Cannon, Eileen E(mily) 1948-

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CANNON, Eileen E(mily) 1948-

(Taffy Cannon, Emily Toll)

PERSONAL:

Born December 1, 1948, in Chicago, IL; daughter of Joseph Phillip (a surgeon) and Mildred Eileen (a nurse; maiden name, Toll) Cannon; married William Christian Kamenjarin (an attorney), July 15, 1973; children: Melissa. Education: Duke University, A.B. (political science; with distinction), 1970, M.A. T., 1971.

ADDRESSES:

Home—P.O. Box 2520, Carlsbad, CA 92018. Agent—Jane Chelius Literary Agency, 548 2nd St., Brooklyn, NY 11215.

CAREER:

Writer.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Academy Award nomination for live action short subject, 1975, for Doubletalk.

WRITINGS:

Mary's Child, Bookcraft (Salt Lake City, UT), 1997.

(Coauthor) Minerva!: The Story of an Artist with a Mission, Bookcraft (Salt Lake City, UT), 1997.

The Christmas Creche, Bookcraft (Salt Lake City, UT), 1998.

Women Testify of Jesus Christ, Bookcraft (Salt Lake City, UT), 1998.

The Little Book of Big Ideas about Hope, Eagle Gate (Salt Lake City, UT), 2000.

Gatherings: Favorite Writings, Bookcraft (Salt Lake City, UT), 2000.

Adversity, Bookcraft (Salt Lake City, UT), 2000.

(Compiler) Five-Star Recipes from Well-Known Latter-day Saints, Eagle Gate (Salt Lake City, UT), 2002.

Also contributor to sound recording Sunshine for the Latter-day Saint Mother's Soul: Stories to Brighten Your Day and Gladden Your Life, Eagle Gate, 2000. Author of screenplay Doubletalk, 1975.

FICTION

(Under pseudonym Taffy Cannon) Convictions: A Novel of the Sixties, Morrow (New York, NY), 1985.

Mississippi Treasure Hunt (young adult novel), Juniper (New York, NY), 1996.

(Under pseudonym Taffy Cannon) Guns and Roses: An Irish Eyes Travel Mystery Set in Colonial Williamsburg, Perseverance Press (Santa Barbara, CA), 2000.

(With Rebecca Rothenberg; under pseudonym Taffy Cannon) The Tumbleweed Murders: A Claire Sharples Botanical Mystery, Perseverance Press (Santa Barbara, CA), 2001.

(Under pseudonym Emily Toll) Murder Will Travel, Berkeley Prime Crime (New York, NY), 2002.

(Under pseudonym Taffy Cannon) Open Season on Lawyers: A Novel of Suspense, John Daniel (Santa Barbara, CA), 2003.

(Under pseudonym Emily Toll) Murder Pans Out, Berkeley Prime Crime (New York, NY), 2003.

"NAN ROBINSON" MYSTERY NOVEL SERIES; UNDER PSEUDONYM TAFFY CANNON

A Pocketful of Karma, Carrol & Graf (New York, NY), 1993.

Tangled Roots, Carrol & Graf (New York, NY), 1995.

Class Reunions Are Murder, Carrol & Graf (New York, NY), 1996.

SIDELIGHTS:

In 1985 Eileen E. Cannon, writing under the pseudonym Taffy Cannon, published her debut novel, Convictions: A Novel of the Sixties, which is about an era twenty-five years in her past. Since then, she has written several more mysteries, including Mississippi Treasure Hunt for the young adult market. In addition to fiction, Cannon is also the author of the Academy Award-nominated screenplay for the short film Doubletalk.

Convictions is the tale of two young finishing-school friends who room together at Duke University during the 1960s and become drawn into the turbulence of the era. The narrator, Laurel Hollingsworth, looks back from the perspective of the late 1970s at her friend Prentiss Granger, a beautiful and intelligent textile heiress forced underground by her accidental involvement in a murder. Cannon's portrait of the mood and feel of the era includes the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, the gap between traditional parents and rebellious, spoiled children, bomb plots, the FBI, and the acceptance of "free love" that triggers Prentiss's ultimate need for an abortion. It also offers "a compelling sense of place," according to Los Angeles Times Book Review contributor Marina Hirsch. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly commented that Cannon's success in capturing the atmosphere of the 1960s was due in part to a narrator who is "so well-developed as a flesh-and-blood, humorous and self-deprecating commentator."

