How important is it to have spent time in a location you use for your fictional story? Can you write about a place you’ve visited only in the imagination, or in travel literature, or online? Authors of historical novels can’t literally recreate the reality of a place, so how do they deal with describing something that no longer exists? Few of us can live in New York or Shanghai or Paris for months at a clip just so we can record and play back for our readers the daily habits of residents. But I think most readers can tell when the sense of place is real, crackling with energy, and specific without being pedantic. (I do not need to know every step the protagonist takes along a street in Oxford, but I like to feel the chill of old stone under her feet.)

Lisa Brackmann’s “Rock Paper Tiger” blew me away from the first lines. It’s a Beijing that simply reeks of life, shabby, crowded, the threat of trouble always in the air.  Lisa has lived and traveled in China and her keen observations help make this book an outstanding read.

Kelli Stanley has two books out set in San Francisco circa 1940, the latest of which is “City of Secrets.” At a recent panel on San Francisco noir, she explained how she conjures up a different time in a familiar place. From old souvenirs and vintage perfumes to reading the newspapers of the day, Kelli steeps herself in the times. And she visits the places as they are today, some quite different and others remarkably the same.

My fellow blogger on LadyKillers, Ann Parker, has a whole series set in the Colorado Rockies town of Leadville late in the 19^th century. The latest is “Mercury’s Rise,” which is launching this week. Ann spoke at a panel at Left Coast Crime last year in which she talked about the extensive research she’s done in the region, in the library, in conversation with people, and even by devouring old diaries. Reviewers and readers agree she brings the place and the issues of the day vividly and believably to life.

There are other books that don’t do this for me, that seem to be cribbed from travel brochures or movies. And when I’m not in the place, I have a hard time staying involved with the protagonist unless the writer is brilliant and is deliberately holding his hero at arms length from his surroundings, keeping them abstract in order to show me something important about the character.

Note: There is a bonus for committing to doing place well in a novel: You can write off your trip. And if you must set your novel in a city’s sewer system, be sure to have it be Paris’s, as Cara Black did in a recent Aimee Leduc novel!

Yikes – Friday again, so soon?

Major manuscript revision in process. Article to write on assignment. Blog post for LadyKillers a couple of days ago. Committee reports for a non-profit board I sit on.

It seems that I’m sitting at the keyboard all day. Just ask the little orange cat begging me to throw her mouse across the room just once more. This is good for a writer, but I lost track of time and my Friday post was the casualty. Rather than write something careless, I’m re-posting an old LadyKillers bit that still holds true: LOCATIONS

Well-crafted settings for stories are like characters in the narrative. They drive action, provide context, set up or resolve conflicts, add color or texture. Writers who skimp on making the location vivid and exciting, stark or serene, dangerous or comforting, have missed a large measure of what most readers want in our stories. Here’s a partial list of some of my favorites in fiction, stories that are memorable to me in part because of the setting. Just thinking about these books floods my senses! What would you add?

Bath, England in PERSUASION by Jane Austen

Communist Laos in THE CORONER’S LUNCH, by Colin Cotterill

Heaven in SUM, by neuroscientist David Eagleman

India in THE GAME, by Laurie King

Lake Superior in A SUPERIOR DEATH by Nevada Barr

Moscow in WAR AND PEACE by Tolstoy

Northern Africa in THE SHELTERING SKY by Paul Bowles

Occupied France in SUITE FRANCAISE by Irene Nemirovsky

Paris in MURDER IN THE SENTIER by Cara Black

Post World War I England in MAISIE DOBBS by Jackie Winspear

Shanghai in SHANGHAIED by Eric Stone

Sicily in THE SMELL OF THE NIGHT by Andrea Camilleri

The high seas in MASTER AND COMMANDER by Patrick O’Brian

Victorian London in BLEAK HOUSE by Charles Dickens

LadyKillers have been discussing this all week on our blog site. I’m not on the rotation for the week, so I don’t get a chance to weigh in over there. But the terrific nominations from the other writers got me going and I herewith offer a few of my own. For me, the opening lines need to signal the presence of a good storyteller, someone who is saying, “Draw up your chair to the fire, and let me tell you the marvelous tale…”

In the crime fiction genre, it has recently become a truism that you have to start with a dead body, or at least a shock that pulls the reader into the book forcefully. There are books that do that well, and I relish them. Others, not so much, especially when they’re too obviously manipulative and formulaic. I’ve always been willing to give the writer a little more time as long as I get the sense I’m in the presence of a master who will entice me in rather than yank me by the scruff of my neck.

