Location Location Location - Fact or Fiction?

I was recently interviewed on a local radio station and one of the questions put to me was “Why did you choose the label A Cheshire Love Story for your books?”

My reason was purely a marketing ploy. Although my stories are all stand-alone, I want the flexibility of offering box sets in the future. Having been in an upmarket magazine, called Cheshire Life, I thought A Cheshire Love Story sounded…lovely. I live in Cheshire in the North West of England. It is a relatively prosperous area with some beautiful mansions, luxurious cars and private schools. Of course ordinary people live here too.

It got me thinking. Does it help the author to know the towns, roads, restaurants, landmarks, etc. that appear in their stories?

An obvious answer to that has to be “Yes.” Many authors set their stories in places they have some connection with, perhaps somewhere they grew up, or where they now live. I know of many who write about a holiday location, some even lucky enough to own a holiday home. But that doesn’t mean you are “stuck” there.

So what tools are available to us in this twenty-first century?

1. Good old local knowledge.

In a novella I’m writing, there is a scene set on the way to Manchester Airport, which isn’t far from me. I needed to get my protagonist from a hotel in a village I know, to the airport, and I needed to know how long it would take. Being able to do that journey, checking out the surrounding area at the same time, meant I could write the scene with confidence. Many readers love it if they know the area you are writing about. Likewise many will be delighted to correct you if you get it wrong.

However, beware. You can get caught out. In Keeping You I wrote about a bookshop near where I used to work. My hero had the nerve to park his car illegally in front of the shop. When I held a book reading in said shop one night, I discovered that there was no longer a road in front of it – it had been pedestrianized. Makes the offence of parking outside even worse J

Another advantage of naming actual places, hotels etc. is the connection you can make with the community. It could be the local library, a bar in a hotel (particularly nice setting for an evening discussing erotic romance) or a book group. Some people love that, and you may be able to use it in promoting your work. For example, I often use #Cheshire in Twitter posts, and can gain retweets and likes from organisations in the vicinity – even getting invited on the local radio station.

Although personal experience is of great value, it doesn’t have to be a limiting factor when it comes to setting scenes. The internet has opened up virtually the whole world. And Google Earth is an added bonus when it comes to an author’s use of location.

2. Google Earth and the Internet

All of my stories have some connection with Cheshire, but they also include additional locations, including London and Manchester, and further afield in Kenya and Australia.

Keeping You takes the reader to White Chapel in London. Even though I have been to London many times, I have never been to White Chapel. But with the help of Google Earth, I was able to locate a high-rise apartment block in a very rundown area, with a phone box on the corner and smaller houses across the road. It was the perfect setting for my hero to be holed up while he sought revenge for the killing of his best friend, and it was a far cry from the luxurious mansion he lived in near Crewe in Cheshire.

Another of my books still to be published by my publisher, Black Opal Books, involves a trip to Melbourne in Australia. I have never been to Australia, let alone Melbourne, but I did my research using the internet and Google Earth. I needed a seedy location where sex workers resided, with a nightclub, and betting premises. Internet searches gave me St. Kilda, and Google Earth helped me house a young woman who never wanted to be a nice one… I was also able to confirm there was a cycling track nearby, as my protagonist was a keen cyclist. I backed up my research with requests to a friend who did live in Australia, leaving me confident enough to write about the area. Further research involved checking local facilities for paternity testing. This was all carried out from the comfort of my own home.

3. Websites selling houses

I confess to being someone who trawls, more nosily than thoroughly, through internet sites offering all sorts of homes to buy. I need to know what type of places exist in the location I have chosen.

On one such site I found the perfect mansion, with its own swimming pool, gym, and amazing grounds, for Lawrence in Keeping You. I named it The Sway. I even used the floor plan to walk my heroine through the house when she was left there alone near the beginning of the book. I find it a great help to visualise the layout of homes in my stories. However, I never use the images on any promotional sites – you have to be vigilant about copyright etc. I purchase all my photos or use Google free “labelled for reuse” images.

So I don’t restrict myself to places I know or have visited. I broaden my horizons and “travel” with no expense spared.

