Setting...Local or Widespread?

By Chester Campbell

When deciding where to set a novel, an author has a choice of restricting the story to a single locale or spreading it across a wider tapestry. There are several factors to consider in making the selection. Sticking to a single location, which is one of the hallmarks of cozies, has the advantage of requiring a minimum of research. If you are like me and choose the city where you've spent most of your life, it's an easy choice.

My seven books in two mystery series featuring PI's are set primarily in Nashville. Since I've spent most of my 87 years here, it makes describing the locale simple. During the early part of my writing life, I was a newspaper reporter or a local magazine editor, giving me total familiarity with the area. The city has changed considerably in recent years, but I've watched it grow and develop. When I need to, I do a drive-by in a particular area to check out recent changes.

The first two books in the Greg McKenzie series are set only partly in Nashville. The first takes place also in the Holy Land, which I had just visited before I started writing. The second starts in Nashville and then goes to Perdido Key and the Pensacola area. Part of it was written at my brother's condo on Perdido Key, which my wife and I visited twice a year.

Both of my Sid Chance PI stories are set in the Nashville area. But I didn't start out locating books in my home town. My first novels were a trilogy of post Cold War political thrillers. I spread the action across the map.

Research is a major consideration when choosing a widespread setting. Getting an unfamiliar area right can be a problem. I set the first two books mostly in locations I was familiar with.

Star Ferry in Hong Kong Harbor

The first involved the Great Smoky Mountains, an area I tromped about many times in my younger days; Washington, D.C., which I had visited many times on business, and Hong Kong, where I spent several days during a Far Eastern tour. I had made several visits to other American cities used in the story. Brief scenes were set in Vienna, Austria, Tel Aviv, Israel and the island of Cyprus. I used tour books and online research to provide sufficient background for those.

Seoul Subway

A large part  of the second book takes place in South Korea. My familiarity there came from a tour in Seoul during the Korean War, plus a visit to the modern city while on the Far East tour mentioned above. That trip also provided several days in Chiangmai, Thailand, which I also featured in the book.

The third book, written in 1993 but never published, will be out next month. Overture to Disaster required the greatest amount of research, since much of it is set in areas I had never visited. A portion of it takes place in Mexico, mostly in the area of Guadalajara. I had been to Mexico City and taken a bus tour from there to Acapulco, so I knew the countryside fairly well. To get the flavor of Guadalajara and Lake Chapala to the south, the number one destination for retired U.S. servicemen, I corresponded with the editor of a retiree newspaper. She provided loads of helpful information.

The second area was a small community in the Zagros Mountains of northwestern Iran. I chose it after reading a book about Army Special Forces that told how U.S. soldiers became heroes to the locals in the wake of a deadly earthquake. That was during the Shah's reign in the late seventies, but the people still would have viewed American soldiers with fondness.

The home of a character who was an investigator for the Minsk prosecutor proved the most challenging area to portray. The time was shortly after breakup of the Soviet Union and formation of the new Commonwealth of Independent States. Things were changing in the capital of the Republic of Belarus. I corresponded with an attache at the American Embassy there who provided me with answers to all my questions, including political conditions and locations of various government offices. 

The important thing in spreading your setting around the globe is to do everything possible to get it right. So far I've had no problem with readers taking potshots at my descriptions. What's your take on how to handle unfamiliar settings?

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Why don't you write a book about...?

By Chester Campbell

Every author gets one of those suggestions occasionally from an acquaintance or a passerby at a book signing. I usually smile or nod or give some such non-response. But when I was getting ready to write my fourth Greg McKenzie mystery, a neighbor pushing ninety stopped with obvious excitement to tell me about a visit to the restored factory and office building of Marathon Motor Works just beyond downtown Nashville. Her father had worked there on the assembly line in 1914, the year the company stopped production.

"You ought to go over there and look at the place and put it in your next book," she said.

An entrepreneur with a vision had bought the old buildings located in an unsavory part of town and long abandoned. He had researched the company's history, learning it had produced a popular touring car in Nashville from 1910 to 1914. the only automobile ever produced entirely in the South. He had been restoring the buildings to provide space for creative types like artists, photographers, and musicians.

