Almost immediately, Dolores realized that cozy detectives had gimmicks. "One of the women in the group was an auto mechanic and had worked in Beverly Hills, and she was using all that," she says. "It began to seem as if you needed that type of experience to write a good novel, but all I had done was work for laundry-trade publications, and when I told people, their eyes glazed over. But the group convinced me to try a dry cleaner/detective. And then I remembered I had interviewed a cleaner in Marin County who was struggling with bloodstains and there had been a murder on Mount Tamalpais. I don't know that the two were connected, but I sure started thinking about it."
Knowing that amateur detective novels are usually sold as a series, Dolores came up with Taken to the Cleaners, Hung Up to Die and A Dress to Die For, the first three Mandy Dyer book titles, outlined their plots and sent a package to a New York agent she'd heard was looking for properties. Luckily for her, the agent was a woman whose very reputation depended on a wardrobe of suits that were always immaculately cleaned and pressed.
James Bludworth
Out, damned spot: Dolores Johnson comes clean about mystery writing.
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"She liked my series because, as she told me, her dry cleaner was the most important person in her life," Dolores recalls. In fact, she quickly sold the three-book package, followed by another two-book deal, and officially became a fiction writer.
Typing late into the night, using work habits that are "just not very good at all," Dolores has been cranking out Mandy Dyer books at the rate of about one every eight months. At the mystery-book conventions held for fans, she is often approached by someone yelling, "Oh, the dry-cleaning lady!" Dolores, whose few dry-cleanable garments are the ones she wears when appearing before her readers, is generous with autographs. Sometimes she even gets a fan letter. "One woman chastised me for always dressing Mandy in tans and blacks," she says. "She wanted her in chartreuse next time."
Possibly -- but right now, like the fabric of her next case, Mandy's outfit is a closely guarded secret. Meanwhile, Dolores, ever conscious of the evolving industry facts, continues to file reports for American Drycleaner.
"Yes, dry cleaning by appointment!" begins a recent Dolores Johnson feature titled, yes, "Drycleaning by Appointment," in whose depths she manages to mention Matisse, Diaghilev, the painstaking process of cleaning ancient Navajo rugs and the fact that her subject, Jerry Goldstone of Northridge, California, keeps a gallery of all the brides whose dresses he's cleaned -- at $200 per -- referring to them as "my little girls." Of course, knowing her audience, she's up on the technical details: "His equipment includes a 35-pound washer/extractor, a 50-pound reclaimer, and a 14-cartridge filter with four extra carbon filters so he can have 'plenty of filtration.'" The story ends with a gripping account of a touch-and-go lipstick-stain removal, for which Goldstone asked no payment.
You'd think Goldstone, at the very least, would have written two or three fan letters to Johnson. After all, she's elevated dry cleaning to an art.
But Dolores comes clean. "I seldom hear a word," she says. "It's as if I didn't exist."