Not all the best stories are fiction either. As I was searching out favorites that other bloggers hadn’t mentioned, I remembered first lines of poems, histories, social commentaries. All had that power to draw me in, to capture my attention with something clear and yet challenging. Some that I love were far too long to add here, or required that the reader stay with the writer a couple more lines to become fully caught up in the story. I honor them even if I can’t include them here.

• In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The Oxford Bible
• Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote, The droughte of March hath perced to the roote… Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, The Prologue
• It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. – Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
• There are people who can be happy anywhere. I am not one of them. – Cornelia Read, A Field of Darkness
• Michael Deramo straightened his tie in front of his cracked hallway mirror and tried to imagine how many buckets it would take to hold one hundred thousand dollars.  – Camille Minichino, The Lithium Murder
• This story’s about greed, desire, love, and death – in the world of antiques you get them all.  – Jonathan Gash, The Judas Pair
• If If you had happened to find yourself on the banks of the Ohio River on a particular afternoon in the spring of 1806 – somewhere just to the north of Wheeling, West Virginia, say – you would probably have noticed a strange makeshift craft drifting lazily down the river. – Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire

Would love to hear yours!

A year ago, I wrote a blog for LadyKillers, where I blog every other Tuesday, on the assigned topic: Where do you find inspiration as a writer? I’ve updated it here because one can never have too much inspiration, right?

Just finished the highly praised “The Lock Artist” by Steve Hamilton. It’s a strong, compelling story in which the author juggles time, doling out bits of the protagonist’s history in parallel to what’s going on in the more recent past. Time shifts can be hard to pull off and Hamilton does a great job, even if I got a little fatigued shifting gears occasionally. Recommended.

In one of her early books, Sue Grafton has Kinsey hide in a trash bin, as I recall. We don’t know any more than Kinsey whether or not the lid will suddenly be ripped off and she’ll be battered. I still recall the tension I felt – my pulse was pounding. How did she do that?

Cara Black’s scene-setting leaves me with such a clear picture of wet cobblestones on cold Paris nights that my feet feel cold. She can conjure that up in descriptions that don’t leave me thinking of the actual words she writes, only of the darkness of the night. I know how Cara does it: She walks those pavements at night in the rain!

Lee Child’s dialogue pushes the plot along at high speed, and Gar Anthony Haywood’s characters talk like real people – he’s got the gift.

Laurie King echoes Sherlock Holmes in more than one way in her Mary Russell mysteries – she knows how to keep me guessing as to the identity of the murderer. Like Conan Doyle, she seems to relish playing hide and seek with the reader, but always playing fair.

Lately, I’ve been reading perhaps too much R.D. Wingfield, whose Detective Inspector Frost stumbles his way to case-solving, cursing, smoking, and annoying other people every step of the way. I say “Too much” because I realize Wingfield doesn’t let Frost grow much, and even his speech gets repetitive if you read too many of the novels in a row. Plus he (Frost, I mean) has a pretty one-dimensional view of women

How about you? Any good sources of writing inspiration to share?

I’m a little distracted by the world today.

I don’t like the politics, the economics, the suffering and fighting, damn near anything. That ought to make it a good day to write crime fiction. There are so many villains and victims and crimes and nasty situations to choose from.

But for me at least it doesn’t work that way. I’ve always said that a slight to my beloved is what gave me the core of the story and one of the chief characters in MURDER IN THE ABSTRACT. In the sequel, THE KING’S JAR, it was a glimpse into a research world unlike what I’d known previously that led to the central idea for that Dani novel. At the moment, I’m deep into the third in the same series, MIXED UP WITH MURDER, and Dani is doing some due diligence as a consultant on a college campus, a type of community I know well.

I look at crimes close up, basically as failures of character. I can explore evil or moral sickness on that individual level and understand, sometimes even sympathize a little, with it. But the big stuff? Whole cultures of corruption? The rule of law crumbling in entire countries or regions? Mobs stoning teenagers? Soldiers raping and pillaging on a daily basis? When it gets that big in scale, I can’t decipher the qualities that lead people to carry out such crimes. Is it merely a multiple of individual defects of character or madness, or is it something new, a kind of sickness that only infects people when they’re part of a group all of whom have their own weak spots that somehow get exploited at the same time by the same trigger?

