WHEN AND WHY TO USE REAL LOCATIONS
IN YOUR FICTION
August 1990
A while ago a friend of mine named Rita was having dinner at a Chinese restaurant in Greenwich Village. The place was the Hunan Pan, at the corner of Hudson and Perry Streets. As she was tucking into her portion of broccoli with garlic sauce, two of the characters in the book she was reading had dinner at the very same restaurant. She found this coincidence amusing enough to bring it to the attention of the Hunan Pan’s proprietor, who became very excited indeed. When Rita admitted that the book’s author, Jack Early, was an acquaintance of hers, the restaurateur said that he wanted to buy a copy of the book, and that he wanted Mr. Early to come around and have a meal on the house.
“You know Jack,” Rita said. Sure, I said. Fine writer. “And you know the Hunan Pan.” Sure, I agreed. Fine restaurant, I eat there all the time. Well, not all the time, sometimes I want a plate of pasta or a grilled cheese sandwich or something, but— “And you write books set in the Village,” she went on. “And your characters have to eat somewhere, so here’s an idea for you. In your next book, have somebody eat at the Hunan Pan. You’ll get a free meal out of it.” And what, I wondered, would she get. “Well, heck,” she said. “You don’t want to dine alone, do you?”
Thus far I have somehow resisted the temptation to send any of my characters to the corner of Hudson and Perry for a plate of General Tsao’s chicken. But the conversation with Rita caromed off a couple of other things that happened lately, and the sparks that were struck have flared up into something worth considering.
First was a letter from a writer and boxing reporter named Joe Bruno, who had paid a visit to a Tenth Avenue saloon called Jimmy Armstrong’s, where a detective character of mine named Matthew Scudder spent much of his time during his drinking days. Joe found the joint awash in classical music and potted plants and (shudder!) yuppies, and complained that it was not at all as he’d visualized it in the novels.
Then, more recently, someone who’d read Out on the Cutting Edge wrote to complain that she had been unable to locate either Grogan’s Open House or Paris Green, a bar and restaurant respectively in which several of that novel’s scenes were set. She had not found them, I advised her, because they did not exist. I had made them up, even as I made up the story.
How real should the settings of our fiction get? With or without the hope of a free meal, when should we cite a specific restaurant, and refer to it by its real name? What are the advantages of so doing, and what are the drawbacks?
I suppose the first point to address is the legal one, and you might bear in mind that I do so as one who is not versed in the law. It is not necessarily illegal to refer in an uncomplimentary fashion to an actual establishment in a piece of fiction. It may even be arguably within my rights to have a character say something libelous about a particular establishment, the argument being that this is the character’s opinion and not my own.
Be that as it may, the idea is not to win lawsuits but to avoid them, so my own rule of thumb is to avoid mentioning a real establishment or institution by name in any derogatory way. This is not to say that every mention of an actual establishment has to be a rave. I can say that Scudder had breakfast at the Flame and the coffee was weak or the eggs runny. But I wouldn’t have him find a cockroach on his plate, or otherwise impugn the establishment’s integrity. Whether or not I’d be inviting a lawsuit, I’d be taking a gratuitous swipe at somebody’s livelihood, and that’s not my job as a fiction writer.
Similarly, I’m more comfortable using invented establishments when people connected therewith are deeply involved in the story I’m telling. In When the Sacred Ginmill Closes, for example, several real-life bars and restaurants play a part, including Armstrong’s. But the book’s principals include the owner of a saloon who hires Scudder to help him regain a set of counterfeit account ledgers and the proprietor of an illegal after-hours joint who commissions Scudder to identify the men who held him up. Both of those establishments were made up out of the whole cloth.
Why use any real names? The best reason—aside from the prospect of a free meal at the Hunan Pan—is that it makes a work of fiction that much more real for some readers. My friend Rita liked happening on a restaurant she knew in the book she read, just as she enjoys reading books set in her own neighborhood. Most of us are like that. For all that we read fiction seeking escape from our own personal reality, we often prefer to escape into a world that mirrors that reality very closely. Westerns sell best in the West.
Another advantage of staying with reality is that it spares you the need to invent, and to keep track of what you’ve invented. It is one thing to visualize an imaginary setting long enough to write a scene. It is another matter to summon it up days or weeks or months later when your characters pay another visit to the place. Of course you don’t have to have precisely the same image in your mind’s eye—the reader can’t see what you’re thinking, only what you’ve written down. But you don’t want to be inconsistent, either specifically or in tone. With a real place, you just describe it as it is, and if memory fails you can go back and look at it.
