Riha was an immigrant from Czechoslovakia. He was also an associate professor of Russian history at the University of Colorado. He was briefly married to a woman named Hana, but they were in the process of divorcing. She had recently fled the couple’s Boulder house, smelling of ether and claiming that someone was trying to kill her.

On March 18, Riha failed to show up for his classes. The Boulder house was full of furniture and a collection of statuary. The table was set for breakfast.

The authorities supposedly received assurances that Riha was alive and that he’d left of his own accord. Some people claimed to have seen him in the early 1970s, in Czechoslovakia.

But no one really knows what happened to Thomas Riha, with the possible exception of the CIA, the FBI – and a woman who called herself Galya Tannenbaum.

Galya spun many yarns, claiming to be a secret service agent. She also claimed to know where Riha was. She disposed of his house, car and statuary collection. She was also the beneficiary in the wills of two Denver residents. Both the decedents had died of potassium cyanide poisoning.

District attorneys in Denver and Boulder filed criminal charges against her for forgery. When they searched her Denver house, they found a pound of potassium cyanide – and Thomas Riha’s driver’s license and passport.

Galya had several other names, a prior criminal record for forgery and theft, and a long record of mental instability. In June 1970 a judge found her incompetent to stand trial. She was committed to the state hospital in Pueblo, Colorado.

Eight months later, on March 7, 1971, Galya Tannenbaum committed suicide, using potassium cyanide.

It’s a fascinating case that has always intrigued me. I used it as a springboard for the second Jeri Howard novel, Till The Old Men Die. But the Riha case, with its echoes of Cold War intrigue, was not the novel I wanted to write. Real life is messy and sometimes it doesn’t have endings, as a good mystery novel should.

From the outset, I decided the professor in my book was already dead, and my private eye Jeri Howard would be instrumental in finding out who killed him.

Of course, I had to have a mystery woman.

By this time I was living in the San Francisco Bay Area, which has a large Filipino-American population. While in the Navy and later in a civilian job, I had Filipino-American coworkers and I became interested in Filipino culture.

So my murder victim in Till The Old Men Die became Dr. Lito Manibusan, a Filipino-American history professor at California State University in Hayward, a friend of Jeri Howard’s father, also a professor. And the mystery woman, Dolores Cruz, shows up at the university some months after Manibusan’s murder, claiming to be his widow and demanding his papers, which have already been turned over to the professor’s nephew.

I don’t remember what my working title was. But one day I was talking with my friend Susan, whose significant other Mike, while not born in the Philippines, was raised there, immersed in the culture of that place. At one point in our conversation about the volatile nature of Filipino politics, Susan said, “It’ll never be over, not till the old men die.”

Perfect title, I thought. I even had one of the characters use the sentence in a conversation with Jeri Howard.

Ron’s blog, Life, Death and Fog, is one that I enjoy and read frequently. In the Shanahan books, Deets has a great dog. And my private eye, Jeri Howard, has cats. So I asked Ron to write about cats and dogs. Here’s what he has to say.

Ronald Tierney

My first exposure to cats was in a barn in Southern Wisconsin one summer when I was very young. Wild cats gathered around when the cows were milked. Jake, the man who handled the chores on my grandmother’s farm, would aim the teats and squeeze, shooting streams of warm, fresh dairy in their direction. It was obviously party time for the cats. They jumped and squirmed, wrestling each other for position — all trying to intercept the pass. Jake would leave them a pie pan full of fresh milk when he was done. Except for this twice-daily ritual, the farm cats stayed away from humans. They didn’t trust us. From what I learned about rural living, they had good reason. However, some farmers — like Jake — appreciated the fact that the feral felines kept the rodents away. The milk was a form of payment, I think, even though I don’t believe management and labor ever ironed out a contract.

My second experience with a cat was an all-too-short-lived experience with a beautiful little Burmese. I’d named him Chat and I fear that was about all the time we had together. It was Einstein who turned out to be my longest-lasting live-in relationship. Nineteen years. He, in his youth a lumbering, large gray tabby, is one of two beings that I have put in my novels who (and I mean “who,” not “that”) actually existed in real life. The other was Casey, who showed up one St. Patrick’s Day and stayed on. He was, as I found out later, a Catahoula, or Leopard Dog, 60 pounds of Louisiana cur, not often found outside the South.

