Marilyn's Musings

Writers can set their stories in a real place or invent one. Either way, it has to be a place the reader wants to spend some time in. Henning Mankell sets his mysteries in a real place -Southern Sweden, an area called Skane, and he puts a map at the front of the books.  Ed McBain sets his mysteries in the 87th Precinct of a mythical city with boroughs named Isola, Calm's Point, Majesta, Riverhead, Bethtown and Smoke Rise. You’d think a writer as good as Ed McBain could come up with better names. My stories are set in New Mexico, which places me in good company. Tony Hillerman, Steven Havill, Michael McGarrity, Judith van Gieson, Sandi Ault, Nevada Barr, Martha Grimes, Dorothy Hughes, Nancy Pickard, and Stuart Woods have also set one or more of their books in the Land of Enchantment. There must be a reason why so many stories are set in New Mexico and so few in North Dakota.             I think it’s because New Mexico has a d...

About Jinx Schwartz: Raised in the jungles of Haiti and Thailand, with returns to Texas in-between, Jinx Schwartz followed her father's steel-toed bootsteps into the Construction and Engineering industry in hopes of building dams. Finding all the good rivers taken, she traveled the world defacing other landscapes with mega-projects in Alaska, Japan, New Zealand, Puerto Rico and Mexico. Like the protagonist in her mystery series, Hetta Coffey, Jinx was a woman with a yacht—and she wasn't afraid to use it—when she met her husband, Mad Dog Schwartz. They opted to become cash-poor cruisers rather than continue chasing the rat, sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge, turned left, and headed for Mexico. They now divide their time between Arizona and Mexico's Sea of Cortez. Jinx's seventh book in her award-winning series, Just Deserts : Book Four of the Hetta Coffey mystery series, was recently released. Her other books include a YA fictography of her childhood in Hai...

My wife and I spent most of our lives and raised our two daughters in and around Baltimore.  Like most Marylanders, when we wanted to get away, we’d go to the ocean.  That meant crossing the Chesapeake Bay Bridge to the part of the state known as The Eastern Shore and following Route 50 for two hours to the beaches along the Atlantic coast.  Our favorite destination was Ocean City, a jewel of a family resort town with a wide boardwalk lined with shops and restaurants that seems to go for miles and a white-sand beach that goes even farther.   Our girls went from toddlers to teenagers in the years we spent weekends and vacations there. It was a natural and easy choice to set my first mystery novel, MEMORY OF A MURDER, there.  We had moved away from Maryland by then, but my memories of Ocean City were so engrained, I could write it without research.             My protagonist, Adam Kingston, lives i...

Thank you, Marilyn, for featuring me on Day 11 of the Mystery We Write Blog Tour. It’s a pleasure to be here and chat about setting and how it relates to writing, characters and authors. As a beginning author my focus was on developing character, writing snappy dialogue and plot. I paid little attention to where a story took place and in hindsight did myself (and my stories) a disservice. Setting, whether real or imaginary, is important. By its very nature, it helps establish mood. It creates conflict and causes turmoil. It impacts and changes the characters. It can (and should) move the story forward. Story setting can be urban, rural, tropical, arctic, foreign or indigenous. A sleepy English village on a clear, winter’s day is a profoundly different setting from a bustling Asian city of fifteen million battered by a category five typhoon. Locale provides distinct conditions that influence the pace, progression and telling of the story, as well as determine a character’s actions ...

Marilyn has asked me to describe the characters in my latest mainstream mystery, RAVEN TALKS BACK . I hope I don’t leave any out, they might come after me more than they do anyway, since I’m already starting book #2 in the Raven Morressey series.  Raven Morressey : 39 years old. Alaska Native, Athabascan tribe. If you want to know how she looks, think Sandra Bullock. Very beautiful woman, she straddles two cultures because she is Athabascan and her husband is Caucasian. Raven was educated in ‘the lower forty-eight’ as Alaskans put it. Dark hair, dark eyes, medium-dark skin, around size 10. Soft spoken, kind, very trusting but self-contained person. Red Morressey . Raven’s husband, same age as Raven. Tall, medium height and build, red hair, ruddy skin. Very complicated and secretive. Sometimes harsh, sometimes nice. You just never know from day to day which Red is going to show up. Raven’s children:     Timmy . Eight years old. Long black hair, slightly stocky ...

My wife, Janet, and I write cozy mysteries—a genre that has a unique requirement when it comes to setting: Broadly speaking, readers expect the setting to be a character in its own right—unusual, interesting, and playing a central role in the story. Our “Royal Tunbridge Wells Mysteries” are set in the fictional Royal Tunbridge Wells Tea Museum—although we’ve spent so much time writing about the institution that think of it as real. We see it as one of the most popular tourist attractions in the South of England, and also a world center of scholarship about tea history, tea chemistry, and tea tasting. The Museum was established in 1964 to honor Commodore Desmond Hawker, a 19th Century Master of the China Tea Trade. The institution is really a combination art and natural history museum dedicated to the art, geography, botany, and manufacturing related to Britain’s tea trade and its love affair with tea. The Tea Museum is housed in an impressive, four-story Georgian-style b...

My dear friend and fellow author, Pat Browning Absence of Malice Pat's new writing environment: Oklahoma Oklahoma wheat fields Pat Browning was born and raised in Oklahoma. A longtime resident of California's San Joaquin Valley before moving back to Oklahoma in 2005, her professional writing credits go back to the 1960s, when she was a stringer for The Fresno Bee while working full time in a Hanford law office. Her globetrotting in the 1970s led her into the travel business, first as a travel agent, then as a correspondent for TravelAge West , a trade journal published in San Francisco. In the 1990s, she signed on fulltime as a newspaper reporter and columnist, first at The Selma Enterprise and then at The Hanford Sentinel . Her first mystery, FULL CIRCLE , was set in a fictional version of Hanford, and published through iUniverse in 2001. It was revised and reissued as ABSINTHE 0F MALICE by Krill Press in 2008. An extensive excerpt can be read at Google B...