While cleaning out her garage one day, local librarian Nancy Meddings uncovered a box of old papers—about 50 pages of a novel she’d started writing in 1984 but never finished.
Meddings was a student at Cal State Northridge when she began writing the book as an assignment for one of her English courses. Meddings decided to make it a mystery novel, as she had been a fan of the genre since her youth.
“I started being a serious mystery fan in high school. Favorite authors included Dick Francis, Ed McBain, and P.D. James,” said Meddings, a semi-retired, part-time librarian at Allan Hancock College’s Lompoc campus. “Later on, I discovered Michael Connelly and Tess Gerritsen.”
Meddings said she based her story’s detective protagonist, Matilyn Rose, on a real private investigator she had read about just before drafting the novel.
“I immediately thought of a small newspaper story I had seen on a true-life female private investigator. Currently, about a third of all PIs are female, but back then, it was rare,” Meddings said. “One of the things that appealed to me was that she specialized in missing person cases, which gives a writer a lot of options, as opposed to say homicide—where someone has to die.
“She also solved cases more through deduction and legwork, and a lot less through muscle and guns, which I liked.”
After college though, Meddings shelved the unfinished book and hadn’t thought about it for decades. Extra time at home during the pandemic inspired Meddings to declutter her garage, where her hidden manuscript resurfaced.
“Like everyone else, being homebound during COVID gave me lots of time to focus on sprucing up our home,” Meddings said. “It was a total surprise to find my old writing file, and, even more surprising, that the story had aged pretty well.”
While the setting of her original draft is Phoenix, Arizona (where Meddings previously lived for a few years), she decided to alter the story to take place closer to her current home on the Central Coast. Meddings described revising the book’s setting as easy for the most part, which “probably speaks to the way I write, which is to focus on my characters, with plot and setting coming later,” she said.
“You really can’t take Hillerman’s Joe Leaphorn too far from his tribal police setting, for example, but my characters could be set almost anywhere,” Meddings continued. “It actually works way better here; the Central Coast has so many options for places where a person could vanish—either temporarily or long-term.”
Meddings released the finished novel, Melted Into Thin Air: A Matilyn Rose Mystery—described as a classic whodunit in the tradition of Ellery Queen and Agatha Christie—back in March. Completing her old college manuscript reignited Meddings’ passion for writing, and she decided to write a sequel from scratch, Spirits May Walk: A Matilyn Rose Mystery, which was published in September.
“The idea for the second book was partially inspired by a small group of old Victorian homes that used to be located by the 101 freeway. A local man was hoping to restore them and make it a historical attraction, but that never happened,” Meddings said, whose sequel takes Rose and her partner to investigate a mysterious building, allegedly haunted by a ghost of some kind.
While dedicating at least two hours every morning to writing, the author is currently finishing her third Matilyn Rose book, which includes a plotline inspired by another regional topic, she explained.
“The third book, Let Her Vanish, involves human trafficking, which our local assemblyman, Jordan Cunningham, brought to my attention,” Meddings said. “That one is almost done, and should be available by the end of this year or the start of 2022.”
Arts Editor Caleb Wiseblood always loves to hear from local authors.
Send comments to cwiseblood@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Dec 16-23, 2021.