A Sense of Place

By Pat Browning

“A profound sense of place” – that’s what novelist Beth Anderson said about my fictional town of Pearl in ABSINTHE OF MALICE.


Pearl is a combination of several little towns along old Highway 99. The highway runs the length of California’s San Joaquin Valley, with Fresno almost dead center and various towns hidden in the trees on either side of the highway.


I lived in the area for most of my adult life and, frankly, I miss it. I’m glad I set my mystery there. ABSINTHE is first in a proposed limited series. The second book got derailed along the way, but as James Garner always said in his old “Maverick” TV series, “I’m workin’ on it.”


Helping to preserve that sense of place as I slog through Book No. 2, which I’ll call METAPHOR, are some photos I took in Hanford before I moved to Oklahoma five years ago. The photos are of real streets and houses. Their place in my book is purely fictional.

Hanford’s old Irwin Street Inn is the inspiration for property now owned by my character Halcyon. She got the keys when her husband’s mysterious disappearance – oops, that would be a spoiler. In METAPHOR she’s fixing the place up and thinking of opening a tearoom.

Halcyon’s dashing nephew, Watt, lives in one of Halcyon’s suites with an outside entrance. Watt was “born” one night about 10 years ago during an online chat with a writing group. We kicked around the idea of a romantic interest for my protagonist. As long as I was inventing him I invented the perfect man – handsome, sexy, rich and aging gracefully. What’s not to love?

 Hanford’s China Alley is the inspiration for my Shanghai Street. It plays an important part in METAPHOR.

This house inspired my version of a house that once belonged to one of Pearl's long dead residents who left behind a surprise or two.

And what would a setting in Central California be without winter fog? I took this photo of a Hanford street in December 2004.


A sense of place … a place I know well. It’s time I got back to it. See you in the funky little town of Pearl!

When in doubt -- look it up!

Even a writer of cozies has to do research. You don’t realize how little you know until you start to write. I had a hassle this week with Google and the pink bollworm, but finally took care of it with a long distance phone call.

Then I checked out a web site mentioned by Janet Rudolph on her blog Mystery Fanfare (http://mysteryreadersinc.blogspot.com/) that kept me tied to the computer for an hour.

It’s at TeachingTips.com, and lists 100 Unbelievably Useful Reference Sites You’ve Never Heard Of -- “Beyond Google, Wikipedia and other generic reference sites, the Internet boasts a multitude of search engines, dictionaries, reference desks & databases that have organized and archived information for quick and easy searches. In this list, we’ve compiled just 100 of our favorites, for teachers, students, hypochondriacs, procrastinators, bookworms, sports nuts and more.”

It doesn’t mention writers, but the list can be “unbelievably useful” for writers, too.

One handy little site is www.freedict.com, a free online dictionary with translations. Need a Hungarian word for “lover”? Never mind. “Sweetheart”? Apparently you can’t say that in Portuguese. “Wife” in Spanish turns up “esposa” which sounds about right. In Italian it’s “maglie, femmina, signora.” I’d go for “signora.” “Maglie” sounds too much like “magpie.” “Femmina” sounds like a hygiene product.

More useful to writers of crime fiction might be a site called Who’s Alive And Who’s Dead (www.wa-wd.com). One segment lists all of Playboy’s Playmates of the Month who have died.

There are a LOT of them, going back to Marilyn Monroe who made her first centerfold appearance in 1953. She died at age 36, from a drug overdose listed here as “accidental/suicide/murdered?” Will we ever know?

The list ends with Elisa Bridges, a 1994 centerfold, who died at age 26 after an overdose of “heroin and three others.” Between Marilyn and Elisa are quite a number of Playmates who died by drug overdose, cancer, murder or suicide. There must be a novel in there somewhere.

But back to Google and the pink bollworm. In going over drafts of my work-in-progress I stopped short at a scene of a farmer on a tractor, plowing down remnants of his cotton crop “to discourage the pink bollworm.” I wrote that scene maybe four or five years ago, just before I left California. Looking back at it now, I felt a moment of panic. Did I dream the “pink bollworm” stuff?

All Google gave me was listing after listing of restricted research papers on eradicating it with pesticides.

Hells, bells. For 50 years I watched cotton farmers plow down their fields every winter before planting a new crop, and somewhere I heard or read that it was to discourage the pink bollworm. I went to The Fresno Bee online and searched their archives. Plenty of articles on cotton and such, but they want $2.95 for each article you download. Fie on them.

