They say write what you know, and Jackie Kabler has followed that advice with her first novel, The Dead Dog Day. Kabler has worked in broadcasting for more than 20 years, including nearly 10 as a breakfast news reporter on GMTV. It's not surprising then that her novel is set in a breakfast television newsroom.
"When you're working in the media, you meet loads of crazy characters and end up in really weird situations. I thought, I've got all this information in my head, I need to do something with it, so I'm going to write a book. That's how it started and it's very much based on my years at GMTV," she says.
The book begins with a tough boss, Jeanette Kendrick, demanding a dead dog be brought on air when she discovers the heroic animal has died the morning he was supposed to be on the breakfast show.
"The dead dog is a true story and every single story that [the book's protagonist] Cora Baxter gets involved in in the book happened to me. I've made nothing up, basically. I've changed names and details but I haven't had half a choice. I haven't had to make anything up because it all happened to me and I just remember it all.
“Even my friends have said, ‘Come on that can’t be true. Come on, come on,’ but I’ve made nothing up. I have enough material for 10 books probably, because so many mad things happened,” she says.
The stories might be true, but despite the similarities in Baxter and Kabler’s lives, she insists she didn’t base the main character on herself. “I’ve been married for a long time, so she has a much more exciting love life than me. Elements of Cora are me, I suppose: I drink Earl Grey tea like she does, and I like a glass of wine like she does, so there’s bits of her but then there are other bits of her that I’ve just kind of made up . . . Cora’s camera crew in the book is totally based on my camera crew that I worked with for years. They love it. They don’t mind.”
Kendrick, Baxter’s demon boss, is more true to life: “She probably is an amalgamation of many bosses I’ve had in my TV years. She’s not based on any particular boss, but she’s definitely the kind of boss you get in television. It’s a stereotype but it’s true: most of the bosses I had in television were tough and not always very nice. She’s definitely a mix of all of them.”
Funny adventures
The boss doesn’t last long. Within the first couple of chapters she is murdered (the one plotline not gleaned from real life), and the rest of the novel centres on finding the culprit, with some funny adventures and a love story thrown in.
It’s a mix of several genres: “Not one for the hardcore crime fans . . . cosy mystery, they call it,” says Kabler. That made it difficult to get a publishing deal in the first place.
“When I first started writing it and sent it out to a few agents, they said, ‘Look, it’s kind of not one thing or the other. Where would a bookshop put it on the shelf? Do they put it in crime or humour or romance. Where do they put it?’ They said you have to sit into a genre. I thought: I can’t, because I find humour even in dark situations.
“It was probably foolish but I thought, I’m going to ignore those agents and write the book I want to write, because life is funny,” she says. “No matter what’s going on, life is funny, and working in television is funny and crazy things happen.”
The whole process took about six years, including a long period when Kabler shelved the project because of time constraints and the period when she searched for a publisher.
"It, for me, was kind of an escape from working in news, because working in news is a pretty tough business. I was always covering horrible murders and tough stories, and I needed an escape and I did it for a bit of fun, really. I didn't expect to get a publisher. I got a lot of rejections from agents, and then suddenly it all came together. It was this crazy thing that I never expected to happen because you hear about authors struggling and getting rejections all the time. Even JK Rowling had so many rejections before Harry Potter was published," says Kabler.
In the end, she signed a three-book deal with Accent Press for a series of Cora Baxter mysteries. The first book hit No 21 on Amazon's overall Kindle bestseller list, and number two on the mystery, thriller and suspense chart, and now Kabler is in the middle of writing the second book, The Deadline, which is pencilled in for release in autumn.
"I only really intended it to be one, and initially they said they'd give me a two-book deal and then they opted for a three-book deal, and I thought, Oh my God, now I'm going to have to write two more. But it's actually fine, because I have loads of material. It's going to be a series like Midsomer Murders or whatever, where it's the same characters but a different murder in every book."
Originally The Dead Dog Day didn't have a murder, it was a straightforward romantic comedy, but Kabler said she couldn't resist the urge to add some crime to the book, as it was her favourite kind of reporting on GMTV.
“I did a lot of crime reporting, and I just always found it fascinating, just what makes people kill. I think it can be such bizarre reasons and not the reasons you’d expect, so I just found it really interesting. The book initially was just a romantic comedy and it wasn’t really working. I thought, I’m going to stick a murder in, and the whole book improved from there. That’s when I started getting interest from publishers, so I think murder is obviously the way to go,” she says.
Nostalgic for the newsroom
Between finishing book one and starting book two, writing about a world based so closely on her GMTV days has made her slightly nostalgic for the newsroom.
“When a really big story comes up, like the general election or something like that, I think I’d love to be out doing that, but I work at QVC, the shopping channel, and it’s the most fun job I’ve ever had. So mostly I don’t miss news that much. I did it for 20 years, and that’s kind of enough,” she says.
With no concrete ideas about the plot of the third Baxter mystery, she has already set her sights on what she would like to write next, and it might appeal to the hardcore crime fans she missed out on this time.
“I’d like to do a psychological thriller, something a bit darker, because I think after a few humorous books it would be nice to try something a bit different. We’ll see how it goes,” she says.
- The Dead Dog Day is published by Accent
