When Murder in Bel-Air, Cara Black’s 19th Aimee Leduc mystery, arrived in March, I put everything aside and commenced reading. I admit, it was tempting to flip through the book to find the two words I was looking for, but I wanted to come across them just as any reader would: in the course of the prose. I found them on page 219, on the first page of the chapter “Friday, 2 P.M.,” nine rows from the top. The words are “Nancie Clare.” My name. A crime fiction fangirl’s dream come true.
Not to be precious about it, but I’ve seen my name in print before: on bylines for articles I’ve written; on two books; at various levels on magazine mastheads. And don’t get me wrong, it’s a thrill and then some each and every time. But getting a byline or being on a masthead is a byproduct of work, or at least it should be. Having a character named for you is different. It comes from the good graces of a writer in the process of creating a character. It’s an incredible gift to the person whose name is being used, it’s getting an alter ego. It’s you, only different.
How do the Nancies stack up against each other? Cara Black’s Nancie Clare is a CIA agent, which I assure you I’m not. Cara’s descriptions, especially about fashion, are always razor sharp. About Nancie, she writes, “She was mouselike in a brown wool coat, matching Monoprix scarf, and worn tan boots.” After Nancie tells Aimee she’s part of the liaison team at the American Embassy, Aimee concludes, rightly, that Nancie is CIA and has, “a horrific American accent with barely passable grammar.” That part about a horrific accent is right for sure only—because I’m an Anglophone from Montreal—my accent is more Quebecois than American and, when I’m in Paris, citizens wince when I speak. Being about average in height and a bit more than average in weight, with brown hair and brown eyes, mousey is not too far off the mark. I don’t, however, wear brown—ever—but I do love Monoprix stores, which are sort of the equivalent of Target only French, meaning in the food section you can find excellent pates and the scarves, while not Hermes, are usually silk and pretty darn nice. But, once again, if it were me, while my Monoprix scarf might match my coat, it wouldn’t be brown.
Cara doesn’t have much call for American names, she said. In fact, I may be only her second American character. But she knew that there was going to be an American CIA field agent in Murder in Bel-Air, and by lucky chance—for me—we ran into each other at a writers’ conference in 2017. This American CIA character would be very good at her job, tracking down Aimee, who is no slouch at staying under the radar. Nancie Clare’s, the CIA agent’s, methodology was inspired by what Cara learned from hearing Jonna Mendez, the former CIA Chief of Disguise (yes, it’s a real title for a crucial job), speak. Field agents, Mendez said, are people who are masters of not making an impression; people who can evaporate into a crowd; people who know how to change the small things on the fly while walking through teeming throngs. They are the people no one can remember were there. Nancie Clare, an American from Ohio, was able to track down Aimee Leduc, a detective who prides herself on her own disguise and evasion capabilities, on her home turf. Nancie Clare was able to shake Aimee’s complacency. Nancie Clare has skills. Cool.
***
And why me? Well, I’ve known Cara for almost a decade. When I was a fancy-pants editor in chief of a monthly magazine published by a major city newspaper, every year we did a “mystery” issue, devoted to the genre across all its platforms: novels, films, television and graphic novels. A who’s who of genre writers contributed: Megan Abbott, Michael Connelly, Robert Crais, Sara Gran, T. Jefferson Parker, and Don Winslow to name just a few. In the 2012 Mystery issue, we did a photo essay about the real guns fictional detectives carried, with the author writing about his or her tool of the trade in the character’s voice. I wanted so badly to include Cara’s Aimee Leduc because she carries a Beretta Nano, which is small enough to fit into whichever designer bag Aimee might be carrying at the time. It turns out that when you work for a big-cheese publication, you have to follow the rules. And there are lots and lots of rules associated with taking photographs of guns, especially with the procurement of the weapons. To photograph guns, you have to have an armorer who is a licensed gun guardian, the facility has to be secure and you have to have additional security. At the time, Beretta Nanos were not available in California. A couple of people offered to FedEx me the weapon (firing pin removed!). My boss freaked. That’s what you get when you ask permission instead of begging forgiveness. So, there was to be no Beretta Nano in the, um, shoot. Shoot. That was the downside. The upside was Cara and I became pals.
Until the late 1960s, there was an official list of saint’s names approved by the French government that were to be used for first names; lots and lots of Marie-Jeanne’s, Jeanne-Marie’s, Jean-Pierre’s and Jean-Louis’s.
When I asked Cara about how she names her characters in general and why she named one for me in particular, she told me naming the French characters was more of a challenge than might be expected. Until the late 1960s, there was an official list of saint’s names approved by the French government that were to be used for first names; lots and lots of Marie-Jeanne’s, Jeanne-Marie’s, Jean-Pierre’s and Jean-Louis’s. So, since the Aimee Leduc series takes place in the last decade of the 20th century, to avoid the confusion that a surfeit of characters with similar first names would cause, those characters who would have been born in the ’60s or before, are often referred to by their last name. For research, Cara lugged home a suitcase full of late 1990’s Paris phone books, conveniently broken down by arrondissements, that a friend of hers was purging. The old directories are treasure trove of names and businesses that she uses in her arrondissement-specific series. As for why she named a character Nancie Clare, Cara wrote, “You have the perfect name for her…you’re more extroverted, but I thought ‘what if you weren’t’ and I could invert you.”