3. Mix and match

Of course, your location doesn’t have to actually exist. (I’m not just talking scifi/fantasy here.)

In The Secret At Arnford Hall I decided to use a fictitious village in Cheshire, and broadly based the Hall on a castle, which was for sale in the Channel Islands. I located Arnford next to a real town called Knutsford, and mention several places that exist there. Again I have been caught out when Gabriel Black takes Grace for lunch in a restaurant in Knutsford, which has since closed down!

Why don’t you share with us the tools you use for the settings in your stories, and maybe confess to the odd faux pas? After all, we are lovers of writing romance and entitled to have our heads in the clouds every now and then J

Images of some of the homes in my books

The Sway, Keeping You 

White Chapel - Google Earth, Keeping You

 Arnford Hall, The Secret At Arnford Hall

The old farmhouse, Guiltless

Guest author Marilyn Levinson: 12 Things to Keep in Mind When Writing a Mystery Series

Allison Brook is the pseudonym of Marilyn Levinson, who writes mysteries, romantic suspense and novels for kids. She lives on Long Island and enjoys traveling, reading, watching foreign films, doing Sudoku and dining out. She especially loves to visit with her grandchildren on FaceTime.

12 Things to Keep in Mind When Writing a Mystery Series

by Marilyn Levinson

1. Your sleuth should be likable, interesting and resourceful, with a definite personality that includes quirks and personal issues that have yet to be resolved. Your sleuth needs to have a personal stake in solving the mystery.
2. Consider your setting a major character. Use your setting well--its geography and flavor, its contrasting neighborhoods, businesses, parks and restaurants. Set your scenes in various locales to avoid monotony. Create annual traditions that are celebrated in your locale. Examples: a parade, a dance, a barbeque. 
3. Occasionally change your setting. If most of the books in your series take place in a small town, you might have you sleuth solve a murder in Manhattan.
4. Your sleuth needs a best friend or confidant with whom to brainstorm. Consider creating a nemesis, as well, to up the tension and add red herrings to the mix.
5. A love interest (or interests) spices up your plot and adds another dimension.
6. Choose your victim carefully. Why was he/she murdered? What connects the victim to the suspects? Why was the second victim murdered?
7. Regarding suspects, have many, with various motives, and with varying connections to the victim(s). Don’t telescope the identity of the murderer, but let your murderer appear often enough so that your reader doesn’t feel cheated when all is revealed.
8. Secrets relating to the past are like chunks of dark Belgian chocolate in a chocolate brownie. Every character should have a secret or two. Reveal each secret only when necessary. Use them to your advantage.
9. Every mystery should have a theme. Be it a dispute regarding an inheritance, your sleuth’s relationship to an absentee father who shows up later in her life, each mystery should include a theme that reflects the concerns of your sleuth, the village or the outside world.
10. Decide what role official crime solvers play in your mystery. Even if you’re writing a cozy series, the police must appear in your books. Is your sleuth friendly with the homicide detective? Do they have an adversarial relationship? Don’t have the police come off as idiots because they’re not.
11. Subplots are essential to any novel, including your mystery. They may arise from the theme such as a dispute over land development, from characters in conflict, or from an issue in your sleuth’s personal life.
12. Make sure your personal viewpoint comes through in your writing. You are unique. Your voice and your view of the human condition will help make your series stand out.

Website: http://www.marilynlevinson.com

Marilyn's Amazon page: http://amzn.to/K6Md1O

Allison’s Amazon page: http://tinyurl.com/ksydz3s

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/marilyn.levinson.10?ref=ts&fref=ts

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/161602.Marilyn_Levinson

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MarilynLevinson

Pinterest: http://www.pinterest.com/marilev/

Thankful for Being Robbed?

My husband and I enjoyed all our major visits—Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado,

Antelope Canyon,

Horseshoe Bend of the Colorado River,

and friends in Arizona, and Big Bend National Park in Texas.

 

All the RV parks we found for camping in our fifth wheel had supply stores, full hook-ups for water, electricity, sewer lines, and television stations we could access for news, sports, and movies.

