By Jean Henry Mead
Selecting your novel's setting is important because it not only adds color to the
plot, it serves as a secondary character. People against nature has
created countless adventures, from Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea to Jack London's story, "To Build a Fire."
Stranding someone in the middle of the Sahara Desert is far more intriguing
than having a car stolen from a city street, so settings should be
considered carefully.
My amateur sleuths travel
in a motorhome about the West and the setting changes with each book. Although
Dana Logan and Sarah Cafferty began solving murders in their California
retirement village, Dana inherits her
sister’s mansion in Wyoming, so the settings change considerably. Both
60-year-old widows are feisty and determined to get to the bottom of each mystery
they encounter. In Diary of Murder, Logan and Cafferty are forced to drive through a Rocky Mountain blizzard in their motorhome, an experince I'd had years earlier. In Murder on the Interstate, they're caught in torrential rain when they discover the body of a young woman in her Mercedes convertible in Arizona.
In my fourth and most recent novel, Gray Wolf Mountain, the setting is Wyoming’s Laramie Mountains, an area I know well because I live there. I also set a children’s mystery,
Ghost of Crimson Dawn, on our ranch
for the Hamilton Kids’ mystery series. The possibilities are endless in the
mountains and have provided me with the backdrop for a mystery which includes the
unwarranted killings of wolves by trigger-happy hunters. I researched the
problem in Wyoming, and was shocked to learn that the situation exists in
other states as well as Canada. The wolves are shot en masse from helicopters in
the Yukon to increase the Caribou herd to 100,000, solely for the benefit of big
game hunters. The Yukon is a setting that few writers have ventured to write
about.My themes usually encompass social problems and I incorporate humor and a little romance to prevent the storyline from becoming dreary. By setting each plot in an unusual area, it hopefully enhances reader awareness and interest by educating as well as entertaining him or her.
3 comments:
You're absolutely correct! Settings done right become secondary characters. And you, my friend, do an wonderful job of creating realistic settings.
You're absolutely correct! Settings done right become secondary characters. And you, my friend, do an wonderful job of creating realistic settings.
Thank you, Jackie. You do a good job with settings, yourself.
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