Places
On the Suffolk Coast
P. D. James
I have used East Anglia as a setting for a number of my novels, the last example being Devices and Desires. The book had its genesis when I was exploring Suffolk with an elderly long-standing friend, Joyce Flack, who drove me in her ancient Mini. I stood for a few minutes alone on a deserted stretch of shingle and looked over the cold and dangerous North Sea. I remember that there were two wooden fishing boats scrunched into the shingle and some brown nets strung between poles, drying in the wind. Closing my eyes, I could hear nothing but the tinny rattle of the shingle drawn back by the waves and the low hissing of the wind, and I thought that I could have been standing on the self-same spot a thousand years ago, hearing the same sounds, looking out over the same sea. And then I opened my eyes and, looking south, saw the silent and stark outline of Sizewell nuclear power station dominating the coastline. I thought of all the lives that have been lived on this shore, of the windmills, once providers of power, now prosperous homes; of the ruined abbeys at Leiston and South Cove, which seemed like monuments to a decaying faith; of the detritus of my generation, the great lumps of concrete half embedded in the shingle, and the concrete pillboxes, part of the defences against the expected German invasion on this coast. And immediately I knew with an almost physical surge of excitement that I had a novel. The next book would be set on a lonely stretch of East Anglian coast under the shadow of a nuclear power station. The book, at present no more than a nebulous idea born of a moment in time and a specific place, might take more than a year to research and plan and the writing even longer, but already it has life.
The Human Geography of Crime Fiction
Ann Cleeves
My daughter’s an academic, a human geographer. She researches specific communities in some of the more deprived areas of North East England; her work has taken her to a women’s group in Gateshead, into an old people’s home to explore the attitude of the elderly residents to end of life care, and to talk to men who are suffering from cancer. She spends time with them and uses their words in her writing. The places where these people live – the streets where they grew up, formed friendships, met their partners, brought up their children – affect who they are and the way they see the world. This is human geography and I think it provides a model for the way crime writers work. Place is an indicator of educational background and financial status. It influences how healthy we are and how long we live. In many cases it defines class, and class is still potent in every genre of British fiction.
If characters are at the heart of the books that we write – and I believe that they are – then place is vital for authors too. The setting we choose for our novel plays a more important role than simply providing a pretty or atmospheric background to the action. It can explain the motive of the killer and the back story of the detective, the relationships between suspects and witnesses. It fixes the characters in our readers’ minds and helps writers to consider them as concrete, rounded beings, with a credible history; they become solid, rooted in the landscape, whether the landscape is real or fictitious, rural or urban. And place can influence plot.
In the very best contemporary crime fiction, place is intrinsic to the book, and provides the glue that holds all the different elements together. It would be impossible to imagine Chris Hammer’s amazing debut novel Scrublands, for example, set anywhere else but Riverend, the fictitious drought-ridden small town, where a well-loved priest stepped out of his church to kill five people. The place explains everything about the book. Emma Flint’s debut Little Deaths, set in Queens in New York in the 1960s, throbs with the energy of the city. Ruth, her central character, couldn’t have come from anywhere else. In the same way Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects grows out of the steamy, oppressive American South.
Because of the power of the setting, I know where a new novel will be based long before I know anything else about it, before even I have a sense of the general theme, tone or voice. Place is always the first decision I make. More recently, because I’ve been alternating between Vera Stanhope books set in Northumberland and Jimmy Perez books set in Shetland, the choice is inevitable, fixed in the contract with my publisher. There has been a joy in coming to the end of a book and thinking: ‘Now I can go home again and spend some time in Northumberland.’ Or to get excited about sending my imagination back north to the Shetland Isles. Within those places, however, I still have to decide on the kind of community I want to use, and that can be random, triggered by a whim or a visit or a scrap of overheard conversation.