Nothing fell off the RV, no tires shredded, and the refrigerator hung onto its cooling system on this trip. We were on a roll (literally) compared to previous trips. But we still had a few stops left. What are the sayings? It ain’t over till it’s over. It’s not over till the fat lady sings. Don’t count your chickens…

In San Antonio we left our movable vacation home at a delightful RV Resort in the south part of the city,

told the two cats to take care of it while we were gone, detached the Ford F-350 diesel pick-up, and drove to downtown. Our first time in San Antonio, we had to visit the Alamo and the River Walk.

After a leisurely afternoon of tourist pursuits, we arrived back at our parking lot around six o’clock that evening. Dinner fixings and a little relaxation awaited us in our RV.

Have you ever arrived at your vehicle and discovered it has been broken into? It’s a creepy feeling. The contents of our center console and glove compartment were either missing or scattered over the floor and seats. We searched to find out just what had been taken. As if by instinct, I cast glances around the dusky parking lot in case someone would poke out from behind a car or around a brick wall.

My husband gave me a look when I told him our camera, a phone charger, and a bag of snacks from the back seat had been taken. “We’ve got bigger problems,” he said.

I eyed him with skepticism. What could be worse than losing our best vacation photos? I’d once had one of my photos chosen for the cover of a Kansas City Star vacation photo supplement, for heaven’s sake.

He stuck his key into the ignition. The truck didn’t start.

“Oh no, they tried to steal the truck.” I have this tendency to state the obvious, but such nefarious designs against my property didn’t easily cross my mind. And I write mysteries!

“You call the police, and I’ll call the insurance company.” My husband got busy while I fumbled with how to call the police for a case like this. Was it an emergency? Yes, I decided, and dialed 911. Have you ever tried giving a 911 operator the address of a parking lot in a strange city? It took a walk to street signs and a detailed description of our parking spot and truck.

After that, I spent many minutes on the phone with a locksmith trying to determine if someone could repair our ignition that very evening. A police officer came, and I gave him all the details for his report while Hubby continued his phone conversations with insurance claims people and a tow company receptionist.

Officer Morales stayed and gave me moral support while we waited to find out how we’d deal with a truck that wouldn’t start on a Saturday evening in a gritty parking lot after dark, miles from where we needed to be. He told me stories about robberies in the area and how crooks targeted Ford F-250’s and F-350’s pick-ups because they were good for smuggling and usually contained guns.

“Guns!?”

“In San Antonio, everyone who drives a pick-up has a gun in it,” the officer said.

“We don’t have a gun. We have an RV,” I said with a crooked smile on my face, thinking those idiot crooks should have picked a truck with Texas plates.

“Always park near the street, not back by a wall, in a tourist area,” he said. Too late for that advice.

In the end, the locksmith started the truck and had us drive to his shop in the far northern part of San Antonio where he installed a new ignition. Hungry, tired, and three hundred dollars poorer, we returned to the RV by ten o’clock that night. It could have been worse. Thank goodness, because of the security key fobs we carry on our key chains, the crooks were unable to start the truck. Thank goodness for the friendly, skillful, twenty-four-hour mobile locksmith who welcomed us to his shop as if we were cousins.

This was an experience we’ll always remember, and I’m using part of it as the basis for my next Psycho Cat and the Landlady Mystery. You’ll meet the good Officer Morales in that book and the locksmith of Middle Eastern descent. Can a person be thankful for being robbed while on vacation?

Now, as for the truck breaking down on the highway near a small town in Oklahoma on the way home… I’m only thankful that the town had a tow service open on Sunday and a Ford dealership that could fix the truck in only two days.

Scene of the Crime

by Linda Thorne



In February of this year, I had the opportunity to revisit the Mississippi Gulf Coast where I lived for eight years, and where I set  the first book in my series, Just Another Termination. I saw Biloxi and Ocean Springs again for the first time in fourteen years.


All the homicides in my book happen in the little city of Ocean Springs. Victim number one was found shot to death in her home. The second case, a double homicide, occurred in the little city twenty-five years earlier. The final murder takes place right out in the open, just off of East Beach in Ocean Springs. This last murder is the one that produces the clue to solve them all.

