Somewhere in my early teens, I had an obsession with maps. Maybe due to books like Treasure Island, where certain adventure waited beyond every X, or perhaps ignited by a recent introduction to Dungeons and Dragons and its world of self-guided exploration, my desk became a mix of ogre lairs charted on graph paper and Auto Club road maps with the places my family and I had visited, highlighted and annotated down to the point of which rest stops were open on holidays. (Late 1980s tip: Most weren’t.) Still, no matter how many notebooks I filled, old railroad schedules I collected, or international warzones I clipped from Newsweek magazines, my fictional heroes never intersected with my real-world maps until I read Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep.
From a public library in Greenwood, Indiana, my borrowed world of crime in one hand, a map of Los Angeles in the other, I followed Phillip Marlowe from his office on Cahuenga to what was probably Geiger’s Rare Books on Hollywood Boulevard, found the very real LAPD Hollywood station on Wilcox, then slid my finger toward the ocean, looking for where someone dumped the Sternwoods’ car off the Lido Pier in Bay City. Confused, I rushed to the librarian and asked what was wrong with the map. The woman smiled with the patience of a saint, then explained that Chandler had used something called creative license to rename the city of Santa Monica.
“You can do that?” I said, my mind spinning with possibilities. “Where do I apply for this license?”
Years later, plotting my debut novel in the very real settings of Bloomington, Indiana, Los Angeles, California, and parts of the Bahamas, I found myself faced with the same dilemma as Chandler and countless other writers who create fictional crimes in real-world places: When to change from You Are Here to Here Be Monsters? (Related questions: Is it okay to take your hero to dinner at Musso & Frank’s if someone ends up face down in the scallops? Does a story about a serial killer set on an actual college campus mean the school’s reputation will suffer, or at the very least, that you’ll be kicked off the alumni newsletter?)
I sat down with six contemporary authors to see how they dealt with location in their latest novels. Whether lining up with Team Bay City or Team Santa Monica, each used their locations to take readers on thrilling adventures.
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Author: Glen Erik Hamilton
Setting: “Mercy Row” (Oregon)
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Glen Erik Hamilton’s award-winning series of Van Shaw novels (William Morrow) began by following army ranger Van from combat duty abroad to his hometown of Seattle, Washington, and continued in mappable spots throughout the Pacific Northwest. Glen’s latest, Mercy River, is set in a completely fictional town in Oregon.
I asked Glen why he chose to create Mercy River from scratch.
Hamilton: “In a word: Freedom. A fictional town in a fictional county allowed me room to play with both geography and jurisdictions. I could borrow the most dramatic features of central Oregon—ghost towns, sheer buttes, fields of jagged obsidian—and put them in closer proximity. And I could design what sort of local law enforcement would work best for the story in that dramatic landscape. Plus, there’s a tacit suggestion to the reader; If both town cops and the county sheriff’s office are invented, the possibility of corruption is more implied than it might be if I were using real departments. My lead character Van Shaw rarely trusts law enforcement as a rule, and this puts the reader closer to his point of view.”
How was writing Mercy River different than your debut Past Crimes, a book firmly grounded in your own hometown of Seattle? Do you attribute this to your growth as a writer, or simply a change in scenery?
Hamilton: “It’s nice to believe I’m getting better with every book! For Mercy River, it was the demands of the story. If a huge contingent of former and active Special Operations soldiers are going to gather for a party, it made sense to have them invade a small town with a broad rural landscape. The soldiers could exert influence on the town—and the town might make deals with them—that wouldn’t be possible in Seattle. The fun of creating a new terrain for Van’s adventures was just icing on that cake.”
“Of course, it’s more work to create a setting out of whole cloth, even if I’m using real features from that region. But just as with using Seattle, I pick a few key points about the town which ideally allow the reader an impression. Readers are sharp; they can fill in any gaps and understand the remote, insular environment of a community under pressure.”
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Author: Nicole Bross
Setting: “Soberly” (Oregon)
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Past Presence, Nicole Bross’ debut mystery (Literary Wanderlust), also adds a fictional marker to the state of Oregon. This time, the reader meets the sleepy seaside village of Soberly. In addition, a bit of paranormal goodness takes the story across both the globe and through time, to a rural mountainside village.