My backgrounds are generally rural; I’ve scarcely lived in a city and don’t understand how they work. But there’s a tremendous variety within the British countryside. A former pit village in south-east Northumberland is quite different from a village built around an almost feudal estate in the north of the same county. Often the community that’s caught my interest will lead to the theme of the story. It might be an enclosed setting, like the writers’ retreat in The Glass Room or the tiny island of Fair Isle in Blue Lightning, for example. Other places are more open to outside influences, like the seaside town of Whitley Bay in The Seagull. Not every place ends up as real in the book – I feel free to invent, or to merge. But the human geography is always real and at the heart of the story.
The Seagull, a Vera Stanhope novel, grew out of a conversation with regulars in my local pub. They were talking about how my home town had changed over the years, from a thriving holiday town, packed by visiting families in the summer, to a party town, rather sleazy and depressed. Now it’s regenerating again into somewhere a bit smarter and arty, with an independent cinema, a poetry festival and a thriving community garden. Still a bit scruffy, but definitely more alive. The theme of the book is about the possibility of change and growth, both for places and for individuals. That theme grew out of the place and the book would never have been written without it. In turn, I needed to find characters who had changed and developed too and that meant a plotline about digging into the past, an explanation of the protagonists’ growth.
With the Shetland books, the scope is rather different and more limited. There are no big cities, not even any large towns. While the geology varies, the landscape experienced by people is similar: bleak, bare and beautiful. That’s why I stopped writing about the place after eight books, and why the TV series has developed story-lines with wider themes, taking their characters away from the islands to Glasgow or Norway. However, the books are still entirely influenced by the place, and by the preoccupations of the people who live there: crofting, the decline of oil wealth, the importance of family and tradition. That’s the element of human geography again. In a more direct way, how Shetland looks has a bearing on my writing. I love the contrast between the open landscape – there are few trees, so usually it’s possible to see right to the horizon in all directions – and hidden secrets. The Shetland books are all about secrets and the kind of psychological archaeology that digs into the past to explain family rivalries and tensions.
So, that’s how I work, but if you’re a new writer trying to decide on a setting for your book, what’s the best way to go about it? Do you have to choose a place that you know well? I hesitate to give advice, because everyone has his or her own way of working. Famously, it’s said that Harry Keating had never been to India before writing his Inspector Ghote books, and for me they conjure up perfectly the heat and the noise of the place. But I’ve never been to India either and someone born and brought up there might see things rather differently.
Of course, it’s easier now with Google Maps and all the information at the click of a mouse to get a sense of a place. It’s still possible to get things wrong, though, and locals can be unforgiving about a small mistake. A very fine writer set a book in Shetland without visiting. She did a lot of research and saw that the islands were famous for their seabirds and specifically for puffins. In one scene she had a puffin perching on a windowsill. Anyone familiar with the islands, or with natural history in general, knows that the puffin nests in rabbit holes on the tops of sea cliffs. They spend all their time over the ocean and never venture inland. Unfortunately, this one error clouded some people’s judgement about what was otherwise a very scary and exciting book. That was all they remembered.
I might set a piece of short fiction in a place I’ve only visited briefly. That initial stunning response to a place can trigger an idea for a whole story. I’ve set work in Alaska, Tanzania and Finland on the basis of the first excitement, of feeling that I have an understanding for a place in a single moment. We’re immediately aware of the difference, the smells, the sound, the sense of being an outsider, and that instant impression is invaluable. One never sees a place in exactly the same way again. Once we’re used to it, the impact is gone. A novel is rather different, however. I think a novel needs a longer knowledge. The imagination needs time to simmer.
We come back to the human geography when we talk about researching a place that’s new to us. Of course, drive around the area you have in mind for the setting of your book; take photographs and look at Ordnance Survey maps. Pick out small, interesting details in the landscape and the built environment that make the area special. As with character, it’s the small specifics that bring a scene to life. But meet the people. Hang out in cafés and shops, lurk in the library, use the public transport. If you have questions, ask them. Most people will be fascinated to hear you’re a writer and nearly everyone likes talking about their lives.
