Now Write! Mysteries

WILLIAM KENT KRUEGER is the award-winning author of the New York Times–bestselling Cork O’Connor mystery series. He has taught genre writing at the Loft Literary Center, the University of Minnesota, the University of Wisconsin, and Ball State University. He lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and does all his creative work in a small coffee shop near his home.

Ask any biologist what’s most important in shaping an organism and the answer will probably be the environment. Any sociologist will tell you that to understand a human being you have to look first at the environment in which that person was raised. In a piece of fiction, environment translates into setting. Simply said, this means that stories rise out of and are inexorably shaped by the unique elements of the place in which they occur.

My favorite authors in the mystery genre tend to be those whose work is suffused with a profound sense of place: James Lee Burke, Dennis Lehane, Craig Johnson, Libby Fischer Hellmann, Louise Penny, Deborah Crombie. These are authors in whose work action is so tied to place that the two are nearly inseparable. In these stories, the events and the way in which characters react is predicated largely on the geography and culture of the setting. After I’ve read a book by one of these authors, I feel as if I’ve taken a journey, but not just a literary one. I generally feel as if I’ve been transported sensually to a different place. And, man, do I love that. No wonder, then, that this is, in large measure, the kind of experience I try to offer readers of my own work.

Globally speaking, setting is the locale of the story. This would be Los Angeles for Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch, south Boston for Dennis Lehane, Wyoming for Craig Johnson, or, in my case, the great North-woods of Minnesota.

At another level, setting is where each scene in a story takes place: a deserted beach, a diner, a busy office, a living room. At the most basic level, setting is what grounds a reader physically in every exchange that takes place: the sound of a semi gearing away from a truck stop, a waiter pouring wine at a table in a posh restaurant, the way a shadow falls across a room. First and foremost, setting is place.

Setting is also character. Setting ought to be looked at in the same way we look at any important character in a story. Characters have voices, smells, physical traits, cultural biases; settings are no different.

The voice of New York City is very different from the voice of rural Ohio. The one may growl and rumble and speak hurriedly, while the other is laconic and punctuated by the sound of meadowlarks and the distant thrum of a tractor. The smell of Seattle is very different from the smell of Omaha. Though they both belong to large cities, the face of Chicago would never be confused with the face of Miami. And the whole cultural milieu of, say, Boston, is a universe away from that of New Orleans.

Setting is atmosphere. It helps create the mood of the story. What would the stories of Carl Hiassen be without the bizarre, surreal Florida backdrop? And how suspenseful would the stories of Raymond Chandler be without the mean, shadowy streets of L.A. ratcheting up the tension? Think about Tony Hillerman and the emptiness of the southwest desert country, which adds such a marvelous feel of isolation and aloneness and introspection to his Chee and Leaphorn stories.

Finally, setting is motivation. What happens in a story, the why of it, should be largely because of where the story takes place. The event that kicks off and drives a Hillerman story, more often than not, rises directly out of some element specific to the Navajo people and the Four Corners area. The unique culture and mores of southern Louisiana provide wonderfully convoluted rationale for the events that occur in James Lee Burke’s work. And for me, the dynamics of racial tension, prejudice, and misunderstanding in northern Minnesota often give rise to the particular actions in my stories.

How do you create a profound sense of place? My biggest piece of advice here is that you don’t offer a travelogue. Don’t give a litany of detail. In the same way that character is best established gradually and through pointed, well-chosen observations, setting is evoked by capturing succinctly the essence of a place. Here’s an example of how effectively Chandler paints the nature of Marlowe’s office with a few wry observations:

The pebbled glass door panel is lettered in flaked black paint: “Philip Marlowe. . . . Investigations.” It is a reasonably shabby door at the end of a reasonably shabby corridor in the sort of building that was new about the year the all-tile bathroom became the basis for civilization.

Imagine sensually when establishing setting. What’s the look, smell, sound, feel, even taste of a place? (Think the dirty rice of Burke’s New Iberia or the fry bread of Margaret Coel’s Wind River country.)

In summary, place plays such a multiple role in a story that it is, in my own thinking, among the most important elements any writer considers when sitting down to create a piece of fiction. A profound sense of place grounds a reader not only in the work as a whole, but also in every moment of the action. Without this solid grounding, a writer risks leaving his reader adrift on a great anonymous sea.

EXERCISE