Below (to the left) is the picture of the intersection of East Beach Drive and Halstead road in Ocean Spring, Mississippi. To its right is a picture of the entrance to the Gulf Coast Research Laboratory across the street just opposite from the intersection sign. The last murder goes down behind these trees, leaving a crime scene close to the waters of the Mississippi Sound.
 

A lot of things happen in the book on East Beach (just southwest of the entrance to the Gulf Coast Research Laboratory). The picture of East beach on the left here shows the Biloxi casinos (tiny in the distance) at the west end of the Ocean Springs Bridge. The picture on the right below is at the southeast corner of East Beach and shows the tiny island where character, Jimmie Lee Albright, occasionally went to in his boat. These places are all so real to me both in my book and in real life.

I met a couple riding their bikes on East Beach Drive when I was taking these pictures. They referred me to Southern Bound Book Shop in Ocean Springs and Biloxi and now I have my books for sale in this Biloxi/Ocean Springs bookstore.

If you want to see more of the Ocean Springs/Biloxi book setting here's the link to my book trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6fo2qtu_vI

Note: Friday August 19th, I'll be a panelist at Session 5 and also Session 7 at the Killer Nashville Writers Conference held at the Embassy Suites in Cool Springs, Tennessee. If you're attending the conference, hope you'll stop by one or both of my sessions.

http://www.lindathorne.com

Setting as Character

I recently had to write an article on setting and this made me reflect on some of my writing. Most reviewers of Café au Lait, from professionals in magazines to random readers on Amazon, have commented on the role of setting in the novel. This is not something I set out to do intentionally--at least not that I can recall--but the setting of that story, Trinidad and Tobago, is so much a part of my psyche that there was no way I could write a novel where the place, time and social context were not significantly intertwined with the psyche of the main character. Setting is ever-present, not simply as a picturesque backdrop but influencing the thoughts, feelings and actions of the characters. The impact of the setting was brought home to me when one reviewer on Amazon UK said she followed the characters around on Google Maps while reading the story.

When I compare that novel with my second romance title, there is a striking difference. This one is set in South Florida, and although I spent close to two years there the place is not so much a part of me as my homeland is, and this distance shows. Is the setting a character in Give Me the Night? I like to think it is, but here it plays the role of a minor character and not a main character as in the first novel.

When I look at other stories I have written that are set outside of Trinidad and Tobago, the settings tend to play minor roles (with the exception of one post-apocalyptic story). Then I glance at my recent short stories set in my country and here again, the setting tends to play a major role. In two works in progress, now that I think about it, the setting is the main character. How does this happen? With me it's an intuitive process that apparently depends on my familiarity with and attachment to the setting.

What elevates setting to the status of character in a story? Based on my own experience, I'd say it's a combination of the following:

• The use of telling details that create images of place, time and context (the basic function of setting).
• The use of elements of the setting as symbols of important themes or issues within the story.
• The use of pathetic fallacy which is the perception of nature as sentient--sympathetic or responsive to human issues in the story. (Examples: the angry sky, stealthy shadows, uncaring desert, the rain as tears...)
• Characters' emotions, thoughts, and/or actions being affected, catalyzed or constrained by elements of the setting.
• The setting changes over time, just as a well-drawn character must.
• In other words, making the setting personal, and not simply a static background. 

My favorite stories are almost always those in which the setting lives and breathes and deepens the tales in memorable ways. In my own writing, although much of it is still intuitive--at least in the first draft--by the time I get to the editing phase one of the things I check for is an active setting that works as a reflection of, an ally, an antagonist, mentor or source of inspiration to the other main character(s).

How do you handle the issue of setting in your writing, and how important is it to your enjoyment of a story?

Setting the scene

Pigeon Point Tobago, setting of a scene in Cafe au Lait

Settings, both in my reading and writing, are often as important to me as character and plot. I treasure writers
who can bring a location, time and social context so vividly to life that I feel I've not just read about a place but actually spent time there. What is setting precisely? It's the overall atmosphere (place, time, society) and the particular physical setting of each scene.

