Wrapping Up a Series: Poppy Harmon’s Last Case and #giveaway – Welcome Lee Hollis
By Liz, excited to welcome Lee Hollis back to the blog! Lee’s here talking about wrapping up the Poppy Harmon series today – which we’re all sad about but thankful to have a chance to meet these delightful characters. Take it away, Lee!
When I started writing the fifth book in my Desert Flowers mystery series, I did not know it would be the last. Sometimes series can last for years (our 16th Hayley Powell Food & Cocktails Mystery, “Death of a Clam Digger” will be out next month with three more novels and three more holiday novellas in the pipeline) and my Maya & Sandra mysteries keep chugging along (with “Murder at the Spelling Bee” out in June 2024). But although the first two Poppy books performed well, the last two have lagged in sales, and during the development of Poppy #5, it became clear I should make a decision with my editor about wrapping up the series.
It was not an easy one to make.
When you write five books with the same set of characters, you spend a lot of time with them and you grow fond of them. Every time you sit down to write a chapter, it can be like spending time with old friends. I loved Poppy. I had based her on a Hollywood actress named Francine York, who had played the mother of a character I played in a long running web series I co-created and co-starred in called “Where the Bears Are”. Francine, who passed away in 2017, was so regal, so elegant, but had a sharp wit and a wonderfully naughty subversive side whenever she’d draw you in with one of her jaw-dropping, gossipy Hollywood stories. She was eighty years old when I met her, having first made a splash as a blonde bombshell in the 1960s appearing on popular TV shows such as “Batman”, “Lost in Space”, “Bewitched”, “Gomer Pyle: USMC”, “Green Acres”, “The FBI”, “Ironside”, “I Dream of Jeannie”, and so many others, all the way up to more contemporary shows like “Hot in Cleveland” and “The Mindy Project”. Francine never stopped working until the day she left us. But Poppy did. In my version, Poppy hated staying too long in such an ageist business and retired in Palm Springs with her husband Chester. Unfortunately, when Chester died suddenly, Poppy discovered her husband had an undisclosed gambling problem and had left her penniless. Her Screen Actors Guild pension would not not enough to cover her husband’s crushing debt let alone her monthly bills, so Poppy had to do something drastic. Her solution? She got her private investigator’s license. I mean, how hard could it be? She had played the loyal secretary Daphne to hunky TV detective “Jack Colt, PI” for three seasons on ABC in the 1980s. She could just transfer that experience to real life and call her own shots. It gave her life fresh purpose.
And to make it more fun, she recruited her two best friends, plain-speaking German Iris and sweet-natured retired high school principal Violet to form the Desert Flowers Detective Agency. These two characters were also based on a pair of wonderful women who, lucky for me, came into my life when I moved to Palm Springs, Brigitte and Helen.
Rounding out the agency were Violet’s grandson, Wyatt, a computer whiz with an impressive knack for hacking, who proved invaluable in navigating the digital world, while Matt, the charming and handsome actor, added a touch of Hollywood glamour to the agency. Matt initially came on board as the face of the firm, the actor playing the of character Matt Flowers, the head of Desert Flowers, when the ladies discovered to their dismay that many people were hesitant to hire women of a certain age to solve their cases. Poppy, Iris and Violet did all the work and Matt got all the credit in a nod to the classic TV detective show “Remington Steele”. But over the course of the books, Matt took a back seat and just became one of the gang, loyal to the core. Together, the group formed a formidable team, their individual strengths complementing one another perfectly.
The cases were mostly set in Palm Springs, but given my history as a Hollywood screenwriter, they always seemed to have a Hollywood connection. There was the murder of an actress writing a juicy tell all memoir in a retirement community in “Poppy Harmon Investigates”, the murder of one of Poppy’s fellow jurors after a court trial who had a mysterious connection to the rebellious daughter of Poppy’s TV co-star Rod Harper in “Poppy Harmon and the Hung Jury”, the mercurial star of a Netflix reboot of “Palm Springs Weekend” was suffocated in her trailer in “Poppy Harmon and the Pillow Talk Killer”, and a murderous reality TV star loose on the set of a Bachelorette-type show in “Poppy Harmon and the Backstabbing Bachelor”. In her final case, Poppy’s new client is a former acting rival who hires the agency to do a background check on the man she is about to marry, and then winds up plugging a would be burglar with three bullets days before the wedding in “Poppy Harmon and the Shooting Star”.
Once it became clear this would be Poppy’s last case, I had to decide how to wrap it all up. I won’t spoil the ending, but I knew I wanted readers to believe that Poppy would continue her life as a successful private eye, no doubt well into her seventies and perhaps eighties. She had come too far, discovered hidden reservoirs of strength and resilience within herself. There would be no point in stopping now.
No, the final chapter had to be personal. Starting with the second book, the series had featured a love triangle between Poppy, her “Jack Colt PI” co-star Rod Harper (think Tom Selleck), and Sam Emerson, a former law enforcement officer turned TV cop show scriptwriter and consultant (think Sam Elliot). I was not above taking advantage of that classic cozy mystery trope of “Who will the heroine choose?” Would it be Rod or Sam? Or neither one of them? I wanted to show that Poppy’s growth as a detective has paralleled her journey to find love again, and that finally she would find fulfillment in both. I will not spoil the ending of Shooting Star for anyone who hasn’t read it yet, but I hope that when you do say goodbye to Poppy in that last chapter on page 281, those of you who have grown to love her as much as I do will have a big satisfied smile on your face.
Readers, what series (besides Poppy) were you sad to see end? Leave a comment below – three readers will win a copy of Poppy Harmon and the Shooting Star!
Lee Hollis is the pen name for a brother and sister writing team. Rick Copp is a veteran film and television writer/producer and also the author of two other mystery novel series. He lives in Palm Springs, California. Holly Simason is an award winning food and cocktails columnist for the Mount Desert Islander newspaper in Bar Harbor, Maine, where she resides. Find out more on Lee’s website.
