Guest Post: Jeanne on "Location, Location, Location: A Very Personal View of the Power of Place—Part 2"

Please welcome back Jeanne of the Bristol Public Library as she has some thoughts about the importance of place in a mystery. This is part two of a two part guest post. If you missed part one last Saturday, you should go read it first and then come back here.

Location, Location, Location:  A Very Personal View of the Power of Place—Part 2

If physical description doesn’t make an impression on the geographically and directionally challenged, what does?  For me it’s cultural settings, and I particularly enjoy those books that use their location to good advantage.  Given my fondness for cozy mysteries, many of the books I read use a small town setting which is fine as long as I can discern at least the region in which the book is set.  There are some stories where I don’t know if the characters are in California or Connecticut, and it mars my enjoyment of the book if I have to stop and go back to the beginning to try to figure out where in the world I am.  I’m not a fan of generic small town. Sometimes I’ve wondered if the author has ever visited some of the locations used or if a publisher just thought it would be good to have a series set in, say, Wisconsin.

Building a sense of place is more than just repeating the name of the town or state, or sticking in some superficial or stereotypical details.  Weather is, of course, a big tip off; but again, is it really always sultry in Georgia? Or always snowing in Maine? There are some series which have never had a change in weather.  I notice it most often in books set in the South, when the weather is always sweltering. My Florida relatives assure me that it does seem chilly in January, even if their chilly is low 60s.

Laurie Cass is working her way through the seasons in her Bookmobile Cat series, with vivid snowstorms and spring mud.  Clea Simon’s Cambridge is also seasonal, though I remember best the howl of the winds and bits of ice and snow that sting the face as Dulcie Schwartz makes her way down the street in the Mister Grey series.  Anne Hillerman’s Navajo characters are used to the heat of a southwest summer, though outsiders not so much.

Food is good way of letting us know where our characters are.  If the characters always eat burgers or tuna casserole or brownies, they could be anywhere.  Throw in the occasional local delicacy, and readers are reminded of location.  In the Mainely Needlepoint Mysteries by Lea Wait, Angie chows down on comfort food of baked beans with the occasional splurge with lobster (if someone else is buying) but also eats Tex-Mex from her Arizona sojourn.  Qwill in the Cat Who series by Lilian Jackson Braun was fond of pasties, a delicacy I’d never heard of before reading those books.

Local custom and mores can also come into play.  I just finished Betty Webb’s The Puffin of Death and was delighted with the way she portrayed the Icelandic setting.  Bryndis, a local zookeeper, helps American Teddy navigate Icelandic society where flirting seems to be a general pastime and there are apps to determine if the cute person is actually a close relative. Other places have their own quirks, such as gathering at a private home for a wake, baptisms in rivers, or ethnicities that add local color.

Finally, dialog and dialect are easy ways to express a region, but a little can go a long way in that department.  Speaking strictly for myself, I prefer the use of idiom and local expression with only light dialect because it can be difficult and tiresome to read the phonetic rendering for long periods of time.  The author also runs the risk of making a character seem uneducated or ignorant, whether or not that is the author’s intent.  I like the way Carol Miller handles it in her Moonshine Mystery series: light dialect used occasionally and a bit of regional terminology gets the point across.  In the No.1 Ladies’ Detective series, McCall-Smith does a wonderful job of conveying the rhythms of speech in Botswana—or what I assume they are, since I have no first-hand knowledge.

One author who pulled it all together for me was Valerie Malmont.  Her Tori Miracle novels had an outsider bemused and/or bewildered by naming customs, peculiar foods, unfamiliar idioms, and local history, but what really came through was Malmont’s obvious love for the northern Appalachian region.  Those qualities added a lot to the story as far as I’m concerned and make her books particularly memorable.

These are just some of the things which, for me, help make a book come alive.  Your mileage may vary.

Guest Post: Jeanne on "Location, Location, Location: A Very Personal View of the Power of Place"

As a reader I tend to prefer books set in the West or Southwest because as a child my parents took me camping a lot and I have been to locations across Texas and almost every western state. You take me to say, Martha’s Vineyard, that is one thing. You move that mystery with the required adjustments to New Mexico and you already have me hooked before I open the book. I may not notice the fact that you use the same house in multiple books. But, you get the details wrong on a location I have been too such as the sunrise or a well-known landmark  and I will notice that big time. A sense of place is incredibly important to me. Please welcome back Jeanne of the Bristol Public Library as she has some thoughts about the importance of place in a mystery. This is part one of a two part guest post.

 

Location, Location, Location:  A Very Personal View of the Power of Place

Kevin has been very generous in giving me a space to ramble on about various things connected to mysteries.  Lately I’ve been thinking about places.  The main questions in a murder mystery are usually who, how, and why.  I happen to think where is an important ingredient, at least in the books I enjoy.  True, there are some books that get by without letting a reader know much about the setting beyond the necessities such as murder location and possible exits.  Those can work just fine, but for a series I like to have some idea of where in the world I am.  The inciting incident for all this was when I realized I had no idea where a particular book was set.  It was Generic Small Town USA, which was a little disappointing.

Where really encompasses a lot of things, I realized belatedly, and so this little essay has expanded accordingly.  I apologize in advance!

Houses, or buildings in general, are important.  That’s where the action is and those aforementioned exits and entrances.  Let me start by saying that I am directionally challenged.  I am terrible at spatial relations.  My house has two stories.  When I hear a noise or spy a leak in the basement, I have no idea as to what room upstairs is the point of origin.  I laughed at one my cats for peering intently down a grate and then running up the downstairs cat tree to stare up at a grate because I knew that was the wrong grate.  Of course, the cat had the last laugh because she was right and I was wrong.  She understood the layout of the house better than I did—or do.

So when I read a description of a house or village in a book, I never envision the physical layout of the setting.  Authors can get away with moving streets or rooms to their hearts’ content and I will probably never notice.  The “probably” is only in there because one book I did read recently had a character step into a room from the kitchen and I would have sworn that she couldn’t have gotten there from the kitchen, but since I’m used to being wrong about such things, it didn’t worry me unduly.

On the other hand, I have friends who definitely do not have that problem.  They can draw maps of St. Mary’s Mead and throw in a floorplan of Miss Marple’s house.  They can describe each shop and house in Three Pines. They know if an author gets it wrong, and they adore authors who provide maps or floorplans.  The latter has definitely fallen out of favor; I remember them from some of the classic locked room mysteries.  Maps, however, still show up.  The last one I noticed was in G.M. Malliet’s Max Tudor series, where endpapers show readers all the features of Nether Monkslip.

Some readers notice if an author re-uses structures.  One friend was a fan of Barbara Michael’s books, but gave up in disgust on one because “it was the same damn house” that had figured in at least two other books. (I, of course, noticed nothing.)

While architecture doesn’t make much of an impression on me (see spatial relations above), a few well-chosen details of structure or furnishings can convey a feeling for an area.  Breezeways in houses or the occasional pie safe or gingerbread trim give clues.  Of course, just say the word “brownstone” and New York pops into mind.  I couldn’t even tell you what a real brownstone looks like, but Rex Stout made that description such an integral part of the Nero Wolfe novels that I have a knee-jerk reaction to the term.

One house I do picture is the one inhabited by Dixie Hemingway in the Cat Sitter Mysteries by Blaize and John Clement.  Dixie shares a house with her brother and his partner, but she lives in an apartment over the garage.  I couldn’t draw you a diagram, but I feel I know the house well enough to borrow Dixie’s bathroom should the need arise.

At this juncture, I decided to take pity’s sake on the readers and save my comments on non-building aspects of place for another post.  You’re welcome.