Love & Murder

Reminiscent of Orwell' s 'Animal Farm' and Philip K. Dick' s 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep' and the movie inspired by it, 'Bladerunner,' 'Love & Murder' is, among other things, a treatise on nature of humanity (as portrayed by cats) under the stress of climate change: threatened starvation, a contaminated environment, massive flooding, the rise of thuggery associated with the demise of rational government, all in the shape of a novel. And it derives from the life experience of a single woman, Katie Christine Bishop. Her early years were comfortably middle-class: she did well in school, went to church, joined the Girl Scouts, played soccer. She knew little about how the world can change in an instant. Her mother' s followed by months of hospitalization and a year on a respirator resulted in her permanent disability and the financial ruin of her family. Ms. Bishop' s father' s loss of his job owing to a corporate merger and the subsequent layoff added to the family' s burdens. Years later, traveling in France with her husband, she noticed a colony of cats harboring in a church. How many of these animals, she wondered, had once known a comfortable home, a caring family, only to lose them in a flash? She later recalled one in particular, a tawny, longhaired male who, standing alone beside a rusty courtyard gate, seemed entirely at ease with himself. Her vision of this cat gave her the idea for the character of Murder. She saw her book in the tradition of noir, and began to read and re-read her way through the genre, particularly the work of Dashiell Hammett and Dorothy B. Hughes. She dipped into film as well, and became enthralled with the work of Akira Kurasawa, which led her to John Ford and Sergio Leone. She was entranced by unforgiving landscapes, and the idea of human beings- or cats- malformed by those landscapes. She began to write- 'Love & Murder.'