We think it’s entirely natural to talk to experts about police procedure and forensics. When it comes to place, the experts are the people who live there, and they’re easy to get to know with just a little effort. It’s impossible to write with any authenticity if you don’t understand a region’s anxieties and preoccupations. In a village café in the Northumberland National Park, much of the conversation will be about sheep. In Shetland it might be about fish, or fiddle music, or the extortionate price of the ferry. In a city it might be school closures, or theft or vandalism. But you won’t know until you listen. None of this detail might come into your book in a hard, indigestible chunk, but it will be there in the confidence with which you create your characters and in a greater ease when you’re driving the plot.
Of course, the easiest thing is to set your work where you live or have lived for some years, and I’ve taken this route, which feels at times like cheating. This has its dangers too, though. We can make assumptions about the places we know well; a region can change and we can have an impression of it that might be stuck in the past. We don’t approach it with the same clear-eyed vision that we do a place new to us. And we can be so close to a place that we blur the line between fact and fiction, introduce real people and real issues without quite realizing.
I make no apology that my fiction can be escapist. I love the fact that people can lose themselves in my stories and the world that I’ve created. We all need times of escape. I want there to be a certain authenticity, though. I want readers to believe in my characters, in the relationships I describe, the ways families might fracture or hold together, the communities in which a murderer might grow. And in my opinion, I have to understand place before I can attempt that kind of reality.
Setting Stories in Unfamiliar Places
Michael Ridpath
The Icelanders have a saying: ‘Glöggt er gests augað’, which means: ‘A guest’s eye sees better.’ It’s an answer to two important questions. How can a writer write about a country in which he is not a native? And why should he?
To take the second question first. ‘Write what you know’ is good advice, especially for a writer writing her first book, but it is one of those rules of writing that is made to be broken. Novelists enjoy writing about worlds that are not theirs, just as readers enjoy reading about them. In theory, authors could just stick to their own areas of experience, their own backgrounds, people who are just like them. It is easier to write a novel in a setting with which you are intimately familiar. But why renounce enthusiasm for foreign people, countries and landscapes? Why not harness it? The same impulses that encourage an author to tackle a particular subject: curiosity, excitement, affection, even love, are exactly those ingredients that give a novel its heart, that make it stand out from the rest.
I started my career writing financial thrillers, many of which took place overseas in places like Brazil, South Africa and Wyoming. Each one of these locations required a massive amount of research, which was only useful for one novel. So when I was searching for a setting for a new detective series, I decided to pick a foreign country and stick with it over several books. In choosing Iceland I completely ignored the ‘write what you know’ rule. I had only visited the country once, on a book tour ten years before, but I had been fascinated. And I was still intrigued by the place.
Now we come to that first question: how can a writer write about a country he doesn’t know?
The answer involves reading, talking, visiting and recording, mostly in that order.
I usually start with a couple of general books about a country. In the case of Iceland, I read a wonderful memoir by Sally Magnusson about a trip to Iceland with her famous father Magnus. For my Brazil novel, I found an excellent book entitled The Brazilians by Joseph Page. Don’t underestimate the benefits of a close reading of the ‘Basics’ and ‘Contexts’ sections of good guidebooks, like the Rough Guide and the Lonely Planet series. At this stage you are trying to get an overview of the country and a list of more books to read.
This list should include memoirs, biographies and novels. You want to get an idea of the society and culture of your chosen country. You want to meet its people and to understand them. You are not really looking for facts, but you are looking for details. When you eventually write your novel, it is these little details which will make the location come alive. This is so much more than descriptions of town or countryside. It is habits, speech patterns, etiquette, furniture, superstitions, seasonal traditions – anything that is different from your own country, especially if it elicits a spark of interest in you. It will probably elicit the same in your readers.
