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SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, Calif. — A new page, fascinating, exciting, these are just a few words to describe author Todd Borg’s Lake Tahoe series with Owen McKenna and his trusted sidekick Spot.
A native of Lake Tahoe, Todd Borg’s books center in and around the area he and his wife, painter and sculptor, Kit Night, have called home since 1990. But it was in Minnesota that Borg began to hone his writing skills. Like any kid, he wanted to be a rock and roll star. He wrote songs in hopes of becoming a singer-songwriter, but when that didn’t work out, he turned to fiction writing when he was 20.
“I published about 12 or 15 short stories and wrote a bunch more,” Borg said when asked if he had sold anything before the Tahoe mysteries. “In the short story market back in the ’80s, when it was really up and running, the only options were what were called little magazines, slang for literary magazines. And there were literary magazines of all genres. In the 1980s I moved on to short stories as a way to develop novel writing.”
The idea of writing a series of mystery novels came during Borg’s childhood, where he grew up voraciously reading mysteries and thrillers of all kinds, by many authors.
“I was lucky that my friends growing up were also readers,” Borg said. “It was natural for me to try that approach when I started writing. It was one of those early decisions when I got to Tahoe in 1990, I was thinking this would be a great place to set up a series.”
With around 20 novels under his belt, Borg admits to not having a very vigorous and organized approach to writing. She takes advantage of her writing time whenever she can, between book signings, library talks, book festivals, and visits to private book clubs.
“I write an outline, and before I start writing a novel, I have 50 or 60 pages, a kind of prose outline. And as I try to follow it, and all my supposedly good ideas, I realize that this is not going to work. And that’s a stupid thought. This character is completely lame. I constantly change, which slows me down.”
Borg said a book for him takes about 18 months, from conception to the point where he can edit it three or four times, and he rewrote it. Writing a book a year means that every time he comes out with a new one, he’s already six months into the next book.
“When I finally have a draft to show, I give it to my wife,” Borg said. “He has a really good internal sense of how stories work. He manages to find all the things that the 12-year-old in me wants to write.”
For those who are fans of mysteries and thrillers, you will know that most of the main characters have some sort of sidekick. And Owen McKenna’s partner is a harlequin Great Dane named Spot. A Great Dane seemed like a natural choice as Todd and his wife have had three Danes in the past.
“When I first dreamed of McKenna, I wanted him to be a regular guy, an ex-cop detective kind of guy, rather than a flamboyant Nero Wolfe-esque detective,” Borg said. “Of all the private investigators in fiction, many of them had cronies. The sidekicks do a lot to reveal the character of the protagonist.”
Borg was lucky that his first novel was his first shot at publication. His first book, Tahoe Deathfall, was published on August 1, 2001. It came out at a time before Amazon became the great machine it is, and was highly praised by rave reviews in magazines and newspapers across the country. . Once word of mouth spread, Borg said people really started clamoring for more books.
Fans will be happy to know that Owen McKenna’s 20th book, Tahoe Moon, will be released on August 1.
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