This is not all that much of a problem in a single book, but let me assure you it can be a pain in the neck when you write an extended series of books over a number of years. I wrote the first book about Scudder, The Sins of the Fathers, back in 1973. Since then there has been much water under the bridge or over the dam, as you prefer, and there have been eight more books in the series, with A Ticket to the Boneyard due from the publisher around the time this column sees print and another scheduled a year hence.
Over the years and books, certain locations have turned up again and again. One does not want to be inconsistent, to have a restaurant on Barrow Street in one book and move it around the corner to Bedford a few books hence, to describe a bar as having tables to the right of the entrance, then shift the tables to the other side of the room through a lapse of memory. This sort of error, while unfortunate within the confines of a single volume, is somewhat more allowable (and perhaps inescapable) in a series. The only way to avoid it, short of tucking all the data into a computer, is to flip through previous books to see what one has or hasn’t mentioned before.
Many series writers display a cavalier attitude, evidently agreeing with Emerson that a foolish inconsistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Rex Stout didn’t always supply a numerical street address for Nero Wolfe’s unforgettable brownstone on West 35th Street, but when he did the number changed considerably from book to book. (Literal-minded readers would search in vain for any of the addresses Stout supplies; all of them would be located somewhere in the Hudson River.)
I’d prefer to avoid even this sort of pardonable inconsistency, but it’s not easy; one doesn’t want to spend all one’s time referring to earlier works, and it’s not enough to turn up one previous description of a locale. You’d have to check out every mention of the place to be sure you haven’t gotten a detail wrong.
But if the place really exists, you don’t have this problem. You just describe it as it is. You’ll mention one thing one time and another later on, but all your verbal snapshots will be of the same real place, so they won’t contradict one another.
It is possible, of course, to manage this without using real locations and names. You do so simply by describing a locale with which you are familiar but calling the place something else, and moving it a few blocks north or south. Because you’ve given it a fictitious name and address, you can say good or bad things about it, involve the clientele and employees in no end of nefarious schemes, and still know exactly what the place looks like.
Another advantage of so doing—indeed, an advantage of making up your locations as well—is that wholly fictional locations can stay the same. They don’t have to change the way their counterparts in reality so often insist on doing.
Back in the early Scudder novels, my hero didn’t do all his drinking at Armstrong’s. He also dropped in for the occasional quick restorative at Polly’s Cage and Joey Farrell’s and McGovern’s and sometimes had a last drink on the way home at Antares & Spiro’s.
Well, I guess it’s a good thing Scudder stopped drinking, because he couldn’t go back to any of those places. They’re all gone. This sort of thing happens everywhere, but in New York it happens at an astonishing pace. Even Armstrong’s itself picked up and moved from Ninth to Tenth Avenue a few years ago.
If I had called the joint something else, I wouldn’t have had to follow its westward migration. I could keep the place on Ninth, around the corner from Scudder’s hotel, and it would exist there forever in that alternate reality that fiction constitutes.
Some of these problems don’t apply unless you’re fortunate or unfortunate enough to be involved in a lengthy series. But the choice of reality or artifice confronts every fiction writer all the time, and there are always decisions to be made.
In Down on the Killing Floor, the most recently completed Scudder novel, the detective visits a facility for homeless youth in the Times Square area. I of course had Covenant House in mind, but for several reasons decided not to refer to that institution by name. At the time of the writing, some of Covenant House’s founder’s personal problems were beginning to come to light, and it was impossible to know how that situation would resolve itself. Since my book was in no sense about Covenant House, and since it was to be only the setting for a single scene, I didn’t want to load my novel with any controversy that might attach to the institution’s name.
However, I’d decided to call it something else even before the place hit the news, because I didn’t want to be harnessed to reality. I didn’t want to bother discovering the actual practices and rules and policies of the real institution when I could better facilitate the telling of my own story by inventing a parallel institution that would have whatever rules and policies I wanted it to have.
I named the place Testament House, purposely selecting a name that would immediately suggest Covenant House to readers familiar with the actual institution. And, just as purposefully, I changed the locations and architecture of its residential facilities and made its director an Episcopalian. Essentially I created a parallel Covenant House, an alternate Covenant House that would fill the role of that institution without bearing the excess baggage that had no place in my novel.
Fiction takes place in its own world, and at the same time it reflects the world the writer and his readers inhabit. The extent to which the two worlds correspond is a matter of endless choice on the writer’s part. You decide for yourself, sometimes with calculation and sometimes intuitively, how much of the actual landscape you want to transfer to your fiction, and just how you will bring that about. The rewards of getting it right are greater than the occasional free meal.
Still, I’ve just gone and mentioned Hunan Pan any number of times in the world’s leading magazine for writers, and that ought to be worth something.