Cowboy Cahill

“Rincon Point” is, on the surface, a detective story set in Southern California in the summer of 1991. What has that got to do with cowboys? Well, I’m glad you asked.

The book is in some aspects reminiscent of a country and western song. Terry Cahill, the protagonist, loses his job, his wife, and his truck all within the first few pages of the book. One result of all this loss is that Cahill is essentially starting his life over, and you get to see his career as a private investigator from the very beginning. I wanted my protagonist to be a fairly lonely person, whether he realizes it or not. So Cahill, untethered to family already, experiences traumatic losses right as the story starts.

Now, I’m going to go off-track for a little here, so please bear with me. One of my favorite detective series right now is Michael Connelly’s Bosch books. Bosch is a big-time fan of jazz, it seems particularly of the midcentury West Coast variety. But it’s not just flavor here: Connelly is telling us something about the character with his choice of music. Bosch is a veteran of the Vietnam War, a war often portrayed in books, movies, and television as a “rock and roll” war. Can’t you hear Creedence just reading that? (Or “Paint it Black?” Or “All Along The Watchtower?)

When he gets home, one of the ways Bosch rejects Vietnam is by developing a taste for jazz. It’s not the music he would have heard during wartime. It is an escape from that.

I too like West Coast Cool Jazz, and listen to it frequently. But it’s not just that that genre was already taken: I didn’t want my protagonist to be too much a reflection of myself. Another favorite of mine, Robert B. Parker’s Spenser series, is something I see as an example of that. Spenser sure seems like a fictionalized version of Parker himself. And while that’s cool, it’s not really what I wanted to do.

A Gibson J-200 acoustic guitar like the one Terry Cahill owns.

Being a musician myself, music is an important component of my life. I wanted to include some element of it in Cahill’s life as well, and I wanted it to say something about his character. And what better music to say “loneliness” than old-school country? That’s why Cahill listens to stuff like Marty Robbins. It’s not even the slick, then-contemporary country of Garth Brooks, reflecting another anti-glamourous element here. It is music utterly unfashionable for the time.

So Cahill is a bit of a nod to the old cowboy characters from decades past. A lonesome man with a gun, setting wrongs right. A man who likes bluejeans, pickup trucks, acoustic guitars, homemade chili, cheap American beer, and pre-Nashville country music. And a man who has just lost pretty much everything and has to start over.

For the record, I hate playing acoustic guitars.