Meg Chittenden Waves
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A Place by Any Other Name is Still a Place

Earl Emerson's Thomas Black series was set in Seattle. G.M.Ford's sleuth, Leo Waterman, prowled the streets of the same city along with his sobriety challenged sidekicks. Rhys Bowen's Molly Murphy goes after bad guys in turn of the century New York, and Linda Fairstein's Alex Cooper does the same thing in the same city in the present day. Don Bruns takes us to Jamaica or Barbados. Barry Eisler takes us on murderous visits to contemporary Japan. I enjoy being an armchair traveler, which is why I enjoy mysteries set in real places.

So why don't I always write one?

My Charlie Plato Mystery Series was set on the San Francisco Peninsula, one of my favorite places to be. But it was set in the fictional city of Bellamy Park. Why a fictional city? For many reasons. One being that if I wrote nasty things about Bellamy Park's City Council and I did-I was pretty certain I wouldn't be sued.

Bellamy Park looked somewhat like Menlo Park. CHAPS, the country western tavern that was the central focus of the series, was similar to a well known country western nightclub in San Jose, but was situated about where Menlo Park meets Stanford University. Each location, restaurant, hospital, office building, or street, had a made up name.

Every once in a while I referred to a real place in the series. If Charlie and Zack went to the City which in that area means San Francisco, I used the real place, the real Golden Gate Bridge, a real area such as the Marina area. In a couple of the books my two sleuths went to Half Moon Bay, where I created a fictional mental health clinic and a fictional florist. When the subject is murder most foul, and may be mixed up with other criminal behavior, it seems much safer to me to use fictional names of places.

Other writers use real towns and real streets and sometimes their readers say, "Hey, that street is one-way in the opposite direction to the one the sleuth took on his mountain bike. How come the writer didn't do his or her research?" Sometimes it might be that the street was two-way two years ago, but it took that long for the book to go through the publishing process.

All in all, it seems to me to be simpler and more fun to just make up a world, people it with fictional people, and make up a fictional story that pulls everything together.

However, in my last book. More Than You Know, a standalone mystery, I used mostly real cities. Seattle, Portland etc. I enjoyed doing that, and I walked the streets and parks that I used in the book, wanting to be sure I got them right. In my next book, Snap Shot, I used Port Townsend in all but name. I called it Port Findlay. Why? Because it's a smaller town and I wanted to mess with the geography and move in a couple of stores and a pub and a photo studio that don't actually exist there.

So maybe it's easier to set a fictional story in a big real city or a small fictional town. I've set previous books in Edinburgh Scotland, Paris France, Quebec City in Canada, Sacramento California in 1903, and so on, but when it comes to using a small town, I give it a fictional name.

Most readers like stepping into the world of their favorite authors. Which is why once a series locale has been established, most authors stay with it. I like Sue Grafton's fictional Santa Teresa, California, where Kinsey Milhone lives in an apartment made out of a garage that is owned by her eighty year old landlord Henry, who is a terrific cook, and eats at a "dingy neighborhood tavern" run by Rosie, a sixty six year old Hungarian.

I wrote the above details from memory. I am used to Kinsey's world. It is as real to me as Thomas Black's Seattle.

I can only hope my readers feel as comfortable in my made-up places. Right now I'm working on a new book--a mystery/suspense story with a woo-woo element. It's set in the San Francisco area and includes a brief look at the City, and later on moves down south to Monterey and Carmel. But there's also a town called Sherwood, on the coast, somewhere between San Francisco and Santa Cruz, that exists only in the mind of this writer. There's a Sherwood police department, with a detective who maybe doesn't do things the way some real city's detectives might do--but hey, he's my detective!

If you like, drop me an email and let me know whether you prefer real places or fictional or don't care. I'd love to have your opinion.

Cheers
Meg

Meg Chittenden lives in the real city of Ocean Shores, Washington, but spends more of her time in her make believe world.