The two of them are regulars in my Deets Shanahan mysteries. I presumed that room and board was enough to compensate them for my occasional theft of their private lives for public consumption. And, unlike humans, I knew they weren’t likely to sue if they thought I defamed them in some way.

In the mysteries, neither of them solves crimes, though they each have figured in small, realistic ways, in some of the stories. For the most part, Einstein, true to real life, wants to eat and, after that, looks for a spot of sun. Casey goes for a walk, plays ball. Sometimes, in real life, Einstein and I argued — usually about food. He and I both had a tendency to put on the pounds. Neither of us took attempts at diet restriction kindly. In his later years, he slimmed down on his own, became extremely polite and dignified. Unexcitable and bored with games, he welcomed visitors with the grace of an ambassador. It was clear I didn’t always measure up to his expectations. But then, I’m not always polite, dignified and welcoming.

Casey liked to tease me. For example, sometimes in the mornings, as I slipped into my jeans, he would wait until I had one leg up. At that one brief, awkward, teetering moment he’d nudge me from behind. Sometimes I’d catch my balance, sometimes not. You can’t tell me that dogs don’t grin.

If I’m permitted to anthropomorphize a bit more, Einstein was a proper sort (I don’t know how else to say it). There were rules. His rules, of course. One behaved in a certain way. And he would demand it, stubbornly. Casey, on the other hand, was more of a con artist. He’d pretend to go along, but when you weren’t looking he’d do what he wanted. There are stories to be told. The two of them never became close to each other. I don’t think Einstein took to Casey’s practical jokes. And I think Casey regarded the cat as a little stuffy.

Dogs don’t seem to mind work. For both the fictional Shanahan and the slightly less fictional me, Casey provided a sense of security. No one was likely to break into either Shanahan’s or my house without being smelled, seen or heard. Casey’s bark was an alarm, announcing unknown visitors of any species. It took a while for Einstein to take his household duties seriously. He only took his food seriously and perhaps his role as doorman. In the winter or on cold rainy days, field mice would set up housekeeping inside. Einstein let them walk around like they owned the place. They were too small for Casey to be interested and, besides, there is a time-honored division of labor. Casey was in charge of squirrel patrol outside. He kept raccoons and possums away as well, but mice? This was cat’s work.

One day a tiny, red-haired tabby with a clubfoot appeared. The cat (I thought it was a kitten at first, but the eyes showed a cynicism that could only come with age and a hard life) was apparently looking for a temporary place to stay. This little tyke, afraid of nothing and no one, came into the house through a loose screen in the kitchen. He didn’t stay long. Though I fed him, he wasn’t especially friendly. He seemed to regard me as one of the help at a roadside inn. As unlikely as it may seem, the aloof Einstein and the young ruffian intruder got along. During his stay, this tough little creature taught Einstein how to catch mice  — a skill and a passion that Einstein never lost. The gentleman Einstein, who earlier couldn’t be bothered to keep the mice at bay, became a big game hunter.

The nice thing about all of this — I mean the inclusion of the real Casey and Einstein in my writing — is that when I return to writing a new Shanahan, I get to spend time with them. In the books, they, like the aging Deets Shanahan, are still going.

That’s one of my favorite lines from my third Jeri Howard book, titled Take A Number.

Take A Number (Jeri Howard #3)

Like many of my books, there’s a story behind the story.

Some years ago I read a newspaper article about a man in rural Missouri who was shot to death in the middle of the day, in the middle of whatever small town he lived in. Lots of witnesses, none of whom stepped forward to tell the police who murdered the man. It seems the dead man was so universally disliked that no one cared about his death or was willing to identify his killer.

So I wrote a book with a murder victim named Sam Raynor, a guy one reviewer described as “deliciously despicable.” Jeri’s client is Raynor’s estranged wife, who is divorcing him and wants to know where he’s hidden his money. After Raynor is shot and his wife is hauled in as the prime suspect, Jeri works hard to clear the woman. In writing the book, it was great fun to have a large cast of suspects and let Jeri eliminate them one by one.

