Photo: Steve Dahlgren
Patricia McConnell next to the cover of her book, 'Away to Me.'
There’s an old saw about writing what you know. Patricia McConnell, the bestselling author of nonfiction books including The Other End of the Leash and For the Love of a Dog, seems to have taken this advice to heart.
Her new novel, Away to Me (Kensington Books), is centered on a character named Maddie McGowan who, like McConnell, just happens to be an animal behaviorist who lives on a farm in Wisconsin and specializes in dogs. It is McConnell’s first foray into fiction and publishes on Feb. 24.
“I just started it as a lark,” McConnell tells Isthmus. “I love writing. I love reading fiction. I love mystery novels.” So when her work as an animal behaviorist abated and she was not ready to retire, she took the plunge. “I had a scene in my mind that turned into the first chapter, and I thought, ‘I’ll just start playing at it,’ and then it got to be more and more interesting and more and more fun and harder and challenging.”
McConnell was aided in this effort by a cadre of friends, especially Cat Warren, the bestselling author of What the Dog Knows, to whom the book is dedicated. “Like many works of fiction,” she says, “there should be multiple names [of authors] on my novel.”
Away to Me, a term used in sheepherding meaning to run counterclockwise, begins with the fatal shooting at a sheepdog trial of Maddie’s good friend and mentor, George. Was it a stray shot, or premeditated murder? As that mystery plays out, Maddie gets drawn into another, as one of her beloved dogs is snatched away, and she is determined to find him.
McConnell affirms that the stream of doggie behavior Maddie is hired to address — from fear of thunder to a tendency to attack other dogs — are drawn from McConnell’s own experience. “There wasn’t any client that I wrote about in the book that didn’t in some way resemble something” from a real situation. There were times, she acknowledges, when she had to rewrite scenes and revise plot twists when she realized it was not how a real dog or a real behaviorist would act.
And while McConnell says there are “some great books out there” about detectives who have working canines, she doesn’t know of any other novel in which the main character is an animal behaviorist and dogs are key characters. Her book overflows with love for dogs. “I adore them, cherish them, need them, live and breathe them,” Maddie says at one point. Later, she reflects, as a dog licks her face: “Puppy breath, the best smell in the world — milky, and sweetly skunky. I breathed it in like life-saving oxygen.”
Like McConnell’s excellent nonfiction books, Away to Me is deeply knowledgeable about doggy behavior. She didn’t start out with this intent, but came to embrace it as she got further into writing the book. As she puts it, “One of the reasons a lot of people read fiction is not just for the story, but because they enjoy learning something new about a field they don’t know anything about.” (For instance, did you know that a wagging tail doesn’t mean a dog is friendly? Live and learn.)
At one point, Maddie notes that “dogs are easy. People are harder.” Did McConnell feel that way in writing her book? Were the dogs easier to write about than humans? “I love that question,” she says. The answer is yes: “It was easier to write about dogs communicating, not through words, but communicating the way all dogs do, mostly through visual signals. It was easier to write about them communicating something than it was to write dialogue.”
Notably, all of the book’s non-villainous characters share a love for dogs. “That’s true,” says McConnell. “And that fits with the life of an animal behaviorist who’s on a farm, who competes in sheep dog trials, and whose friends are involved in competing in sheep trials. And you know, who also loves dogs.”
Once again, fiction mirrors real life.
Patricia McConnell is appearing with fiction writer Nickolas Butler at the Gard Theater in Spring Green on Feb. 24, 6 p.m. (tickets here), and with Madison jounalist and novelist Maggie Ginsberg at Mystery to Me in Madison on March 5, 6 p.m.
