

Neil S. Plakcy is the author of over fifty mystery and romance novels, including the best-selling golden retriever mysteries and the highly acclaimed Mahu series, a four-time finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards. A Lefty winner, his stories have been featured in the Bouchercon anthology Florida Happens, Malice Domestic’s Murder Most Conventional and the 2022 MWA anthology Crime Hits Home and others. His website is www.mahubooks.com.