I particularly like the man who is sitting in a pickup truck outside Raynor’s funeral, whistling that old tune, “I’ll be glad when you’re dead, you rascal, you.”

Download a copy of Take A Number and see if you can figure out who killed him.

The book takes place on a sleek streamliner – the California Zephyr – in December 1952. The train is on a run from Oakland, California to Chicago, Illinois. Of course, this is a mystery. Murder and mayhem will ensue, wreaking havoc with that on-time schedule.

It’s a train, people get on and off, interacting with my protagonist, who is a member of the onboard train crew. The train crew changes as well. So there are lots of opportunities to add characters to the mix.

I knew early on that a cowboy was going to board the train. I didn’t know much about him, other than he worked on a ranch somewhere and he was going somewhere to spend Christmas with a family member.

I’m now at a point in the train’s journey where the cowboy has boarded the train. He’s traveling in coach and he’s wearing cowboy boots, jeans, a red and black flannel shirt, and a sheepskin jacket. I can see his face and he has a name now.

I wasn’t even sure where he was going to board. Elko, Nevada, I thought, then Winnemucca. But I needed to make sure it was a location where ranching was active. I finally decided that the cowboy would get on the train in Portola, California, the last major stop the old California Zephyr made before heading down into the Great Basin of Nevada.

In addition to a name, the cowboy now has a backstory. It might change but I do know that he was born in Gunnison, Colorado, was in the Army during World War II, and he’s going to spend Christmas with his daughter and her family in the Denver area.

Wonder how that’s going to turn out, since he hasn’t seen her in ten years. But that’s another story.

So that one went back to the warehouse. Since then I made do with my rocking chair. Let me tell you, that wooden seat, even padded with pillows and a folded blanket, wasn’t comfortable after a couple of hours of reading.

The cats, who were used to curling up on the back of the old sofa or next to me, were completely discombobulated. The rocking chair didn’t provide any such space. And my lap is only so big, accommodating two cats if they crowded in and didn’t hiss at each other.

I just hadn’t found the time yet to go sofa shopping in person, though I’d done a lot of looking on the Internet, checking out styles and fabrics. I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to pay, or what style (other than rolled arms) or what color.

Then last week, a friend mentioned that she had a loveseat stored in her garage. It had been there few years, ever since she’d purchased a new sofa. She told me if I wanted the loveseat I could have it – for free.

I went over to look at the loveseat – sage green, traditional look with rolled arms and wooden accents. I like it a lot.

New-To-Me Loveseat

One of my neighbors volunteered her son-in-law and his pickup truck, so a couple of days later we went and got the loveseat.

It looks good with the accent pillows I found at a local home furnishings consignment store. It’s comfortable, has nice pillowy backs suitable for cat lounging. Those rolled arms show evidence of cat scratches – like that’s not going to happen at my place.

As my friend says, free is a really good price.

So today and tomorrow, you can get the first Jeri Howard case, Kindred Crimes, for free, at this link: http://amzn.to/HyMuxn

It’s a good book. It won the St. Martin’s Press/Private Eye Writers of America contest for Best First Private Eye Novel and was nominated for three best first novel awards: Shamus, Anthony, Macavity.

There’s also a big Kindle Friday the 13^th bonanza going on, with 100 free books in all genres. Check that out at http://bitly.com/Ii3hjO.

Give Jeri a try, for free. I think you’ll like her.

He was born in 1922 – the same year as Judy Garland and Ava Gardner. The president of the United States at that time was Warren Harding. David Lloyd George was Prime Minister of Great Britain and Lenin was in charge over in Russia.

It had only been four years since the Armistice that ended World War I. In 20 years, the United States would be embroiled in World War II.

Dad was born on a farm in southwestern Kansas, a little town called Ford, near Dodge City. He was the fourth of five children – four boys and a girl. He had fond memories of being a Kansas farm boy.

I heard stories about the kids riding a horse named Rowdy to school. My aunt, the middle child, grumbled that she always had to ride at the back end of the horse. When going to school with the two older boys, they made her ride on the back because she was the youngest. Then when she got older, she had to ride on the back to look after the two younger boys.

Then there was the time Dad was five, back in 1927, and he had a close and memorable encounter with a skunk under the farmhouse.