In 1993 Cannon published A Pocketful of Karma, her first mystery novel and the first in a series featuring attorney Nan Robinson, an investigator for the California State Bar. In A Pocketful of Karma, Robinson's former secretary, Debra LaRoche, seems to be missing, and in searching for her the litigator-turned-investigator is drawn into the wilds of California popular culture: rock star groupies, Hollywood muscle boys, and past-life hypnotists. Robinson has doubts about hypnotic regressions and suspects several employees of the Past Lives Institute of murder, but she nevertheless finds herself attracted to Jonathan, the institute's director. Debra's body is eventually discovered in the trunk of the secretary's own car; her estranged husband also turns up dead, and Robinson herself becomes a target of Debra's mysterious assassin. Wilson Library Bulletin reviewer Gail Pool said Cannon "plays up her southern California setting well, distinguishing its identity and particular brands of looniness" from those in the rest of the country. A Publishers Weekly reviewer commented that "Cannon's skeptical heroine and her elusive villain stake out the wilds of L.A. in an auspiciously flavorsome foray."

In 1995's Tangled Roots, Cannon shifts the scene a bit farther south to San Diego, where a flower nursery owner has been murdered and Robinson's brother-in-law, another flower grower, is the leading suspect. Attorney Robinson thinks her brother-in-law an unlikely perpetrator, but his gun and a wrapper from the unusual brand of gum he favors are found at the crime scene. Matters become more complex when it is learned that his pregnant wife once had an affair with the murder victim. Robinson's investigations lead her into a tangle of family relations, greenhouse employees, an amusement park conglomerate, and Anglo-Hispanic relations. Near the end, Cannon's sleuth, whom Wilson Library Bulletin reviewer Gail Pool described as "sharp" and "extremely appealing," almost becomes the fifth victim. The third book in the "Nan Robinson" series, Class Reunions Are Murder, has attorney Robinson returning to Illinois for her twenty-year high school reunion where former class tramp Brenda Blaine surprises her first by showing up, and then again by being murdered.

In 1996, the same year that Class Reunions was released, Cannon also published the young-adult novel Mississippi Treasure Hunt. The novel finds thirteen-year-old Vangie and her brother leaving their home in Malibu to visit their father and stepmother in Minnesota. While his children are visiting, Vangie's dad finds out that he has inherited an estate in Mississippi, so a summer in Minnesota quickly becomes a trip to the South. In a desk in the house her father inherits, Vangie discovers an old letter that alludes to the whereabouts of a mysterious treasure. She, her brother, and their grandfather solve the mystery with persistence and much help from the local library. Kliatt contributor Gerrie Human called Cannon's Mississippi Treasure Hunt "an ingeniously plotted mystery with realistic YAs portrayed."

A few years after Mississippi Treasure Hunt was published, Cannon, still writing as Taffy Cannon, started a planned new series of mysteries featuring ex-police officer Roxanne Prescott. The first book in the series is Guns and Roses: An Irish Eyes Travel Mystery Set in Colonial Williamsburg. After her partner is killed, Prescott tries to take a break from murder and mayhem by going on leave and working for her aunt's tour guide business. Taking a group of tourists to Colonial Williamsburg on a history and gardens tour (which she calls the "guns and roses" tour), she unfortunately finds she cannot escape from criminals when one of her group is murdered. Although Cannon follows the tried-and-true mystery format in which a clever detective is surrounded by suspects with possible motives for the killing, reviewers complimented Guns and Roses for its satisfying storyline and well-drawn setting. Library Journal contributor Rex E. Klett acknowledged Cannon's "predictable characters" but enjoyed the "nicely orchestrated plot"; and Booklist critic John Rowen observed that the author filled the tale "with all manner of colorful background, from southern history to details about the American Girl doll series."