Here are some examples of the kind of details I mean. In Iceland, people always take off their shoes when entering someone’s home; Icelanders refer to everyone by their first name – even the President; and there used to be no TV broadcast on Thursdays. And when an Icelander hits a bit of unexpected good luck, he exclaims ‘beached whale!’, because what could be luckier than a massive store of meat, oil and blubber showing up on your doorstep one morning? I love that. All this needs to be written down. You need to record the small stuff; the big stuff you will remember.
This is also where you will find the ingredients for the characters who will people your novel. You will absorb their attitudes and thought patterns, but write down their backgrounds, their education, their professional careers.
Personally, I like to read some of the literature of the society I am writing about. Literature is particularly important in Iceland: it replaces the historical architecture the country lacks. The sagas are medieval stories, many of them set in the settlement period of 874 to 1100, when Norsemen farmed and squabbled. Independent People by the Nobel laureate Halldór Laxness is a novel about a tough independent farmer named Bjartur at the beginning of the twentieth century. Both these sources inspired story ideas, and both helped me understand the Icelanders better. Many Icelanders are Bjartur at heart: if you understand him, you understand them.
Read crime fiction by local authors. Good crime fiction shines a light on society, and different crime novelists illuminate their own countries from different perspectives. Reading about crime, you learn about the police and investigation procedures. But there is a difficulty: you can become inhibited in planning your own novel by a fear of stealing plots from the locals.
Finally, you should consult more ephemeral written sources such as blogs and magazines in the English language, which are easily found on the internet. Seek out some you like, read them regularly and note down useful details. For information on Iceland, I regularly read a Facebook page by Alda Sigmundsdóttir, the Reykjavík Grapevine and the Iceland Review. Every country has its English-language media and bloggers.
Which brings us to language. It clearly helps if you are fluent in the language of the country you are writing about, but it is not absolutely necessary. If you speak English, there will always be plenty of information written in or translated into that language. Nevertheless, it is a good idea to teach yourself a smattering of the language. I have tried to teach myself Icelandic, and I even spent some time learning Portuguese when I was writing about Brazil. It makes research easier, it makes travelling around the country easier, and it brings you slightly closer to the country you are writing about.
Having read a lot, it’s time to talk. You need to find natives of the country you are writing about, and you need to ask them questions. Finding these people is surprisingly easy. People love to talk to novelists: well over half the individuals I approach, most of whom don’t know me from Adam, are happy to talk to me. When I started I only knew one Icelander – the publisher of my first financial thriller – but that was enough. I asked him who he knew that could help me. I asked my friends and contacts in England if they knew any Icelanders. If I read about an Icelander based in London (where I live), I got in touch out of the blue. They were all willing to talk to me. Later, when I travelled to Iceland on a research trip, I put together a list of contacts of contacts to speak to.
You have to be very specific in these conversations. If you are not careful, an hour can be frittered away discussing politics or economics or the merits of different airlines. A good technique is to sketch out an idea of a character in the book you are planning to write – a rural priest, say, or the son of an Icelandic fishing captain – and ask what that person would be like. This works especially well if the person you are speaking to is from a similar background to your character. In this case, by talking about an invented individual, your interviewee is more likely to tell you about their own experiences or those of their friends than if you asked them directly personal questions about themselves.
Once again, you are looking for details, details, details, and you have to write them down.
A police contact is important. It’s possible to manage without: many highly successful crime writers are happy to make up police procedure as they go along. But if you are the kind of person who likes to get details right, you need to know what the country’s investigating procedure is. Most countries do not follow the same legal systems that we see and read about in Britain and the US, which means that their police investigations proceed very differently.
Finding a police contact is not as hard as it seems. You will find that someone knows someone who knows a policeman. Failing that, you can always wander into a police station and ask. If you are brushed off, go to another police station and try again. If police officers are bored, they will talk to you. I have tried this in America, Scotland, Greenland and, of course, Iceland, mostly with success. It’s worth waiting until you have a good idea of the crime you are writing about, so you can ask your police contact specific questions about it. These you really do need to write down in as much detail as you can. From experience, when you are actually writing your novel, you are likely to wish you had asked just one more question about the procedures for arresting and interviewing a suspect.