My wife and I visited the place, now called Marathon Village, and got the grand tour by Barry Walker, the owner and developer. Being somewhat a history buff myself, I found it quite intriguing. He had located a few Marathon cars from around the county and was restoring them. A nifty looking one sat in the old showroom of the headquarters building. I shot a photo of it which I sent to the artist who created the cover.

In wandering around the place, which was still in the process of being restored, I noticed it had thick interior walls. Former office spaces contained decorative wood facing in places such as corners in a wall. I got to thinking what somebody might have hidden behind one of those decorative panels. And a mystery novel was born.

Most of the Marathon Motor Works background in the book is factual, with names changed to protect the guilty. The Marathon car made quite a splash in the automobile world. It was sold at dealerships around the U.S. and in several foreign countries. The owners made several mistakes that doomed the business. They fired the engineer who created the car and brought in new management who knew nothing about manufacturing or selling automobiles. And there was skullduggery afoot, with cars being "sold out the back door" at less than cost.

With this background, I created an assistant treasurer, Sydney Liggett, who disappeared in the midst of this financial fiasco and was accused of embezzling funds. His body was found a few years later seated in his Marathon in an abandoned barn a few miles from Nashville. Thus the cover artwork. Ninety years later, papers are found in the wall of his office that may have some bearing on the case. But the construction foreman who had them disappears before he can show them to Liggett's grandson, now in his eighties and in a nursing home.

It is at this point the story begins with Liggett's great-great granddaughter retaining my senior sleuths, Greg and Jill McKenzie, to find the foreman and recover the old Marathon records. As you might imagine, when they find the foreman, he's in his Jeep at the bottom of a lake. I put the murder in a rural county where the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation takes charge of the case. The TBI detective is a major character in the story.

The Marathon Murders is the fourth book in my six-book (so far) series and was published in 2004. The ebook version will be free in the Kindle Store Monday through Wednesday, January 25-27. If you can't wait till then, it's only $2.99 anyway.

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Research - the Backbone of Your Mystery

Research provides the backbone of a mystery novel. In her book Writing the Modern Mystery, Barbara Norville says unless you’re a professional in a field that lends itself to solving crimes, the choosing of your protagonist starts with research into the type of people who do.

When I started my Greg McKenzie series, dealing with a retired Air Force Office of Special Investigations agent, I read all I could find about the OSI, then arranged an interview with the Special Agent in Charge of the OSI office at Arnold Air Force Base south of Nashville.

I spent a couple of hours with him, going over the agents’ backgrounds, the types of cases they worked, how they operated on the job. With the knowledge I had gained as an Air Force intelligence officer, that interview gave me enough information to predict how my protagonist would act when he faced the problems I had in mind with my plot.

Getting into your main character’s head, though, is just the start. The major research effort will provide you with the details you need in setting the stage for your story. Back to that first book, Secret of the Scroll, I needed to know about ancient Hebrew parchment documents, how they are handled, something about their translation.

I went to the library and checked out books on the Dead Sea Scrolls and biblical archeology. After absorbing several of those, I did a telephone interview with a professor at Emory University in Atlanta who went to Israel each summer and worked on translations.

In talking about the book with a writer friend, he asked if I was familiar with the Bible Codes. I’d never heard of them. A trip to the bookstore got me a book that seemed to cover the subject with an honesty I found refreshing. It gave me a plot point that was exactly what I needed.

Since the book began in the Holy Land and wound up there (after several chapters around Nashville), information on Israel was vital to the story. I got the original idea on the way home from a trip to Israel and Jordan, and I had brought back lots of information. That included three hours of video I shot during the tour. But I bought a couple of guidebooks to refresh my memory and fill in some details that would help color the writing.

One I used spoke of the Israeli-born Jews called Sabras. It said they have a distinct character like the prickly pear, from which they got their name, spiky on the outside but sweet on the inside.

Being set partially in a foreign land and dealing with a historical subject, this book required more intensive research than any of the others I’ve written. It gave me a good introduction to the requirements for research, however, which has carried over to my later novels. Since a lot of my information gathering has involved interviews, my newspaper background proved helpful. But any writer can do it.

If you want your story to sound realistic, do the research and gather all the facts you can. You won’t need to include them all, but they will give you the factual background to satisfy those who know a lot more about the subject than you do. If you'd like to get a taste of the research I did for that first book, click on the link below.

Secret of the Scroll Opening Chapters