Deadly Sanctuary

It has all the ingredients of a good mystery novel.

An elderly widow who donates $1 million, hoping to turn a beloved book into a movie. A glamorous author, determined to make a shoot happen in the scorching Arizona desert, despite squabbling between local talent and Hollywood pros. The startling revelation, just before cameras are scheduled to roll, that the money has disappeared.

The problem is that this plot isn't the outline for Phoenix writer Sylvia Nobel's next novel.

For the past year, it's been her life.

Nobel is best known as the creator of Kendall O'Dell, a feisty "flame-haired investigative reporter" who solves crimes in small-town Arizona. The four Kendall O'Dell books don't have a big-deal publisher and they've never gotten much notice from the critics, but they have plenty of devoted fans. That's surely a testament to the intricate storylines, with their ripped-from-the-headlines quality — and the books' vivid protagonist.

For years, Nobel dreamt of bringing Kendall O'Dell to the big screen. And, for a time last year, she believed filming was imminent. A loyal reader had anted up enough money to attract a Hollywood director and a professionally written script.

Then the money disappeared from the movie's bank account.

The details of where it went, and who's at fault, are bitterly contested, but it's undisputed that the project has collapsed. Today, despite months of wrangling, virtually no one involved with the project has any hope that the film production company will get the money back. Meanwhile, as Nobel attempts to beat her former partners in court, many of the biggest law firms in town have ended up with a piece of the action — a sure sign that few involved will escape without big legal bills.

The fact that the money went missing is galling. But, to Nobel, the most upsetting part is the end of her dream of bringing Kendall O'Dell to the cineplex.

"It was going to be one of the exciting things that had happened in my whole life," she says over salad at Lantana Grille in north Phoenix. "Instead, it's been a total nightmare."

Nobel is a born storyteller, a warm and engaging presence who knows just how to hold her listeners — and readers.

At 62, she has long, curly red hair, just like her heroine, and a flair for the dramatic.

Her pale green eyes widen as she pauses. She says, "I'm living one of my novels!"

As a little girl transported from Pennsylvania coal country to Cave Creek, Arizona, Sylvia Nobel dreamed of being a writer. Growing up in a big, "rather dysfunctional" family, in what was then the middle of nowhere, books were an escape. Mysteries, in particular.

"I read all of them," she says. "The grandfather of the mystery novel, Edgar Allan Poe. Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner, Daphne du Maurier, Agatha Christie, and, of course, Nancy Drew. The classics, and the entertainments, too."

But loving mysteries and getting paid to write them are two entirely different things. Sylvia Nobel was in her 50s when she first got published.

"I had known most of my life I'd be a writer," she says. "I just never got around to it because I had to raise a family." She didn't go to college; instead, she worked a secretary, a keypunch operator, a marketer, and a mom before finally getting a chance to take writing classes at Rio Salado College.

It would take another decade to find a publisher. "I got enough rejection letters to paper a room," she says, ruefully. And when she finally hit the jackpot, it wasn't in the way she'd imagined. Not at all.

For years, she'd worked on an Arizona-based mystery. She'd had an idea for a heroine, a brave, beautiful newspaper reporter named Kendall O'Dell. Her first O'Dell mystery, Deadly Sanctuary, told the story of the redhead's move from Philadelphia to a fictional Castle Valley, Arizona. There she encounters a sexy rancher, the harsh beauty of the Arizona desert — and an adoption scam involving a corrupt sheriff.

Castle Valley was based closely on Wickenburg, and Nobel mined her memories of what it was like to be a transplant from the East, startled by the monsoon, scorpions, and heat.

Castle Valley lived and breathed for her. "When I'd go away to that town, I'd be gone," she remembers. "The kids would come home from school and they'd say, 'She's gone into writer's glaze — she's not really listening.'"

But it took a romance novel to get a foot in the door with the publishing industry.

After Deadly Sanctuary was rejected by countless publishers, Nobel put the book away with a heavy heart. She wanted to be practical.

"I heard the best way to break in was to write romance novels," she recalls. "And I thought, I can write a romance novel!" Unfortunately, she hadn't done quite enough homework; as it turns out, most romance publishing houses have very specific rules about length. Nobel's manuscript was too short to fit the requirements.

"My friends said, 'Can't you just pad it?'" Nobel says. "But when it's over, it's over. I set the book aside."