Whatever it is, I’m baffled, occasionally speechless, and definitely not up to the challenge of getting it down on paper. John Le Carre was able to do it for Cold War spy agencies, I think, and Dennis Lehane can paint scary portraits of communities that are – and are subject to – prejudice. Lehane and the other writers on “The Wire” did it every week, but they chose to do it the only way I could conceive of the job, come to think of it, through individual stories that sometimes broke your heart.

All of us who write fictionabout crime have to look it in the face, try to parse it enough to understand it, to see through the shock and tragedy of the act into the hearts of the villains as well as the victims. I’m just having a hard time today seeing past the immensity of the real world crimes.

I posted this over at LadyKillers this week and it sparked some great ideas – what do readers think the novel will look like 2, 20, or 200 years from now?

The Future Shape of Novels?

• Strictly 140-character chapters.
• Based on cartoon characters who ran for office in last election.
• Includes interactive graphics.
• Features short 3-D movies.
• Optional music.
• Optional out-loud reading of novel by Angelina Jolie (or, Brad Pitt. Your choice, but not cheap.)
• Customized with your name as protagonist. Or superhero, if appropriate.
• Streamed to your e-reader by Apple or Amazon, the only providers in business.
• Only 99 cents.
• Written by one of 10 best-selling We-Customize-for-U Authors.
• Comes with coupon: Buy 10 and get a free 32-ounce drink.

To blog or not to blog, that is the question. A few years ago, the answer for a crime writer who wanted any chance of standing out in the crowd was a resounding yes. The air was full of panel discussions, advice columns – and blogs – on the value of social media in bringing readers to your books. Publishers increasingly controlled by bottom line realities weren’t spending as much on mid-list and new authors publicity so we had to do it ourselves. And we did.

Thousands of blogs sprang up, assisted by simple and clever software programs generously put out there by companies that seemed to survive on less revenue than bookstores or lemonade stands. At first, I bookmarked like crazy. I mean who wouldn’t want to read a weekly post by David Hewson, Louise Penny, or the other best-selling authors who jumped in? And I had personal friends I wanted to support or whose small essays pleased me. And when I began my own, I was honored that some people bookmarked mine, and subscribed to the automatic feeds. But suddenly, I was drowning in clever essays. I couldn’t stay current with everybody and vines began to cover the unused links.

One innovation helped a lot: the group blog: The Kill Zone, Jungle Red Writers, Murderati, Pens Fatales…the list is long, and the quality of the writing sparkles. I blushed with pride when The LadyKillers invited me into their highly-rated group. One benefit: with so many writers in one blog, you didn’t have to produce as often as for your own blog. A nice feature, except that I – like many – still produce my own weekly blog.

I’m not answering the blog question in the negative, at least not yet. I enjoy the challenge of coming up with a topic and riffing on it for 300-450 words. I think out loud and solicit readers’ thoughts too. But I do wonder if it falls on deaf ears – or weary eyes, or no eyes at all some weeks.

And the original purpose? I hear from other authors that publishers who used to do a little publicity now do none, that the existence of author-originated strategies is now damn near all there is until and unless you hit “the numbers,” a mysterious goal that the publishers don’t actually share with you. So, onward and outward, reporting live from Blog Central.

Not many people write letters these days. Invitations, thank yous, birthdays, customer service complaints…there are email forms and clever software apps for just about everything. Just ask the Post Office, which is staring some form of bankruptcy in the face. It’s even easier to send an email than to call, witness the phone companies sweating bullets competing for my dwindling landline bill while Apple smiles at my (late adopter) embrace of texting and Facebook continues to “improve” everyone’s access to my social networking information.

So it is a joy to have one friend who not only writes letters, but writes them so brilliantly, so charmingly, so richly that I can hardly wait for her next missive. She’s an American but lives in France, so we do our correspondence via emails, but not in email language. No LOLs or IMHOs for her. She’s literate, funny, frank, and highly opinionated, which I treasure. I try to be half as interesting when I write to her.

Our letters say a lot about us, much as Jane Austen’s and Abigail Adams’ and Lillian Hellman’s did about them. I mention these women not because I equate my writing with theirs, but because, as famous writers and personalities, their epistolary (now there’s a word we don’t use much any more!) writing has been captured, saved, and published, so I can access it. My friend is an artist and writer, and once edited a fashionable magazine, so she has the chops for this. She, like I, stretches her humorous anecdotes to capture the full human folly in them, and holds up a gleaming mirror to her own shortcomings so that I continue to know her as a fully-formed person. I hear her voice and understand that she spends a little time on her letters to me, not so much that her prose is stilted, but enough so it stands for something.

