Mystery Scene article by Pam
Pam and Mary O’Shaughnessy, sisters, are the authors of the best-selling Nina Reilly series of legal thrillers, as well as a book of short stories and an independent novel. Their latest book, a prequel to the series called SHOW NO FEAR, was published in December 2008 by Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster. Mary is a former sound and visual editor who graduated from UC Santa Barbara, and Pam formerly practiced law after receiving her J.D. from Harvard Law School. Pam and Mary write under the name Perri O’Shaughnessy.
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Mary and I grew up in the far reaches of Los Angeles and Orange Counties, far from the City of Gold that we call San Francisco. But it has attracted us like a gravity well our whole lives. It’s the ultimate city for physical beauty and fresh air. It’s got the sea-tang and a timeless Mediterranean look that starts with Coit Tower, still its ultimate symbol of beauty and grace, but most of all it’s got people from all over the world stuffed within its island-like borders. To us, growing up down south in a desert of tract houses, it was far-away Oz.
Here are some pictures from the long love story between us and the City:
I was sixteen and Mary twelve (Mary’s correction, it was my 16th birthday present and we were followed by sailors on Market Street), and we took the Hound up Highway 101 by ourselves, our first trip on our own, our mother’s protests still ringing in our ears. We had never been to the City before, had never gone anywhere, really, and now I had saved a few dollars from my Christmas job selling ties at Macy’s in L.A. and could buy the tickets myself. You might say it was the present I had wanted all my life.
We stayed at the youth hostel in the Tenderloin (Mary’s correction, the YWCA on Sutter Street) and walked around for two unforgettable days, so young and so impressionable that even now I can’t look out at Alcatraz without thinking of us on the boat heading out there in a shifting wind, pursued by a lonely sailor who we finally drove away because our mother had made us promise not to talk to strangers. We walked the whole city, up and down, and it felt like freedom and the promise of adulthood.
A year or so later I sat on the roadside playing my guitar, thumb out, waiting with my boyfriend for a four-hundred mile ride. We went to Playland and lay on the concrete floor and heard the Big Mama Thornton. You don’t forget nights like that.
That promise of adulthood came true after college, when I left L.A. for good and moved to 10th Avenue in the Sunset near the Park. I worked at the Office for Civil Rights in a building on Market Street, and antiwar protests were erupting everywhere. One day I looked out my window and people were running down Kearney Street followed by a whole cavalry of mounted police. Another day my boyfriend brought two girls he had met at a class home for dinner. One of them, who was called Mizmoon, didn’t talk much. She had the air of someone important who knew things you’d never guess, and this impression was confirmed later when we learned she was a member of the Weatherman group who didn’t make it out of the Seventies alive.
My life changed when I left for law school, but during the summers I’d return to work at my old office. One summer I sublet a studio on the tenth floor of one of the big buildings on Cathedral Hill near Gough. Looking out across the fog of lights at sunset toward the East Bay from my tiny balcony, anything seemed possible.
I moved to Tahoe, and Mary began raising her family in Brisbane, just south of the City, although after a few years, she moved down the Peninsula. Her kids grew up visiting the Exploratorium and Golden Gate Park, and when I’d visit we’d talk about how much we wished we could be writers, the one thing we both had wanted to do since childhood. Finally we figured out that two heads beat one any time, and finished our first manuscript together. We became full-time writers, and San Francisco became part of our fictional universe as well as our actual lives.
Nina Reilly, the fictional lawyer who we love to get into trouble, is from the Monterey Bay area. As a law clerk in Carmel, she meets a former homicide detective from San Francisco, Paul van Wagoner. You can read this part of her story in Show No Fear. Later she marries a young lawyer and moves up to live in Bernal Heights and work at a big law firm on Montgomery Street. An unfortunate impulsive afternoon with a plumber leads to a divorce, though, and Nina has to leave town for the mountains. That event gets a breathless writeup in our first published novel, Motion to Suppress, and sends Nina on her way as a Tahoe criminal defense lawyer.
At Tahoe, Nina opens a storefront law office and some years later finds herself back in the City defending her right to practice law in another of our books, Unlucky in Law. Caffeined to the max and wearing a dark suit and an air of confidence, she’s grown up a lot from the small-town girl who came to town a few years before.
Throughout our books, the City looms large. It’s a place to run to for refuge and to hide out in. It’s a place to fall in love. It’s the third leg of the triangle that bounds Nina’s life, of Tahoe, Monterey Bay, and the City. It doesn’t change. It’s still the place young people from all over dream of seeing, and it never fails to change its visitors.
Recently I was having lunch at Perry’s on Union Street with an elderly lady from New York City, who has lived for many years in San Francisco. “I hate this place,” she said. “I wish I could move back to Manhattan.”
“But it’s so cold during the winter there. And it’s all concrete, you never see a blade of grass.”
“That’s true, I always got pneumonia in February.”
“What’s better about New York City?”
“People are too nice here. I get sick of all the niceness.” She tossed back the rest of her vodka collins and ordered another. She was eighty-four, a sharp former editor, and I was curious about her opinion.
“Isn’t it good to be nice?”
“No, no, no. Not when you’re as old as me. You want to be able to yell at the grocery clerk, yell at somebody, but they’re all smiling and trying to take my arm.” She picked up her cane and brandished it. “Even the dogs are happy. I can’t stand it. I’m stuck here and I won’t be around much longer. What’s there to smile about?”
“Look around,” I said. November sun hung over the buildings across the street, warming us. There was no traffic and only a few people window shopping. The air had that aching blueness you get some days after fog season is over. We sat at a small outdoor table protected by brilliant hanging baskets of flowers. For dinner I’d be taking her to North Beach, to Martuni’s, where my friend Cindy would be playing piano blues to an enthusiastic crowd.
She looked down at her bruschetta and said, “Bullshit,” under her breath. But that’s the way it is; not everybody is born to be a San Franciscan. An open mind and good walking shoes aren’t enough; you have to forget your troubles for a minute and let the City work on you. “You’re going to live another twenty years,” I said. “Did you notice how good-looking the waiter is?”
“He’s not so good-looking.”
‘Wait’ll he comes back.” Our waiter came back with the drinks and picked up my friend’s cane. He looked like Colin Farrell. Maybe in ten years I’d go to a movie and he’d be in it. “To fight the guys off with?” he said and gave her a wink.
She shook her head. “That’s what I mean,” she said. She sipped the new drink, looked at the flowers, his broad back, and sighed.