Vizcaya Museum & Gardens, Miami, from Give Me the Night

When I think of alluring settings, Gerald Durrell's Corfu stories come to mind. His stories which are set in Africa, Argentina, Guyana and other places are equally compelling setting-wise. If I ever make it to his zoo on Jersey Island, I'm sure I'll recognize the place. I can even recall the smell of animal droppings in his backyard in England when it used to be cluttered with animals in cages--though I've never visited that island. I can hear his neighbors quarreling over the fence about the squawking of the exotic birds and screeches of the primates, just as I'm painfully familiar with the colonial India of E.M. Forster, the dust-clogged Canadian prairies of Farley Mowat, and the blistering near-mystical Australian outback of Arthur Upfield. Yes, I'm a setting whore of sorts.

The settings in my books are usually places I know intimately, such as the Caribbean and South Florida, or that I've imagined intimately, such as the post-apocalyptic barren permafrost wastes in my speculative short story, Bird. Whether the scene is a placid

Arctic tundra, similar to the landscape in Bird

beach or a tropical swamp, a Miami metropolis of highways and metrorails or a lichen-covered polar wasteland, I labor over the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, textures and rhythms that create that elusive element, setting. To me, these are as important as the speech patterns, personal tics, actions and psychological journeys of the characters. As such, I prize highly the review of an Amazon UK reader who said she was on Google Maps the entire time she was reading one of my stories, following the characters around. This, to me, is proof that the setting came alive and excited the reader to the point where she was living the story, an immersion that's essential to my reading experience, and which I try to create for my readers.

How important is setting to your writing? Do you labor over it, or is it a mere backdrop to that all-important element--the plot?

Spaceship Bermuda

The first week of this past July, for our biennial vacation together, my wife Valerie and I took a cruise to Bermuda for the first time. That I found it a beautiful island and enjoyed myself immensely should surprise no one. For one thing Bermuda's beauty well documented in myriad travel magazines and for another most folk know I've never met an island I didn't like.

But I'm a writer, and when writers travel – or do much of anything, actually – we are always observing, picking up details that will probably in some form find their way into our work. Also, as always happens when we travel together, Valerie resumed encouraging me to write a romance or six – suggesting Bermuda as a perfect location. So I began taking notes on what I was observing, which I usually don't do.
Things I wrote down included:
Grass on Bermuda looks just like the Bermuda grass in our yard, but isn't because American Bermuda grass is African.
The Bermuda Longtail is the only bird I've found as viciously territorial as my favorite Northern Mockingbird. A cage match wouldn't be much fun, though; the Longtail's twice the size of a mocker.
The famous pink sand is ordinary white sand with (really pretty faint) swirls of pink flakes from crushed shells.
Sea turtles do not appreciate friendly snorkelers.
On the other hand, if you hold very still underwater (and are of hirsute eastern European stock) finger-long fish will line up along your arm to nibble your hair.
Wear sneakers in the water! Raw coral beneath the surf is the norm.
Mayonnaise is great for removing tar.
On a related note, everything is spookily clean.
Rude Bermudians are evidently kept in a secure compound far from any tourist areas.

Those last two are particularly significant. In our first exploratory stroll through the Dockyard on Ireland Island we sensed something a bit 'off' – not wrong, but different. It took us a while to realize what it was: no one approached us with discount offers. In every city with a tourist industry we've visited there were always folk on the street offering visitors half price or less on cab rides, local crafts, tours, etc. Here there were none. We'd heard Bermuda was expensive, but the prices in the stores were in line with anywhere else we'd been; what was missing were the street vendors. I even sought out alleys and back streets in Hamilton, testing the theory local entrepreneurs kept a low profile, with no luck. "Deals" were not available.

At seven every morning, as I sat drinking my third

coffee and considering a second Danish, I witnessed something that for me epitomized the aspect of Bermuda's character that struck me most deeply. The pilot of the ferry docked on the other side of the wharf from our ship rode his moped past a row of empty parking spaces to turn at the marked aisle and ride back past the same row of spaces before parking his moped – unsecured – for the day. On Bermuda there is a pervasive sense of orderliness.

