Clarissa McNair

I was born and grew up in Mississippi, graduated from Briarcliff College in New York and have set up households in half a dozen countries. I've been a researcher for CBC-TV in Toronto, a broadcaster, producer of documentaries, news writer and news reader for Vatican Radio in Rome, and worked in film in Los Angeles. I've lived in Cyprus, in Beverly Hills, in a Portuguese fishing village. I've slept in tents, in a pirogue, on houseboats, in chalets, in grass huts with lizards falling from the ceiling on me, on beaches, in palaces and in plenty of places I never want to see again. Hilarious, outrageous, surprising. From Afghanistan to Zanzibar---I've had adventures.

I love to write. The settings for my novels sweep across Europe in the 1980s--a fascinating decade of glamour and elegance and excess. The characters are often drawn from people I've met--from kings to cab drivers, from countesses to dressmakers. The plots spin on stories I've been told, things I've done or wish I'd done.

GARDEN OF TIGERS was written in Rome as I stood at my typewriter wearing a bikini and a big hat on my terrace overlooking the Tiber. A FLASH OF DIAMONDS was written in the Beau Rivage hotel in Geneva as I gazed out at that glorious silver-blue lake and Mont Blanc across the border in France. DANCING WITH THIEVES is my love letter to all things Italian. I wrote it in a fishing village on an island off the coast of Tuscany in the dead of winter overlooking a cold harbor as the halyards jingled in the wind all day and all night. Meanwhile, in Panama, Noriega was panicked. Every morning I jogged through the port, bought the Herald Tribune and based my story in real time with what was happening in Panama and what might have been happening to my eccentric Barracuda Brothers in the Nevada desert. This book is a departure from the others. It may be my favorite book, a zany caper of overlapping plots involving cocaine, too much money, fear, danger and love. Meet Take-A-Chance driving his chocolate brown Mercedes in Las Vegas, have dinner with the King of Thieves, drink prosecco with Teddy on the via Veneto--the story flies across time zones as does the money which is carefully packed in Gucci suitcases.

My nonfiction books are published under my nickname, Cici McNair. DETCTIVES DON'T WEAR SEAT BELTS and NEVER FLIRT WITH A FEMME FATALE are my tales of being a private detective, of why I became one, the characters I've met, and why I am in love with my profession.

I am extraordinarily lucky because I have not only discovered the two things in life that make me happiest but I am also doing them!