In much the same way a spore can lay dormant for decades—and even centuries—before conditions are just right for its germination, Velda, burlesque queen turned detective, became encysted in my mind twenty years before her birth, entirely unbeknownst to me. I certainly hadn’t anything like her in mind when I walked into the used book store in Mexico City back in 1983. In fact, at that time I had never even considered the possibility of writing a novel about anything at all, let alone a hard-boiled detective. Indeed, I don’t think I’d even read a hard-boiled detective novel. I had created a couple of books, however, one of which—The Grand Tour, a non-fiction travelogue of the solar system—had gotten me the job that had brought me to Mexico. I was there working as production illustrator for the motion picture version of Dune and my wife—who was a model-maker for the film—and I enjoyed prowling the nooks and crannies of the great, sprawling city. One weekend, we found a tiny bookstore run by the United States Embassy, the proceeds from its sales going to some charity or another. Since the source of the books was Embassy personnel and the bulk of the books sold were to Embassy personnel, the thousands of old paperback volumes had been circulating and recirculating since World War II, at the very least.

As an illustrator, I found myself, well, boggled as I browsed through the shelves, finding endless classic paperback covers in nearly mint condition. The ones that really attracted my attention were the lurid covers of the detective novels. I’d never really seen anything like these before, at least not outside of books and magazine articles about the history of paperback publishing. I had no idea there were so many and that they were so damned good. Man, could those old illustrators paint or what? I started pulling the books off the shelves—especially when I learned that they were only the equivalent of a nickel each. I ultimately carried out four or five cartons of the damned things. Maybe two or three hundred.

And I started reading them.

I had every one of the Shell Scott series and all of the Mike Hammers, natch. Those must have gotten a lot of Embassy personnel though a lot of drizzly Mexican winters. I had David Goodis, Frank Kane, Leslie Charteris and Dashiell Hammett (a first-edition Continental Op, too, which I understand is actually worth something) and Dodge, Sterling, Evans, Bellam and Halliday. I had Dell mapbacks and Ace doubles. I had authors even I’d heard of and authors who were totally new to me. Hundreds of books and I eventually read them all.

That sort of thing is bound to have some sort of effect on you.

In the meantime, I wrote more non-fiction and, ultimately, tried my hand at a novel—three, in fact, as it turned out. But they weren’t mysteries. Although I didn’t realize it at the time I wrote them, they were in that peculiar sub-genre of science fiction known as "steam punk", which was OK by me since I’m a great fan of Jules Verne. And then I wrote another novel, this time in the realm of historical fantasy. The four books shared a kind of theme, however. All featured a woman as the protagonist. And not just any kind of woman, either, but a type which was described by one character as "a tough cookie." The trilogy (now a tetralogy: the original three books have been recently reprinted by Timberwolf Press, along with a new, fourth volume) concerned the trials and tribulations of a plucky if irascible princess and the historic fantasy centered around the adventures of Bradamant, a rather dangerous female knight in the service of Charlemagne, who was in turn based on a character from the sixteenth century epic poem, Orlando Furioso.

Which brings me to yet another of the threads that led to Velda.

I’ve always had a special interest in strong women. Not "strong" as in physically powerful. I have no particular affection for female body builders. But, rather, strong in character and purpose. I have long contemplated compiling a book about the great, unknown heroines of history. Not the Susan B. Anthonys or the Florence Nightengales, but the heroines relegated to footnotes, if even that much, because their heroism did not lie within traditional female roles. The women samurai, the women Vikings, women explorers, warriors and pirates. While that book remains to be written, I did create a book about the great female characters of science fiction and fantasy, the ones who belie the hoary old stereotype that the typical SF heroine is a blonde bimbo swooning in the tentacles of a bug-eyed-monster. Firebrands, with a text by SF author Pamela Sargent accompanied by a hundred of my paintings, illustrated many of the great heroines, villainesses and monsters from more than two hundred years of classic SF and fantasy, many of them recreated with the help of the original authors themselves.

Well, all of this had to eventually come together: My interest in heroic women, my penchant for writing novels with strong female leads and my love of lurid, hard-boiled detective novels. What finally tipped me off to what was obviously heading my way was a re-reading of Mickey Spillane’s Vengeance is Mine. It’s probably already needless to point out that I’d always found Mike Hammer’s secretary, Velda, fascinating. And this book was really hers, I realized, not Mike’s. In the story, Hammer loses his license and gun permit and has to depend on Velda—who has her ticket and apparently always carries an automatic in her purse—to carry through the actual investigation. She’s very good at legwork as it turns out.

I found myself wishing that Spillane had at some time devoted at least one novel outright to Velda—she had certainly earned it. Then I started thinking that if Spillane hadn’t or wouldn’t than someone should. I considered the possibility myself, but the thought lasted only about fifteen seconds. I didn’t really want to write about someone else’s character (let alone go through what it would take to do so). But I did want to write about a female private eye. And I wanted it to be set in the 50s, just like in all those great paperbacks I’d been reading.

I recalled an obscure little book written by an anonymous author at the beginning of the twentieth century. Her Other Self described a purportedly true case that took place in the late 1800s, about a girl accused of a crime she remembered doing but couldn’t possibly have committed. That sure seemed like a swell plot idea to me and I started thinking about how to translate it into the mid-twentieth century. I decided to call my detective "Velda" as a tip of the hat to Hammer’s indefatigable assistant. She has a black page-boy haircut, too, but that’s more because I like that style than the fact that Velda 1 preferred it (which, in fact, I’d completely forgotten about until looking up her description while writing this essay). I based much of her personality on my wife, Judith—as I’d tended to do with my previous characters—and her physical description (since I keep getting asked about that) on Patricia McFarren, a close relative who worked her way through college as a print and runway model. She has this perfect 50s look, as though she had just stepped out of a cold war-era Vogue, and a 500-ampere glare.

As my Velda—Velda Bellinghausen, if you must know—evolved, she became a burlesque queen, who, tired and disgusted, had decided to change careers when she found an advertisement for a correspondence school course in detection on a matchbook cover. That seemed a natural thing for her to do, since her father had been a cop—one killed under mysterious and scandal-ridden circumstances that had left her with no resources (her mother having died some years earlier in a freak donut explosion). Dropping out of secretarial school to get a job as clerk in a theatrical agency, she was discovered by Maxim Slotsky and offered a job in the chorus line of his follies. And what happened after all this took place is the novel.

Copyright© 2004 Ron Miller

RON MILLER is the illustrator and author of more than thirty books, including six novels. He has won a Hugo Award and the American Institute of Physics Award for Excellence in Science Writing, among many other commendations. He has also created US postage stamps, designed for motion pictures, consulted for Walt Disney Imagineering and provided illustrations (and articles) for publications ranging from National Geographic and Scientific American to Analog and Reader's Digest. His original art hangs in public and private collections worldwide, including the Smithsonian Institution and the Pushkin Gallery.
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Read an extract from Velda