Welcome to My (Fictional) Town

Lea Wait, here.

I’ve written historical novels set in real places (Wiscasset, Maine; Charleston, South Carolina; Edinburgh, Scotland) and I’ve written contemporaries (my Shadows Antique Print mysteries) set in fictional places in Maine, New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts.

Those fictional settings are ALMOST real. Some are closely based on real places. Like Shadows at the Fair, where the fair involved is almost the Rhinebeck Antiques Show in Duchess County, New York. Only, it’s not. I changed the location of the bathrooms and added a preview evening and … I re-named the show.  Maggie Summer teaches at Somerset County Community College in New Jersey, which doesn’t exist. But it MIGHT exist. Other counties in New Jersey have community colleges. And Maggie shops at malls that do exist, attended a real college, and drives on highways that anyone who knows New Jersey will recognize. (And avoid if possible.)

Fictional settings give me the freedom to put houses, roads, coffee shops, graveyards, hospitals – whatever my plot demands – wherever I want them to be. But these places can’t be jumbled together. They have to be arranged logically. They have to form a new entity. And once arranged, they can’t be scrambled. You can’t juggle a created universe.

My next Shadows book, Shadows on a Cape Cod Wedding (spring, 2013,) takes place in Winslow, on Cape Cod. No, you won’t find it on a map. But to me Winslow is a real Cape community.

Right now I’m getting ready to start a new book. But before I write a word, I need to design the place where my characters will live. Settings are critically important to me. They frame my characters’ world. I need to see and feel and even smell them.

This time my town is on a river, close to the Maine coast. It’s a year ’round community, filled with old homes, but some people live in trailers, too. It has a small downtown area, with two churches and a Green; a library and an old inn. A diner and a (usually closed) restaurant. A small bookstore which also sells Maine t-shirts. An antiques mall. A co-op art gallery. An “antique” store that sells mostly junk. A stand where tourists buy lobster rolls and ice cream cones in the summer. A beauty parlor. A town wharf and fisherman’s co-op. There’s a sunken garden ladies of the local garden club created between the granite cellar stones of a tavern that burned down in 1873. Teens hang out there at night, and they’re not there to admire the flowers. If you drove through my town quickly, you’d want to snap a picture of this classic Maine community. If you’d grown up there, you’d see it differently.

I won’t use every building or business in town, or every character I know lives there, in my book. But their presence deepens my understanding of their world. 

I’m drawing a map, so I won’t mix up where my characters live, or which direction they’ll head when visiting friends. Or enemies. The map will hang in my study as long as I’m writing the book. I’ll get to know the streets and people of this town better than I do those of the town where I receive mail.

Because this town will be where I’ll be living for the next few months.

Bully Pulpit by Sheila Simonson

Last week, I read a mystery written in the early nineties in which the viewpoint character (first person, a police chief) not only kills three innocent bystanders in the course of bringing a killer to justice but also trashes six of the first ten amendments to the Constitution, or would have, had the story been set in the U.S.  The novel was set in Canada, which has similar protections.  Since it was first person narrative, the reader was apparently supposed to empathize with the cop and even admire him, nor was there any sense that the book was porno-violence aimed at a scofflaw audience.  It was an ordinary, almost traditional mystery, not even particularly noir.  I threw the book at the wall.  I think I may be jurisprudish.

We all know the conventions of the genre.  How many times do we smile and nod as an aristocratic detective of the Golden Age permits a culprit (usually another aristocrat) to go off and commit suicide sooner than face arrest?  The detective is not a cop, so that’s okay.  Right?  One law for the connected, another for the disconnected.  The suicide gambit makes me queasy but doesn’t induce book-throwing.  Still there are limits, even with amateur detectives.

Here’s another example of the felonious sleuth.  I just read the latest in a best-selling, hardcover-in- Costco-and-Walmart series that features a cuddly amateur detective.  This sleuth is not only cuddly, she’s pious, loyal as a Labrador retriever, and endearingly klutzy.  Her cell phone battery is always dead.  She runs out of gas or trips over her galoshes at crucial moments.  She takes apple turnovers to shut-ins.  Lovable is the word.

Now, one problem professional investigators have is getting a search warrant so they can make a case against malefactors.  For a warrant they need evidence that a crime has been committed, but the evidence is locked up in the bad guy’s stronghold.  Frustrating.  So what does the cuddly sleuth of the previous paragraph do?  She sneaks into the villain’s house, breaks into his safe and office files, and steals the relevant evidence.  Fruit of the poisonous tree, you say?  Nonsense.  This cookie makes apple turnovers, remember?  Her boyfriend just happens to be a cop, duly armed, and just happens on the scene in time to blow the villain away as he foolishly objects to being robbed.

I have no quarrel at all with writers portraying bent cops or stupid cops or even vicious cops, and amateur sleuths aren’t bound by the rules of evidence.  What I have trouble with in these books is viewpoint.  The authors have used the first person viewpoint and the agreeable persona of the series sleuth to bully me into applauding acts I would despise in real life.  I detest being bullied.  Anybody else feel that way?

Sheila

The Fine Art of Murder, by Camille Minichino

This print of one my favorite paintings hangs in my office: Wheat Field, by Monet. Across from it is a poster of Dexter, with a delicate blood spatter background. They’re more alike than you’d think.

The Monet is representative of countless other landscape paintings, like those of Millet, Corot, Church, Cezanne, and Pissarro, all of which I love. I could sit in front of any of them for hours.

What’s so blog-worthy about that? Most of us relish the moments of meditation and pleasure we get from works of art.

But what I can’t figure out is this—if I were actually standing in one of these landscapes, I’d be freaking out. A wheat field? Eeuuw, I’d be scratching and itching, as well as asking, where’s the nearest Starbucks? and why do I have only 1 bar on my cellphone? So why do I have prints like this all over my house?

Bierstadt’s The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak, in our guest room, is even worse. The sun is strong. I don’t like sun. Or bugs. Or plants. And there are animals. Eeek! I’m afraid of the wild half of the animal kingdom and allergic to the tame half. Besides, they tend to add organic matter and odors to an open area like this meadow (valley? grassy knoll?), both of which I would find unpleasant if I were to stand at the focal point of this painting. I’m cringing at the thought of what would be on the soles of my shoes. And still no Starbucks, or even a family-owned bistro. Nor a convenience store to buy bathroom tissue—oh, right, there’s no bathroom in sight. No sign pointing to the nearest hospital.  Just thinking about being there, I’m hyperventilating.

My idea of roughing it on vacation: a couple of galleries at MOMA are closed, darn; my theater seats are in the balcony; and late night room service takes more than fifteen minutes.

Thinking about this phenomenon—why I love paintings that depict scenes I go out of my way to avoid—it’s a lot like my relationship with crime fiction.

I write crime fiction; I love reading and watching movies about crime. The ensemble heist, the perfect murder, the “lovable” serial killer, a juicy kidnapping or hostage situation. But I don’t want any of it to touch me in real life.

There must be a name for this syndrome?