“The young protagonist is Rennie Stride, a newspaper reporter (something I never was, and kind of regret) who seems to be the Angel of Death’s groupie, at least where rock death is concerned. Everywhere she goes, somebody turns up dead, and she has to check it out. She’s not a detective, so that’s a little limiting, but as a reporter she can ask questions and poke around in ways that cops can’t, and she’s very, very observant.

“Her mandatory sidekick is Prax McKenna, a bi superstar who’s a kind of combo Janis Joplin/Grace Slick clone, and the mandatory love interest is Turk Wayland, another superstar, an Eric Clapton clone, only without the drug problems.

“As you can probably tell, I’m having big fun with these.”

With the infamous scenes and provocative titles, I couldn’t resist asking if there were any “veiled truths” woven into the plots.

“Not really. All the ‘truths’, such as they are, are pretty naked. Good ones and less good ones alike. The characters, of course, are fictional. Rennie is not me, and Turk is certainly not Jim. And back in the actual day, there weren’t any big dramatic rock murders of the sort I cook up.

“But the band dynamics, the record company rip-offs, the personal stuff: that’s all very real indeed. And a lot of it was not very nice —which makes it absolutely perfect for the series.”

While on the subject of writing, I got into the topic of her book Strange Days, published in 1992, a year after Oliver Stone came out with his Doors movie. It’s a riveting work that covers virtually every aspect of her relationship with Jim Morrison. I asked her what the reaction to the book was. 

“Thank you for appreciating it. Well, reaction depends on who you are, and if you’re too smart to have fallen for the ‘Ballad of Jim and Pam’ that assorted ignoramuses and apologists and people with personal and money-driven agendas have tried to cram down the public’s throat for the past 40 years.

“Most people with half a brain realized long ago that Jim couldn’t possibly have been the drunk, drug-besotted creature that his (male) biographers put out there for public consumption. Where would the songs and poems have come from, if he was stoned all the time? Short answer: they wouldn’t and he wasn’t.

“Days got very good reviews, except from a few morons with personal axes to grind at my expense. But readers were thrilled, at least many thousands of them have told me so, to hear what Jim was really like, and that he had a real relationship with someone who was on his own level, and who wouldn’t take crap from him or play games but called him on his B.S. and loved him enough to tell him…someone whom he loved enough to marry. And anyone who read some of my reviews of his work and still wanted to put a wedding ring on my finger was not only a man in love but a very brave man indeed.”

The marriage. Of all aspects of her story about her relationship with Morrison, this is arguably the one event over which she receives the most heat from her critics. Among the more serious Doors fans, there are those who side with Patricia that the ceremony legitimately and legally wedded her to Morrison, and there are those who don’t agree and challenge her from a variety of perspectives, the most consistent one being that the marriage wasn’t legally recognized.

It’s on that point that I ask Patricia how she answers her critics. Her response is lengthy and detailed.

“Actually, according to New York State case law, our marriage could be considered a valid one. There was a court case, Persaud vs. Balram, in which a Hindu man sought to have himself declared never married because he and his wife had not obtained a marriage license and because the Hindu priest who performed their purely religious ceremony, before witnesses, was not authorized to perform marriages in New York State.

“Well, the judge ruled that the man was indeed married, that his marriage had been a legal one despite those issues, and if he wanted to be lawfully shed of his wife he would have to go through a legal divorce like everybody else.

“Jim and I were in a similar situation: we too had no license and the ceremony was a purely religious one, though carried out by a Presbyterian minister empowered to perform marriages in NY State.

“So, according to this case (which two separate lawyers have brought to my attention), and this wasn’t the only one or even the first one, I consider that Jim and I were married. I simply choose not to pursue it and take it to court, because I don't want people's mucky hands all over our private life, because I don't grub in the gutter for money, and because I want to protect the identities of the officiant and witness. And most importantly, because I want to protect Jim’s and my privacy, the few scraps of it we still have left. There are things in my possession which Jim is the last person to have touched, apart from me, and they’re going to stay that way.