Bermuda is not without crime – there are three prisons and we once saw a group of police officers surrounding a man on the street. And listening to a radio talk show in which the female host took calls from listeners debating some political controversy I didn't follow I learned Bermudians can indeed vent their tempers when they want to. (Though a heated argument in British Colonial English pales in comparison to southern talk radio stridency.) But Bermuda is alone. I'm typing this in Wilmington, NC, so Bermuda is about 770 miles east of me; the point of land nearest Bermuda is Cape Hatteras, NC, at just over 700 miles. Even on this shrunken globe of the internet and jets and 6,000-passenger cruise ships, in a very real sense the people of Bermuda have only each other to rely on. Which means that Bermudians need to trust one another to work for the common good, and behave in a manner worthy of that trust. Of course there are individuals who don't – they do have police and courts and prisons – and there are bound to be seven or eight or twenty opinions on what best constitutes the common good, but underlying it all is the knowledge they are all in it together.

What has this to do with writing? Quite a lot. Most of us have had the experience of reading a story set in a place we live or have lived and known by the second sentence the writer has no idea what she's talking about. She may know what street leads where and accurately describe the sunrise/set over the mountain/bay/river/skyline, but it's clear she doesn't "get' the place she's writing about. Every society, every locale, every family has its particular culture. More than any physical attribute a place and a people are defined by their culture – the givens upon which they base their decisions and behaviors. Any story set in Bermuda that vividly captures it's physical beauty, or engagingly depicts sea birds and turtles, or evokes its colonial history with insightful observations of architecture and ruins, but misses the culture of the people will ring false.

When you set your story in a place you don't know, don't just research its history and geography and politics. By all means, visit if you can and between snapping shots of everyday scenes and making notes about scents and sounds pay attention to how folk interact with each other when they're not playing for the tourists. Body language, manners. If you speak the language, listen to AM talk radio. If you can't visit, the internet makes local media scarily accessible. Listen to local talk radio stations, read local papers, read stories by local writers if you can find them. This diligence – which is by no means hard work – will add a depth and texture to your story and a verisimilitude the folks you're writing about will appreciate

Culture and settings... repost

A few weeks ago I posted this blog.  However due to a rather finicky blogger.com, it affected the settings on the Novelspaces blog.  Consequently we had to remove it, reverting it to draft.  I had all intentions of fixing the kinks and reposting it, but with four of the five members of my family coming down with the flu that left me playing nursemaid for a few weeks, I never got around to it.  So now I'm reposting it, and trying to get the kinks out.  I hope it works.  Here goes.....

Have you ever read a novel set in your hometown and wonder what town they are describing? Or have you ever seen an expert on television, after some breaking news, discuss the culture or customs of your home country or the psychology of your people all from a foreign perspective?

That is one of my pet peeves. I simply detest hearing authors, experts or whatever labels they give themselves talking about or setting stories in places that bear no resemblance to the actual place (fantasy is the exception). It’s especially irksome to read a story set in the Caribbean and either hear the culture referred to in near clinical terms, or hear the locals speak, think and react with a mindset that is typical of the country of the writer, but does not resound with me as a native. Or even worst, to have the story riddled with stereotypes.

So then, am I saying that a non-native of a place should not write about that place? Definitely not! I’m just saying if you want to write about a place or culture, do the research. And I’m not talking about a Wikipedia search. I recently met an author who writes multicultural romance. She has set her novels in Greece, and Italy and many exotic countries. But there is one caveat to her writing: she’d never been to any of the places she writes about. I asked her how she does research. She gave me a very short answer: “Google Earth.”

“Google Earth?” I wondered. How does Google Earth capture the ambiance of the place? The sounds, the smells, the feeling… How does Google Earth compensate for the micro-culture of that place? It is worst than someone taking a 3-day cruise to the Caribbean and being instantly transformed into an expert on Nevis. Or to be more dramatic, sitting in transit on the airport in Benin and claiming to know the place intimately.

Why is all this important to me as a writer? Well first and foremost, I am a reader, and authenticity of setting transports me to that place and time and makes for a wonderful reading experience. Secondly, despite being labeled as a contemporary romance author on this website, I actually write multicultural romance. In my two published novels the hero of one is Ghanaian and the other Kittitian. In my latest manuscript, the heroine is indigenous Caribbean and most of the novel is set in Dominica. How do I make my characters believable and my settings work? I follow a few rules (make that guidelines) that I will list below:

1. I don’t set the story in a place that I have never visited for an extended period.

Why? Because being in a place around the people gives you the feel of the place. It transports you and that makes things authentic. There is more to an area than the buildings, the streets, the flora and the fauna. Places are living, breathing entities and they have auras and personalities that must be captured in the story to have a profound effect on the reader.