I’m not writing this to bemoan the lack of letter writing skills in “today’s youth.” I suspect every age feels that way about the one that is rapidly succeeding it. I do think something is lost, not just for the reader, but for the writer, when an animated card accompanied by elevator music substitutes for a handwritten birthday note. I’ll bet my grandmother had exactly the same response when a Hallmark card took the note’s place, and somewhere in the 19^th century, someone kvetched when a reference in Latin fell on uncomprehending ears! We are of our era, and I will rejoice and be happy that my friend and I have this small pleasure to relish.

The publishing industry is in the throes of change that we thought last year would be evolutionary, but which has defied the notion of incremental adaptation and become a revolution, a tsunami, a flash.

Less than 18 months ago, I was reading quotes from traditional publishers who were willing to begin discussions with Amazon about turning their authors’ books into e-books if the right conditions (namely large profits for them) could be negotiated. While they discussed the many and complicated problems at conferences, Amazon simply plowed forward.

Two years ago, it was generally believed to be an admission of failure to bypass agents and editors at print houses and put one’s book in a POD (print on demand) form and sell it directly on Amazon – and walk-in bookstores weren’t usually equipped to help with that. Amazon made them available to customers without blinking.

Last year, authors were debating whether or not to go the e-publishing route with its attendant technology problems and perceived lack of status for books they couldn’t get into the normal print channels. Smashwords was only one of the companies that made it easy to do, and Amazon made them – all of them, good and bad – available through it’s vast, aggressive enterprise.

Today, there are several e-readers competing for the lucrative, fast-growing hardware market, other on-line retailers following Amazon’s lead (and let’s face it, they are following), and big name authors from the paper book world choosing e-book formats over print – for the money!

I feel as though a new planet zoomed overhead while I was reading the star map and thinking about far away constellations. Have I missed the boat? Is the boat still being constructed? Is there a new, still better boat in someone’s head about to burst on the scene?

The fact that I love physical books and may yet drown in them, that I love and am loyal to independent bookstores and still buy from them, and that I hope my agent may land me a new deal with a good print publisher doesn’t keep me from being awed and amazed by the vision that Amazon had and has and the creativity and courage of writers and those who are working with them to conquer this brave new world. Hell, my series may wind up in e-book format by December. That’s how fast the world turns these days.

A post by another writer (Hilary Davidson) on another blog, Mystery Fanfare (http://mysteryreadersinc.blogspot.com/) run by mystery expert and chocoholic Janet Rudolph, started me thinking about a dilemma I’ve faced a few times in my own fiction writing. If one sets an imaginary crime scene in a real place that’s smaller and more specific than, say, Grand Central Station or Chinatown, is one inviting a nasty letter to the publisher or worse?

I love the atmosphere, the architecture, and the allure of  The Metropolitan Club in Manhattan, and what an address: 1 East 60^th Street! I’ve helped put on dinners there, and have been a guest on several occasions, and it’s pretty snazzy. But when I set part of my second Danielle O’Rourke mystery in New York and included a major scene at a private club, I hesitated to be out front and identify the space by its real name. For one thing, I took a few small liberties with the décor and the way the catering systems operate. For another, I made a couple of comments that might offend the real staff.

Now that the book is out with editors, all of whom work in Manhattan and probably recognize the Club, I’m thinking I was a wimp. After all, every author includes a reminder of the difference between fact and fiction in her acknowledgements.

I also fictionalized a whole country in this book, THE KING’S JAR. My reasoning is a little broader but my core question is the same. The country I name had to have a historical possibility not quite realizable in one current country within the context of the story, so I had to shift a few geographical boundaries. And, because I once directed an organization that still works in the country whose somewhat twisty and corrupt politics served as the model for my fiction, I didn’t want to take even the remote chance of offending someone in that government who might remember my association and think I was representing the views of my former employer. Unrealistic, even conceited to think that a current person of power whose native language isn’t English might read and draw false conclusions? Absolutely. But not impossible.

So the question remains: Should an author sacrifice verisimilitude to give herself greater fictional freedom? Is it necessary, if one wants to avoid complaints, push back or even, god forbid, litigation?