Saxton Reads! & Reviews

Please welcome guest blogger, Ann Littlewood, author of two Zoo Mysteries, featuring zookeeper, Iris Oakley. Littlewood, herself a zookeeper for twelve years at the Oregon Zoo is able to recapture her love of animals and zoos through her writing. We're looking forward to more adventures from this author.

Night kill & Did not survive

   

How I Came to Write Zoo Mysteries

Ann Littlewood

I’m an example of the power of the right book. While I was in college, a fellow student raised some cash by selling me his copy of Management of Wild Animals in Captivity by Lee S. Crandall. Copyrighted 1964, it was the first effort to pull together all the information available about keeping exotic animals alive and well in zoos. I was a psychology major mostly because I got to do behavioral research with pigeons and monkeys, and this book fascinated me. I still remember odd bits, such as how to lay the cement for a giraffe yard to avoid slipping—"swept when freshly laid with a coarse broom." Yes, I still have the book. It planted a seed that affected my life.

A few years after college, the seed germinated, and the lure of beautiful and strange species at Oregon Zoo inspired me to wrangle a job there as a zoo keeper. For twelve years, I worked in the nursery and raised baby cats such as servals, sand cats, and cougars, plus a lioness and a tiger. We taught orphaned deer to nurse from a pop bottle, pushed smelt down the throats of abandoned baby harbor seals, and nursed little bears back to health. One of our biggest stars was a baby hippo that became injured in his exhibit and had to be hand-raised.

After many years and many critters, it became necessary for me to move on. Next came a rewarding career in corporate America working as a technical writer and then as a publications manager. But I missed the zoo world and always wanted to return, if only by visiting zoos and in my imagination.

Somewhere along the line, the seed from Lee Crandall’s book hybridized with my life-long love of mysteries. My early reading memories include Erle Stanley Gardner, Nero Wolfe, and Ellery Queen. Josephine Tey and Ngaio Marsh and Agatha Cristie soon followed. I loved how mysteries could lead me into worlds I knew nothing about.

After a long germination, my first zoo mystery, Night Kill, grew from blending these two passions. Now it has a sequel, Did Not Survive, with others planned. It’s great fun to invent Finley Memorial Zoo and to stock it with any animal I want. It’s challenging to invent a story that will interest and puzzle mystery fans, a wily and sophisticated audience! In Did Not Survive, I was able to explore the issues around keeping elephants in captivity, with a denouement that highlights a surprising threat to many wild animals. The protagonist, zoo keeper Iris Oakley, is pregnant in this one, so I got to re-live my own two pregnancies as a zoo keeper—the worries about diseases from animals and the problems of finding a uniform big enough. As for the mystery, Iris must redefine everything she thought she knew about her boss.

Night Kill focused on big cats and the end of Iris’s marriage, Did Not Survive on elephants and her pregnancy, and now I’m thinking about parrots, especially macaws, and romance. Iris is a single mother with a demanding job. If she ever gets a decent night’s sleep, she’s likely to realize that she’s lonely and misses having a man in her life. Her romantic choices have been a little erratic, so there’s likely trouble ahead.

Lee Crandall might be surprised to know where his magnum opus led, but I think he would be pleased that, while my means is an engaging puzzle, my goal is to encourage others to appreciate animals and to participate in protecting them and their habitats. That would be no mystery to him.