In what a Kirkus Reviews critic dubbed a "brightly malicious tale," Cannon's Open Season on Lawyers: ANovel of Suspense features a clever murderer who targets attorneys who have made a name for themselves by winning large settlements in dubious cases. The killer bumps off the victims in ways strangely germane to the case with which the lawyer was associated. For example, a lawyer who defeated a plaintiff burned by a cup of coffee at a restaurant is murdered by being boiled to death in his hot tub; another lawyer dies when he is poisoned with botulism after he helps a guilty caterer fend off a food poisoning case. Although some people might sympathize with the killer's motive of eliminating the country's most unsavory lawyers, Cannon's detective Joanna Davis of the Los Angeles Police Department is determined to track down and lock up her clever opponent.

Cannon has also written two mystery novels under a new pen name, Emily Toll: Murder Will Travel and Murder Pans Out. Harking back to Guns and Roses, both books feature a tour guide, although this time her name is Lynne Montgomery. In the former book, Montgomery uncovers a murder while giving a tour in the Sonoma Wine Country, and in the latter she is guiding a group of school teachers through California's Gold Rush country when an innkeeper is suddenly killed. In addition to these books, Cannon also has completed a book that was started by a friend of hers, the late Rebecca Rothenberg. This novel, The Tumbleweed Murders: A Claire Sharples Botanical Mystery, is about a plant pathologist who finds herself embroiled in a murder in California's Central Valley.

Cannon once told CA: "I always loved to write, but as a child it never occurred to me that I could be a writer. I thought writers were somehow anointed at birth and since I hadn't been, I would have to find a real job. I kept looking for careers that would integrate writing until I discovered, in my mid-twenties, that writers were simply people who decided to write and then did so. Thus began an odyssey of challenge, adventure, creativity, and penury.

"Over the past quarter-century, I've tried just about every type of writing but advertising, which always seemed to be an immoral application of any gifts I might have (see penury, above). Along the way I supported myself as everything from a carnival barker to a professional feminist, accumulating material and moving through worlds I might never have otherwise encountered. I've never 'studied' writing, and I don't think it's something that can really be taught. Still, there are certain skills that can be acquired by writing and writing and then writing some more. It is an evolutionary process, and everything I do is built on what I've done before.

"From journalism I learned the importance of solid research, the significance of the single telling detail, that writer's block is a non-issue on deadline and that once you have your lead, a story or scene will write itself. From screenwriting, I learned structure, pacing, visualization and that every word of dialogue should accomplish something. These different skills have come together in writing fiction, which provides all of the excitement of journalism without the constraint of having to tell the truth. Storytelling is magical to me, and the process of writing a wondrous exploration. To create people and worlds and events (and even commit the occasional murder) is a marvelous luxury, and one I cherish. Writing fiction allows me to explore issues and places and situations that I find interesting, and to call it 'work' with a straight face. It never gets easier, but it's always exciting and each new project presents unexpected joys and challenges. In the end, however, it all comes down to a simple truth: I write because I can't not write."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Detecting Women Two, Purple Moon (Dearborn, MI), 1996.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, February 15, 1993, p. 1038; February 1, 1995, pp. 992, 996; January 1, 2000, John Rowen, review of Guns and Roses: An Irish Eyes Travel Mystery Set in Colonial Williamsburg, p. 882.

Kirkus Reviews, April 15, 1985, p. 335; January 1, 1993, p. 24; January 1, 1995, p. 27; January 15, 2002, review of Open Season on Lawyers: A Novel of Suspense.

Kliatt, September, 1996, p. 6.

Library Journal, June 1, 1985, p. 142; February 1, 1993, p. 115; January, 1995, p. 142; February 1, 2000, Rex E. Klett, review of Guns and Roses, p. 120.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, August 25, 1985, p. B1; August 15, 1993, p. 9.

Publishers Weekly, May 10, 1984, p. 221; May 10, 1985, Sybil Steinberg, review of Convictions: A Novel of the Sixties, p. 221; January 11, 1993, p. 53; January 30, 1995, p. 88; February 12, 1996, p. 78.

Wilson Library Bulletin, May, 1993, p. 99; February, 1995, p. 73.