In the 1920s, wet weather led to increased agricultural production on the Great Plains. When Dad was eight, in 1930, the wet years ended. The drought and the dust storms began. Dad remembered the Dirty Thirties vividly. His mother would wet sheets and put them around the windows and doors, trying to keep out the blowing dust. But they stayed in Kansas.

Dad graduated from high school in 1940, one of a class of nineteen students. When World War II broke out, he enlisted in the Navy. He was on shore patrol one night in 1943 in a small town in Oklahoma when he met my mother.

Eventually he took the Oklahoma girl home to Kansas to meet his family. My parents were married in 1944, a month or so shy of Dad’s 22^nd birthday.

Dad and Mom - Wartime Wedding

After the war, he went to college on the GI Bill. He and my mother started a family – two kids, me and my brother.

It’s hard to believe Dad has been gone nearly seven years. When I look back, it’s not at that last year, when he was in failing health. It’s back a few more years, to a family reunion in 2003. I brought along a tape recorder and got Dad and his only surviving brother talking.

Once they got rolling, I heard all sorts of yarns. Such as the time they’d built a sort of roller coaster and sent my aunt’s cat on a ride. I particularly liked the tale about my uncle wiring the clothesline with an electrical charge so that Grandma would get a shock when she hung out the wash. Those four Dawson boys were certainly a handful.

Every now and then I listen to that recording, which I now have as an audio file on my computer. It’s great to heard Dad’s voice again.

Got family? Get a recorder and get them talking. You’ll be glad you did.

Those black-crowned night herons who hang out in the trees in downtown Oakland are flying from tree to tree, twigs in their beaks, full of purpose and intent on nest-building. Already the green canopy above echoes with the raucous cawing that sounds almost like a bark. Soon there will be nests with eggs, then hatchlings that grow into nestlings, clamoring for food.

Black-Crowned Night Heron

I became a birder through a series of events. I got tired of walking the same old paths in the town where I live. So I sought out new paths, exploring some of the 60-plus parks in the East Bay Regional Park system. Many of these parks are on shorelines or have marshes, such as Coyote Hills, Point Pinole and Arrowhead Marsh.

The birds that caught my eye at first were water birds or shore birds. That’s how lots of birders start. These birds are big and slow-moving, easy to spot and identify, unlike the tiny warblers who hang out in the forest and flit from branch to branch before I can get my binoculars focused.

I bought a book, Birds of the Bay Area. Then another field guide. From there it was a slippery slope to a guided bird walk and a beginning birding class.

Then it was the Mono Basin Bird Chautauqua and the thrill of seeing an eagle’s nest with an eaglet in it. I went on Audubon Society field trips, like the one to the Pinnacles National Monument where I saw my first California Condor.

Since then I’ve gone on bird walks led by the folks at the Point Reyes Bird Observatory and outings with fellow birders, to favorite places like the Point Reyes National Seashore and Audubon Canyon Ranch.

Last fall it was a weekend away with a much more experienced birding friend, to the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge. Now I’m contemplating a birding trip to the Big Bend National Park in Texas. Maybe even Costa Rica.

So that’s how it starts. Now there’s a whole shelf of field guides, plus iBird on my iPhone.

It’s spring. Get out there and look at those birds!

I’m going up a day early to do some research in the library at the California State Railroad Museum and to take in the treasures at the Crocker Art Museum.

Looks like a great line-up of panels. Mine is on Saturday afternoon at 1:30 PM in the Compagno Room.

The panel is called They’re Watching You: Private Eyes. It’s moderated by Dick Lochte. Fellow panelists are Cara Black, Gayle Carline, and Michael Siverling.

And I’m a finalist for the Golden Nugget award, to be given to the best mystery set in California.

See you there!

Thanks to Google I have determined that it was covered by Barbra Streisand. But that’s neither here nor there.

What’s free again is the Kindle version of Jeri Howard Casebook: 4 Stories.

It will be available for download free of charge for two days this week – Thursday, March 22 and Friday, March 23.

Call it a spring fling. Call it what you will. It’s an opportunity to meet Jeri Howard, my intrepid private eye, in four stories, one of which (“Slayer Statute“) was nominated for a Shamus award.