Do you have to visit the place you are writing about? After all, it will cost money and take time, and many writers do not have much of either of these to spare. I nearly always travel to the places where I set a novel. But there is now so much information you can gather online – from Google image searches to Google Earth to YouTube videos – that it is perfectly possible to write a novel based in a foreign location without ever visiting it.
But it’s much better to visit the place if you can, for a number of reasons. Most obviously, your description will be better, not just because you will see more of the location, but also because you will hear it, smell it and feel it. Secondly, you will have a much better chance to talk to locals and ask them specific, useful questions. But also it will make writing the novel so much more pleasurable, and as I said before, a writer who enjoys what she is writing is more likely to be writing good stuff. When I’m at my desk writing about my detective Magnus in Iceland, I feel that Magnus is there, that I am there, that I or we are moving through the landscape I have visited. I love it.
I have found the ideal time to visit is just after you have started writing your first draft. You probably know where most of the action takes place, and you also know the locations you still need to find for various events in the plot – where to hide a body, perhaps, or where to locate a showdown at the end of the book. Then you go where your characters go.
Researching the country itself is fun. Your senses are alive, your brain buzzing with how you can fit what you see in front of you into the book that you see in your imagination. There are a few things to keep an eye out for.
Note your first impression of a location. How does it feel. Write it down before it is overwhelmed by second impressions.
Look out for anything that moves: people, clouds, birds, vehicles, machinery, patterns of light. Portraying these, especially if you use imaginative verbs for the movement itself, will bring your description to life.
Look for symbols of the place you are visiting. This is my single most effective trick to encourage the reader to feel she is in the place you are describing. Find an obvious landmark or feature and mention it several times. That way, as the reader works her way through the book, she will begin to feel that the location is familiar. This works. Frankly, you don’t even have to describe the landmark; repetition will do it. For Reykjavík, I usually use Mount Esja, which is a large rocky ridge to the north of the capital, or the big smooth concrete church on a hill in the middle.
And always talk to people.
You have read dozens of books, you have scoured the internet, you have spoken to people, you have visited your chosen country, and you have written it all down. You now have a lot of notes. It’s time to organize them. This next step can take a week or two, but is time well spent. I create a monster file on my computer, which I label ‘Research by Subject’, which is broken up into dozens of headings. These might be general categories such as history, farms, superstition or birds. There will be different headings for each location or neighbourhood. And there will be sub-categories for descriptions of bars, restaurants, cafés, parks – anywhere characters might meet. Police, crime, lawyers and police procedures have their own sections. I then go through all the notes I have taken, copying and pasting paragraphs from the original notes into the new file under the relevant category.
This file can become quite large. My Icelandic file is now 420 pages. Even my file for one book, Traitor’s Gate, which was set mostly in Berlin in 1938, is over 200 pages.
Organizing your research notes in this way is extremely helpful when you are actually writing the novel. Before you start on a scene set in a particular location you can quickly read over all your notes about it in one place, and you know exactly where to look when you need to find a detail as you write.
A few chapters of my novel Amnesia take place in Capri in the 1930s and ’40s. Initially, I wrote them without visiting the island. But they didn’t quite make sense to me, so I booked myself on an easyJet flight to Naples and spent two days there with notebook, voice recorder and camera. A couple of important scenes take place at the Villa Fersen, an abandoned mansion perched on the cliffs overlooking the Bay of Naples. It’s hard to describe how I felt as I walked through those musty rooms where my characters had fought and loved, as I looked out over the sparkling blue water they had marvelled at. It was beautiful, yes. I had got some of the details right and some of them wrong in what I had already written. But at that moment I felt a kind of sublime elation, an awareness that my book and my characters were standing there with me, a sense of being at one with the world around me and the world inside my head.
That’s why I write abroad.