Bross: “This was my first foray into creating a fictional location—in other projects I’ve always found comfort in being able to root a story in concrete landmarks and details that readers might recognize. When writing Past Presence, however, I found I needed the freedom to create places from scratch so I could mold them around my characters, rather than trying to shoehorn those people into places that already exist. Further to that, the events I set in the past, such as the blizzard and subsequent famine in the little 18th century Russian village, were entirely fabricated, and I didn’t want to be accused of being a historical revisionist by assigning them to a place where they didn’t happen. In both cases, since I’m dealing with small-town settings, it seemed less important to try and immerse the reader in a real place than it did to let the location take a back seat to character development. Real places can become a sort of character of their own in novels, and I wanted to avoid that.”
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Author: Gale Massey
Setting: “Blind River”
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In Gale Massey’s The Girl from Blind River (Crooked Lane), nineteen-year-old Jamie Elders can’t wait to escape both her family name and the small-town life of Blind River.
Massey: “Creating the town of Blind River gave me the artistic freedom to develop an environment that applied constant pressure to my protagonist. There’s no safe place for Jamie Elders. She seeks refuge from the whispers and grudges that the good people of Blind River hold against her shady family, but there are also environmental threats of ice and snow and freezing temperatures. As she moves from one shelter to another, she encounters bad players. Physically placing the pawn shop in between the diner and the funeral home and around the corner from the check-cashing store ensured that Jamie was always going to run into those bad players. Everyone wants something from Jamie but she has very little to give, so these difficult interactions give the story a hefty bit of conflict and drama. She fantasizes about leaving Blind River but there is no escape for a nineteen-year-old with no resources. Eventually, Jamie has to find her way out of the grip this small town has on her and when she does, the tension escalates. Ultimately, Blind River gives the story a solid container and allows for a powerful and focused resolution.”
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Author: Gwen Florio
Setting: Montana/Mountain West
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Gwen Florio’s Lola Wicks series (Various Publishers) straddle a series of borders between Montana, the Blackfeet Nation, the Glacier National Park, and Canada.
What about the area and its many boundaries inspire you?
Florio: “First, it’s one of the most breathtakingly beautiful spots in the country, if not the world, a stunning juxtaposition of mountain and plains, sculpted by winds so fierce they occasionally shove railroad trains off their tracks. It’s a joy to describe that scenery, and the effects its harsh and demanding beauty has on its human inhabitants, lending a natural tension to many scenes. The human-drawn borders create their own made-for-fiction dilemmas, as each area—the park, the reservation, the surrounding counties and of course Canada—all have their own law enforcement agencies, often at odds with one another, a fact enthusiastically exploited by criminals. It actually leads to a sense of lawlessness in some cases: look at the way agencies have for decades shrugged and looked away from what is a real epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous women. Shameful.”
Your sense of location does more than paint a picture; you bring a segment of a culture under the reader’s eye that isn’t often seen. While fictional, what responsibility, if any, do you feel to portray these people correctly?
Florio: “That responsibility is huge, and intimidating. But I can’t imagine writing about Montana and the mountain West without mentioning the people who were here first, and remain in significant numbers, wielding increasing political and legal power. As a journalist, I’ve reported for years on reservations, so that familiarity is helpful. The biggest thing is to make sure those characters are fully fleshed out, not just cardboard stereotypes, and I’ve been gratified by the response of Native readers.”
Your latest release, Silent Hearts, a stand-alone novel set mostly in Kabul and Islamabad, comes directly from your time as a foreign correspondent. How did you reconnect with these locations and how do those cultures inform the journey?
Florio: “I started work on that book immediately after returning from my work overseas, but it took more than fifteen years for me to rewrite it into publishable form, at which point, my memory was pretty fuzzy. Thank God for Google Earth and Images: They let me take a good long look at places like Macroyan, a block of Soviet-built apartments in Kabul, or various ministries, or even things like the way men wore their turbans. During my time in country, I was very fortunate to be more or less adopted by our driver’s family in Islamabad; they invited me to various dinners and outings, and even a wedding. Likewise, in Kabul, we couldn’t get a room in the only safe hotel at the time, so stayed with a family, which gave me a great view of life behind those high courtyard walls. Most important, being a woman meant that I could talk with the women of the household, something far more difficult if not impossible for male journalists. Those women and I quizzed each other endlessly about the details of our lives, finding more similarities than I would have imagined. It was my favorite part of my time there.”
