Hamner, Linda

(Linda Elin Hamner)

PERSONAL: Married; husband's name Gary.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o St. Martin's Griffin, 175 5th Ave., New York, NY 10010. E-mail—cleoandtyrone@yahoo.com

CAREER: Author of television scripts and fiction. Script consultant for Television Corporation of Singapore.

AWARDS, HONORS: Daytime Emmy Award (with others) for outstanding writing team in a drama series, National Television Academy/Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, 1991, and Writers Guild Award, Writers Guild of America, both for Santa Barbara.

WRITINGS:

(With L. Virginia Browne) Letters from Cleo and Tyrone: A Feline Perspective on Love, Life, and Litter, illustrated by Steve Feldman, St. Martin's Griffin (New York, NY), 2000.

Writer for television series, including Another World, National Broadcasting Company (NBC), General Hospital, American Broadcasting Company (ABC), Guiding Light, Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), Santa Barbara, NBC, and Texas, NBC.

WORK IN PROGRESS: With L. Virginia Browne, an original online serial for Warner Bros.

SIDELIGHTS: Linda Hamner and L. Virginia Browne appear as themselves in their joint novel Letters from Cleo and Tyrone: A Feline Perspective on Love, Life, and Litter. However, the two women are far offscreen in the story, whose protagonists are their cats: Cleo the Divine, who lives with Hamner, and Tyrone the Great, owned by Browne. In the epistolary tale, the correspondents are the cats, who discuss everything from their mutual attraction to the art of regurgitating hairballs.

The book's initial premise is not so different from that of the popular 1920s and 1930s "archy and mehitabel" series by Don Marquis, in which the cockroach archy types notes for the cat mehitabel on Marquis's manual typewriter, and the names appear in lowercase because the correspondents could not use the shift key on the machine. However, Letters from Cleo and Tyroneinvolves a technological component that roots it firmly in its time: the two correspond via e-mail. Furthermore, their amorous dialogue and subversive attitudes toward their "mommies" (roundly criticized by both) identify Cleo and Tyrone as denizens of the post-1960s generation, worlds away from the less-ironic sensibilities of Marquis's time.

While a reviewer in Publishers Weekly noted that the authors "wring from [their premise] some moments of wicked, if painfully obvious, humor," a commentator in Kirkus Reviews was more positive, calling Letters from Cleo and Tyrone an "amusing first novel and takeoff on the old archy and mehitabel series." Sally Rosenthal wrote in Cats magazine that "while reading it, I laughed so long my cats came into my room, wondering what was so funny."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Cats, May, 2001, Sally Rosenthal, review of Letters from Cleo and Tyrone: A Feline Perspective on Love, Life, and Litter, p. 62.

Kirkus Review, September 15, 2000, review of Letters from Cleo and Tyrone.

Publishers Weekly, October 16, 2000, review of Letters from Cleo and Tyrone, p. 51.

ONLINE

Cleo and Tyrone Home Page, http://www.cleoandtyrone.com/ (September 16, 2003).