The Page 69 Test: "Scents and Sensibility"

Monday, July 27, 2015

"Scents and Sensibility"

Spencer Quinn is the author of the Chet and Bernie mystery novels: Dog on It, Thereby Hangs a Tail, To Fetch a Thief, The Dog Who Knew Too Much, A Fistful of Collars, The Sound and the Furry,

and Paw and Order. He lives on Cape Cod with his dogs Audrey and Pearl. When not keeping them out of mischief, he is hard at work on the next Chet and Bernie mystery.

Quinn applied the Page 69 Test to his latest novel, Scents and Sensibility, the eighth book in the Chet and Bernie series, and reported the following:

Hard to imagine a human story of any kind without conflict, and there's plenty of it on page 69 of Scents and Sensibility. In fact, this conflict - between P.I. Bernie Little and Detective Brick Mickles, former colleagues at Valley PD (all of this seen through the eyes of Chet, Bernie's partner throughout the series) - lies at the heart of the story, although we don't know it yet. Mickles is no cardboard cut-out bad cop - he's smart and funny, and comfortable with words like "nemesis." His understanding of Bernie - "the self-destructive type" - makes a certain amount of sense. The scene on page 69 is all about building tension. On the surface, the two men keep it together, but underneath - well, let's have Chet take it from here, where scents make the most sense.
When two dudes are right on the point of throwing down – meaning two human dudes, although a similar thing happens in my world – you can’t miss a sudden smell that comes rising off both of them, and now we had it big-time. I could feel their muscles loading up – mine, too! – and could also feel their hate for one another, hate being something you hardly ever saw from Bernie. I made sure my weight was nicely balanced, all set for whatever needed doing.