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Author: Lisa Brackmann
Setting: San Diego
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Set in several notable locations in and around San Diego, California, Lisa Brackmann’s Black Swan Rising (Midnight Ink) is less ripped-from-the-headlines, than a logical extrapolation of today’s troubling patterns into tomorrow’s terrorist attacks.
We spoke about the difficulty of bringing the worst of the worst attacks into her own city:
Brackman: “I have to admit, there were times when writing this book that I freaked myself out. For one thing, San Diego is a very safe city—the safest large city in the US in terms of violent crime. I set the book in neighborhoods that to the outside eye are about the burbiest of the burbs here, mainly Clairemont, where I went to high school. I know these neighborhoods well. I’ve walked all over them. And to consider them disrupted by gun violence was just disturbing. For example, I have a community fair in a local park in my book. I happened to pass by the inspiration for that park one Saturday and there was an actual community fair going on. And it was exactly as I’d pictured it for the book, down to the representatives from my local Congressman’s office. It was so scary to picture how easy it would be to attack this kind of space, how that kind of “random” violence is really a deliberate attack on our civil society. Similarly, having gotten involved a bit in local politics, I was impressed by how accessible many of our elected officials really are—and again, how easy that would be to disrupt (I deliberately stayed away from dramatizing some of the kinds of political events I attended because it just freaked me out too much). A representative democracy depends on this accessibility. Political violence such as that depicted in the book is a direct attack on our democracy, and something that worries me a lot—especially that as a society we have been so slow to make the connections between online hate, seemingly random mass-shootings and overt political violence.”
On a lighter note, Black Swan Rising brought a great deal of attention to San Diego’s local brewing scene. What obligations or opportunities do you feel authors with real-world settings have to travelogue?
Brackman: “I think one of the reasons people read is that they want to be transported, perhaps to a place they know well, perhaps to a place they’ve never been. So you want to be true to that setting, both for your readers who want that travelogue and for those who will bust you if you screw it up. My books tend to be set in what are considered ‘exotic’ locales, but I’ve always tried to keep in mind that for the people who live in, say, the Chinese countryside, there’s nothing ‘exotic’ about it. So you look for the ordinary in the exotic, and the exotic in the ordinary. In the case of San Diego, I think it’s been an underutilized location and one that a lot of people just don’t ‘get.’ There’s a lot more going on here than just beaches and sunshine, and I wanted to portray some of the more interesting aspects of the city that people might not know about. The craft beer scene is definitely one of them!”
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Author: Trey Dowell
Setting: Iran
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In Trey Dowell’s thriller, The Protectors (Simon and Schuster), a team of globe-trotting superheroes work to destabilize a real-world government famous not only for suppressing criticism within its own borders, but for actively tracking authors who might portray the country in less than positive light.
Dowell: “As a kid growing up in the late 70s/early 80s, I can’t tell you how disappointed I was to see Steve Austin sneaking into the Balinderry embassy, or watch Airwolf go into battle against the forces of North Limbawe. For me, fictional settings were tantamount to someone with a megaphone shouting, “YOU ARE WATCHING A TELEVISION SHOW. MAKE BELIEVE, NOTHING TO SEE HERE.” Suspending my disbelief required real-world countries facing real-world problems.”
“Therefore, it was a slam-dunk to set a large portion of The Protectors in my main character’s home country: Iran. Since very few Americans have visited Iran, I had to do a ton of research to make the place really come alive for readers. The problem with sampling a foreign culture’s food, television, art and architecture, however, is that you quickly grow to love it—which is a problem when it comes to Iran. Even if I could get a visa to go experience the country myself, it’s extremely dangerous for me to ever travel there. You see, The Protectors was, ahem slightly critical of the Iranian government…a geo-political faux pas which has, no doubt, put my name on a governmental watch list somewhere in the Iranian cultural ministry. This means the only “culture” I’d get to see in Iran would be the back of whatever van they use to transport me to prison. Not a huge deal, as Iran wasn’t on my summer itinerary…but still, sad that there are governments in the world that punish writers and artists for the simple act of creating something which doesn’t blindly follow whatever dogma they’re preaching.”