Then I called the U.S. farm service bureau in Hanford, where I used to live, and asked the woman who answered. She knew the answer. Yes, the plowdown is to discourage the pink bollworm. Hanford takes it seriously. If a farmer messes around and doesn't get it done by January, his name might appear in the paper as being derelict in his duty.

All that sturm und drang for 3 sentences in my manuscript:
"I passed a field where ribbons of white terns trailed a farmer on a tractor. The terns wheeled and darted, picking up bugs and worms while the farmer turned under remnants of his cotton plants. It was a winter ritual, plowing down the old plants to discourage the pink bollworm."

On a different note, my favorite California cotton story comes from my trip to China in 1989. We picked up a topnotch tour guide in Beijing, and had wonderful local guides in other places. We had been told to take small gifts for our main guide and bus driver. For him, I had a baseball cap. For her I had a huge picture book on California.

In the middle of the book was a double-page photo of California. I don’t remember now whether it was an aerial photo or what, but it laid out the state as plain as day – the mountains on the east, the ocean on the west, and in between the long, golden San Joaquin Valley.

I put my finger on the spot we came from. Our guide gave me a thoughtful look and said, “I know that place. We buy cotton from there.”

An interview with Sarah Cafferty

by Jean Henry Mead

I began my career as an investigative reporter and have interviewed hundreds of people over the years, but never my novel characters. So, taking my cue from Chester, who interviewed his protagonist Greg McKenzie not long ago, I gave in to the pleadings of Sarah Cafferty, one of the protagonists in my recently released senior sleuth novel, A Village Shattered.

You're not the viewpoint character, Sarah, so why am I interviewing you instead of your friend, Dana Logan?

Because nearly the entire plot is seen through Dana's eyes and I rarely get a chance to speak my piece. Don't you think my private investigator's widowhood trumps Dana's claim to mystery novel buffdom? Which do you think takes precedence?

I'm sure you're both equally qualified to solve the murders of your friends and club members. The two of you work quite well together, so why are you upset?

Dana gets to have all the fun while I have to hang around with Micki, whose cooking puts weight on everyone within smelling range. The sheriff paired all us widows in the retirement village when he realized a serial killer was on the loose. Micki's partners keep getting killed or put in jail, so I'm her partner now. I'd rather stay with Dana but her daughter Kerrie showed up unexpectantly and is occupying the guest room.

I would hardly call being locked in a closet by the killer having fun. Dana and her daughter were in danger while you and Micki were doing an unauthorized stakeout, which was also dangerous and could have gotten you killed.

It was boring and we ate a couple of pounds of Micki's world famous brownies before the sheriff found us and ordered us home. He's not very good at his job, you know. The sheriff was elected recently and doesn't know his job very well. In fact, he's bungling the investigation. That's why Dana and I decided to put our crime solving skills to work before we're murdered too. The killer stole our club roster and is killing our club members alphabetically. A for Alice, B for Betty, C for Candice and D for Dana...


If my name were next on the killer's list, I'd barricade myself in my house and not come out until he's caught.

Not my friend, Dana. She's got to be there in the middle of things.

Now, Sarah, we both know that it was you who talked Dana into investigating the murders.

Well, it just made sense. My late husband's investigative tools were just sitting there rusting, and I typed all his reports so I know how to go about learning the killer's identity.

And didn't your great ideas almost get your neighbor killed?

Well, Harold was the logical suspect and how was I to know he would disappear. There are other suspects living here in the retirement village. There's Pat Wilson, an alcoholic womanizer who was married to Betty before she was murdered. He may have killed the other women to cover up his own wife's murder. Then there's John Merino who's married to the psychic and Nola Champion who has her cap set for Pat Wilson. And . . .

Don't give away the entire plot, Sarah. You didn't mention the pea soup San Joaquin Valley fog.

Oh, that. Well, if you've lived in the valley as long as I have, you take that awful tule fog for granted. At least we did until the killer started hiding in it and picking off his victims.

I think we'd better let the readers discover the rest of the story for themselves, don't you?

But, I was just gettting started.

Thank you, Sarah. By the way, folks, I'm currently in the middle of a two-week blog book tour to promote A Village Shattered. I'll be giving away three signed copies of my novel to those who leave comments at the various blog sites. My Blog Tour Schedule lists links to the various host sites.