Casey Dennis, the author of the Tanzi mystery series set in Vermont and Florida, does not arrive at Yama restaurant in West Lebanon wearing the Hawaiian luau shirts favored by his protagonist, ex-cop Vince Tanzi. He drives a pickup truck, not the Taurus SHO performance sedan in which Vince Tanzi trails suspects.
And as far as this reporter knows, he has not slipped out to the parking lot to place a GPS tracker on the underside of her won’t-pass-the-next-inspection minivan.
Nor is he, as they say, packing heat. Unless you count the dollop of wasabi, the Japanese mustard, he inadvertently swallows during lunch, which makes him snort and shake his head from side to side.
In fact, Dennis, an independent financial adviser who used to play the bass guitar in the rock band Dr. Burma and now plays in the bands Stone Cold Roosters and Linda B. and the Barn Cats, is dressed in Friday casual.
Tie, button-down shirt, but no suit: the kind of formal informal wear that Tanzi, who isn’t exactly his alter ego, might well mock.
Dennis, who lives in Hanover in the winter and on Lake Morey in the summer with his wife and 10-year-old daughter (he has a grown son and daughter from his first marriage), began work on his first book Tanzi’s Heat in 2011.
An omnivorous and lifelong reader of mysteries, Dennis had it in mind for many years that he also wanted to write one.
As a graduate of Middlebury College who moved to the Upper Valley in 1981, Dennis, who is now 65, wanted to set a mystery in Vermont.
He grew up in New Canaan, Conn., and spent time as an AFS exchange student at high school in Argentina, where he learned Spanish. He studied English literature and creative writing at Middlebury, but switched to a major in Spanish.
He also had family ties to Florida — a late uncle was a deputy sheriff in Vero Beach, the so-called “black sheep” of the family who left WASPy New Canaan to go into the Air Force and then became a cop. Over the years, Dennis became familiar with Florida. He visits Vero Beach once a year, where he still has family.
In setting up the parameters of his mysteries he liked the contrast between a state that people associate largely with such rustic attractions as cows, maple syrup and skiing, and one that, in the words of Floridian and Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Dave Barry, may have only six percent of the nation’s population “but produces 57 percent of the nation’s weirdness.”
To outsiders, cows, maple syrup and skiing may represent the iconic version of Vermont but Dennis likes the state’s often under-reported rougher edges and lonelier outposts, particularly near the Canadian border.
“I think Vermont is rich in beauty, quirks and subtleties — and not-so-subtleties,” he said.
But it wasn’t until he met the writer and workshop leader Joni Cole, who began the Writer’s Center in White River Junction and encouraged him to write the book, that he really began the hard work of pounding out a draft.
“She took me on and I don’t know what I would have done without her,” he said. Cole helped him to realize that the first draft doesn’t have to be, and assuredly will not be, perfect.
So he battled his way through, influenced by such fictional tough guys as John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee and Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe.
Tanzi doesn’t have the unflappable cool of McGree or Marlowe. He’s impulsive and he screws up — frequently. Not surprisingly, given the history of the private eye genre, he has an eye for women and a sardonic humor. All of the above tendencies get him into worlds of trouble.
Along the way in the first novel Tanzi becomes romantically involved with a client and also befriends and hires a hacker, a wise-cracking teenager (is there any other kind?) who can get into databases that Tanzi can’t.
“I liked the idea of a flawed protagonist. There are many PI books where the lead character is infallible,” Dennis said.
Dennis has written three more Tanzi books under the name C.I. Dennis (Charles Ingram): Tanzi’s Ice was the second in the series; Tanzi’s Game and Tanzi’s Luck followed. He is now at work on a yet-to-be-titled fifth, which he hopes to bring out early in 2018.
He also has written two books under the name Zig Davidson.
His books are available as downloads through Amazon Kindle, and as paperbacks through Amazon, Barnes & Noble and the Norwich Bookstore.
For him publishing through Amazon has been a good deal, Dennis said. There’s a 70 percent royalty, and while he has to come up with his own publicity, the fact is that most writers published by the big trade houses have to hustle to do their own marketing anyway.
According to Amazon rankings, Dennis’ books are ranked No. 88 in the mystery, thriller and suspense private investigator category, No. 98 in the Kindle eBook mystery, thriller and suspense private eye category and No. 270 in the eBook Crime Fiction category. Which, considering the crowded field of crime fiction, is a considerable achievement.
On Aug. 7, Tanzi’s Game reached the No. 1 spot on Amazon Kindle, thanks to BookBub, an online service that alerts readers to limited-time-offers for discounted and free ebooks.
Dennis writes in the early morning and late at night, before and after work, and after his youngest daughter has gone to sleep. He would like to turn out a book each year. That he has attracted a loyal following is not what he expected when he first began.
“It feels like a stroke of tremendous good luck. Doing something like this on my own is a whole different thing. Putting yourself out there solo, rather than in an ensemble, is pretty exciting for me because I’m not that way by nature,” he said.
Nicola Smith can be reached at nsmith@vnews.com.