The stories are: “Little Red Corvette,” Blue Eyes,” “Slayer Statute,” and “Candles on the Corner.”

Check it out, and enjoy the stories!

It’s a historical mystery set in December 1952. And it takes place aboard the California Zephyr, not the current Amtrak version, but the original streamliner.

That train ran between San Francisco and Chicago, and was jointly operated from 1949 to 1970 by three railroads, the Western Pacific, the Denver & Rio Grande Western, and the Burlington Northern.

The CZ was renowned for its Vista-Domes, all the better to see the spectacular scenery in the Sierra Nevada’s Feather River Canyon, and in the Rockies, where the tracks ran along the Colorado River, through some amazing canyons.

Old California Zephyr Brochure

The Silver Lady, another name for the train, was also known for its amenities and level of service provided in its sleek silver cars. In addition to the male crew members – engineer, brakemen, conductor, stewards, porters and the like – each run of the California Zephyr had a woman hostess known as a Zephyrette.

Ever since I learned that, I knew I had to write a book with a Zephyrette as my protagonist.

Research – it’s such a seductive thing for a writer. In the name of research, I rode a special excursion train in August 2010, up the Feather River Canyon, which has seen very little passenger traffic since the Zephyr stopped running that route. The special train went from Emeryville to Portola, site of the Western Pacific Railroad Museum and, during the third weekend in August, a great little fair called Railroad Days.

During that trip, the consist – that’s railroad talk for roster of cars – included vintage rail cars, ridden by enthusiastic railfans from all over the United States. I myself rode, and slept, aboard a car called the Pacific Sands – a 10/6 sleeper manufactured by the Budd Company for Union Pacific.

A 10/6, for those of you who aren’t railfans, contains ten roomettes for one person and six bedrooms. If you want to ride the Pacific Sands, it and several other vintage railcars are part of a group called LA Rail that runs day trips and overnights out of Union Station in Los Angeles. They keep the cars parked in an area of the LA railyard called the Garden. You can read about LA Rail here.

Also in the interest of research, I’ve ridden Amtrak’s California Zephyr between the Bay Area and Denver, twice in coach and twice in a roomette. Though Amtrak takes a different route through California, from Winnemucca, Nevada and on eastward, it’s the same route as the old Silver Lady. On my last trip, as we headed for Denver along the Colorado River, I spotted seven bald eagles in one day, which is a good day for a birder.

I have pored through files in the libraries of the California Railroad Museum in Sacramento and the Colorado Railroad Museum in Golden, both worth a visit. For those of you attending Left Coast Crime in Sacramento at the end of March, the California Railroad Museum is located in Old Sacramento, and it’s an absolute must.

I’m planning another visit this summer to the Western Pacific Railroad Museum in Portola, where dedicated volunteers have collected an assortment of old railcars at the museum, especially cars I’m writing about, such as a diner called the Silver Plate, and a buffet-lounge car called the Silver Hostel, which contained the Zephyrette’s tiny compartment. Yes, all those Zephyr cars had “Silver” names.

The greatest way for me to experience the past is to talk with people who were there. I’ve interviewed two Zephyrettes who worked aboard the Silver Lady, one from the late 1960s and the other from the early 1950s. They provided me with a wealth of material in their personal reminiscences.

My writing space is surrounded by printouts – diagrams of CZ cars, menus, timetables, advertising brochures, an old photograph of a Zephyrette in a Vista-Dome, handing out a dinner reservation check to some passengers. Since my book takes place in 1952, timetables and menus are of particular importance.

That’s why I wish I had a time machine, just once, to take a trip aboard the old Silver Lady, ensconced in a bedroom aboard a Pullman sleeper, having dinner at a table set with a white cloth and napkins, railroad china, heavy silverware, and a Colorado carnation in a bud vase.

In 1949, that bedroom would have cost me about $25. In 1952, I could have dined on fresh Rocky Mountain trout for $2.50. Of course, I’d have to contend with the cigarette smoke, since more people smoked those days than do now.

I don’t have a time machine, so I must be content with my file folders of photocopies and printouts, my visits to museums, and my conversations with people who were there.

If you ever rode on the old Silver Lady, especially back in the early 1950s, I want to hear from you.

Memories are the next best thing to a time machine.