2. Know the culture. Yes we can read about the culture, customs and traditions, but we have to be mindful that while traditions may be static, culture is dynamic and changes with time. The best way to learn of the culture if you can’t travel to the place is to be around its natives. In addition to learning the history, read the local newspapers (many are online) and blogs, especially the comment threads. It helps you understand the prevailing mindset. Eat the food (even if it’s the Americanized version). Follow the politics. View You Tube videos made by locals of that place (if available).

3. Avoid stereotypes. I let people I meet be inspiration for the characters I write. There are few individuals that conform to common stereotypes.

4. Give your characters a lot of wriggle room. What do I mean by that? When I made a Kittitian a main character in my novella, it was easy; I was born and raised in St. Kitts. I know the culture, the customs and the mindset. But my Ghanaian hero was different. I have never been to Ghana. I know of the culture and customs by immersing myself in the history and culture of the country through reading and by befriending Ghanaians, all of whom live and are educated in America. So I made the character a Ghanaian who was living in America for quite some time. To compensate for any aspect of the culture that I may have obviously overlooked, I made him the son of an Ambassador whose work forced them to live in many different countries.

In my most recent story, the setting was easy: my husband is from Dominica and I spend lots of time there. However, the heroine is native Carib (Kalinago), the indigenous people of the Caribbean. There is not a lot of information you can get about their current culture, even by living on the island. After much effort and agonizing, I decided to take her from the territories and place her in the mainstream Dominican culture.

5. And if you really want to set your story in a place you have never visited: create a fictitious village, enclave, or street or town in or around that location. And then of course there is Google Earth :).

Cold Case Murder

In conducting research for my archaeological mystery American Caliphate, I spent five summers investigating a pyramid complex on Peru’s north coast.  I’ve written of these excavations before, but I left a few details out. 

Some grisly murders took place here. 

The culture that built the pyramids is called Moche.  They were a warrior culture, profoundly violent, yet at the same time, their pottery betrays an unexpected sensuality. 

Archaeologists are the detectives of prehistory.  We investigate the past, and in the case of the Moche, our investigations often enough turned up evidence of violent crimes.  One day we were excavating a platform off the back of one of the pyramids, and we came across a skeleton lying partly under a wall.

Yup, that’s a mud-brick wall dating to about 500 A.D. that’s on top of the skeleton.  And here’s me getting down into the pit to work on the excavations.

Here’s a close-up.  I was a little concerned when I saw the teeth in the eye socket, but it turns out one of the excavators put them there for safe keeping, so they wouldn’t get lost.  And that was a relief. 

And there’s the leg, just sticking out of the wall.

Then we brought him to the lab and started running some diagnostics. 

He was a young man in his mid- to late twenties with perfect teeth.  A thorough examination of his bones revealed hardly any wear and tear.  He was a noble; someone who had enjoyed a life of luxury – up till a point.  Up until the moment someone stood him on the edge of a ledge and smacked him in the back with a sword.

Those are the marks the sword made on his ribs. The blow drove him over a ledge.  Exactly how he died, whether from the fall or from further injuries, we can’t know.  But immediately thereafter, for reasons not yet understood, a wall was built over him.

Are we going to solve the case?  Will the killer be brought to justice?  I doubt it.  This murder was committed more than 1500 years ago.  No, our killer got away with it.  The tools that archaeologists can bring to bear on the violence of antiquity are blunt.  There’s only so much we can resolve.

But the tools that a mystery writer can bring to bear on the violence of antiquity are robust.  I’m never going to forget that man who got smacked with a sword, then buried under a wall.  He’ll turn up in my stories here and there.  That’s basically how I built my story for American Caliphate, by letting the clues lead me to a place the scientist part of me couldn’t answer, but the writer part of me could run with.