(Eventually the French government loosened the restrictions on first names. In the wake of this new freedom, Cara told me that there was a wave of names, mostly for girls, taken from American prime-time soaps such as Dynasty and Dallas. All those Sue Ellen’s, Pam’s, Alexis’s and Krystle’s. Sacré bleu!)
***
The names of lots of real people have ended up in crime fiction novels. In her second downtown L.A. bicycle cop mystery, Edgar Award-winner Naomi Hirahara named a Latino gardener Ed Fuentes. In real life, Fuentes penned the “View from a Loft” blog that covered the Little Tokyo area of L.A. About Ed, Naomi wrote in an email, “When you are part of a community newspaper’s legacy, real-life characters often cross your path.” Of Ed’s untimely passing earlier this year at age 59, Naomi said, “I was glad that in my simple way, I was able to mark that he had been important in my life.”
Naomi added that names are crucial to her, saying that she can’t go forward with a story until she gets the right name. And she only uses names of people she likes, even for villains, noting that “I don’t want my novel world to be polluted with any kind of negativity.” For her about-to-be-published Iced in Paradise: A Leilani Santiago Hawai’i Mystery, (September 2019, Prospect Park Press), Naomi said she was swimming in different waters. About Leilani, Naomi says she’s, “Filipina/Japanese/white and I wanted to use a non-Japanese Filipino last name. I chose Santiago for two reasons: [it’s] the surname of a poet friend, plus I like that it has Latin roots.”
When I thought about other people who had lent their names to fictional characters, Hector Dejean immediately came to mind. In his day-to-day, Hector is the Associate Director of Publicity for Minotaur Books. Which means he’s met more than his fair share of crime fiction writers. And, let’s face it, he has a cool name. So cool, in fact, that Olen Steinhauer, (The Last Tourist, winter 2020), named one of the main characters in Berlin Station, his spy thriller series that aired on Epix, Hector Dejean. The name, Olen wrote in an email, “…has such a great ring to it. ‘Hector’ has a primal feel, a name you would have heard in Ancient Rome attached to a gladiator, while Dejean smells like French aristocracy…I needed names for my two central characters. One needed to be quiet and somewhat bland—thus ‘Daniel Miller’—while the other needed to be complex, a contradiction of violence and erudition. ‘Hector Dejean’ seemed to fit the bill perfectly.” Olen did ask Hector if it was okay to use his name and Hector gave an enthusiastic “yes.”
When I asked Olen if he’d named characters for real people in other works, he replied “I’ve only done [it] a handful of times, and always with minor characters and to friends who I knew and would get a kick out of it. They might have said ‘no’ if I asked, but I never did!” Otherwise, Olen’s approach to naming characters is about one-hundred-and-eighty degrees different from Naomi’s. “I very often inserts ‘[name]’ or ‘[name 1/2/3]’, because I never come to writing prepared for the job of naming and don’t want to stop to … figure out each one. When I do name, I use online lists, or quickly browse newspapers for names that stand out. There’s no particular rhyme or reason to it—by the time I’m looking for names I know something about the character, and so I go with what feels appropriate,” Olen writes.
In fact, Hector Dejean might be one of the most namechecked real person in crime fiction.
Hector Dejean told me that he did think it was cool to have a character, a CIA operative for that matter, with his name. But the thought did pass through his mind that “no one will probably see it.” Well, not exactly. For the three-season run of Berlin Station, Rhys Ifans gave the character the “contradiction of violence and erudition” that Olen visualized. Lots and lots of people have seen it. But, Hector told me, although Olen’s Hector Dejean might be the most front-and-center, other crime fiction authors have used his name. In fact, Hector Dejean might be one of the most namechecked real person in crime fiction. The multiple award-winning writer Julia Spencer-Fleming used Hector’s name for a particularly unsavory villain in Through the Evil Days. So unsavory in fact, Hector wondered that if his name was Googled, a description of him as someone who traffics in human organs might be the result, something the real Hector definitely does NOT do, although the bad guy in Spencer-Fleming’s book does. Additionally, you can find Gregg Hurwitz’s Evan Smoak beating up a thug named Hector Dejean, and in Steve Hockensmith’s 2016 Holmes on the Range mystery, World’s Greatest Sleuth!, Hector Dejean is cited as the man who caught the world’s largest catfish, as displayed at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Hector Dejean gets around the crime fiction world—and on multiple platforms at that.
Yes, writers often auction the naming rights to a character for charities. But even in those circumstances, they put a great deal of thought into what character gets that name. Because, whatever the source of the name, writers of fiction expend a great deal of care in the creation of their characters. This is probably something that every reader knows on a certain level without realizing it. But think about it: a character’s name is often a window into who this person is. Thackery’s Becky Sharp and any number of Dickens’ characters (I’m especially fond of the cast of Bleak House, Lady Dedlock, John Jarndyce: delicious) announce their dispositions from the get go. We get to know these characters, get into their heads and often their souls. In fact, instead of the inevitable “outliner or pants-er” question at book festivals, I wish someone would ask about how writers name characters. For those of us who are lucky enough to contribute our name to a character, it’s a form of immortality. For all readers of crime fiction the characters are our gateways into the stories; our Virgils into that writer’s universe.
Featured image: The Lovers, Rene Magritte (oil on canvas)
