PLACES OF IMAGINATION by Frankie Y. Bailey
A couple of weekends ago, I was on a
panel at Malice Domestic, the mystery conference. Our moderator asked me and
the other panelists about setting. How and why did we choose the places where
we set our books? I said briefly that I had set my books in places that I know well
– a fictional version of my hometown, Danville, Virginia, and a near-future
version of Albany, New York, where I live and work. But it is more complicated
than knowing these places well. The places I have set my books and short
stories have been reshaped by my imagination.
In fact, the first book in my Lizzie
Stuart series was set in London and Cornwall, England. Both I and my sleuth had
been on vacation there. In the second book, Lizzie moved from her hometown in
Kentucky to “Gallagher, Virginia”. She works at a fictional university and is
now director of the fictional Institute for the Study of Southern Crime and
Culture. She has left Gallagher several times in the five books in the series –
going to Chicago, Wilmington, North Carolina and New Orleans in one book, and
to the Eastern Shore of Virginia in another. In the next book, whenever I have
a chance to finish it, she will be back in Gallagher after spending a few days
in Santa Fe.
What is important about place in both
the Lizzie Stuart novels and the novels featuring Police Detective Hannah McCabe
is that my two protagonists have been shaped by the places where they grew up.
Wherever she is in the world, Lizzie is a Southerner (as I am). Hannah McCabe
is a New Yorker – upstate New York, not New York City, and that is an important
distinction. Even though Lizzie is a graduate of the real-life School of
Criminal Justice in Albany (the place where I now teach), she has no roots here.
Even though McCabe may have cousins in the South, she would be out of place
there.
In the Lizzie Stuart books, I began
with Danville, the place where I grew up, wrote about in my dissertation, and
in a local history about the Prohibition-era. I drew on Danville’s history and
geography, and created “Gallagher”. Even though I have lived in Albany for
almost three decades and done research on the city, I have needed to bring the
Hannah McCabe novels to life in a world that I can never enter. In both series,
setting is crucial to the stories I am telling. The geography, the pace of
life, how the places are perceived by outsiders is what I try to capture in my
books. Customs, culture, and ways of seeing the world shape the events.
I admire those authors who can write
about a real place so truthfully that you can feel and smell and taste that place.
That is want to do. But real places must be distilled and re-imagined as fictional
worlds in which the events of stories happen. The longer I write, the more
comfortable I am in my fictional worlds that overlap, draw from, and exist
alongside the real world. The real world feeds my imagination, but doesn’t
constrain it. I am telling stories that exist in the recent past or the near
future. I am never in the here and now.
One of the pleasures of writing
fiction – in contrast to my academic research and writing – is that I can make
things up. But I love doing research. Therefore, I always begin with a set of
facts and then twist them. The Red Queen
Dies began with the story of the day that Abraham Lincoln and John Wilkes
Booth were both in Albany and the stories behind Alice in Wonderland and The
Wizard of Oz. What the Fly Saw
began with a famous blizzard, celebrations of life, megachurches, 19th
century spiritualism, and virtual reality.
Recently, I wrote another short
story set in an upstate village in 1948 featuring a new protagonist. Before
writing this story, I had to learn what a “village” is as defined by New York
State. This is not a concept that I grew up with in Virginia. I also spent some
time in villages – visiting them with a friend who had grown up in New York and
could help me to understand what they might have been like in the 1940s. At the
same time, I needed to spend some time doing research on the historical era of
post-World War II America. I needed to do all this so that the story I was telling
would have the sense of place that I strive to achieve. Readers will let me
know if I got it right.
Brief bio and links:
Criminologist Frankie
Bailey has five books and two published short stories in a mystery series
featuring crime historian Lizzie Stuart. The
Red Queen Dies, the first book in a near-future police procedural series
featuring Detective Hannah McCabe, came out in September, 2013. The second book in the series, What the Fly Saw came out in March 2015.
Frankie is a former executive vice president of Mystery Writers of America and
a past president of Sisters in Crime.
Website
URL: www.frankieybailey.com
Twitter: @FrankieYBailey
Amazon:
What
the Fly Saw
My Notes: Years ago, at the one and only Edgars Award dinner I ever attended, I sat next to Frankie Bailey. We had a nice conversation, bt I didn't really find out all this interesting information about her then.
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