Charlie Cochrane & Riptide Publishing are here today promoting the latest Lindenshaw Mystery novel, Two Feet Under. Be sure to enter to win some sweet swag below. Good luck!
An author’s sense of
place
Last
year, a fellow author asked me last how important is place in my stories. I was
about to glibly answer, “It’s vitally important,” when I realised that was
probably telling a bit of a porky pie. Sometimes it’s vital, other times it
isn’t. Now, before you shake your head and say, “Well, that’s an incredibly
helpful answer, Charlie!” let me try to make myself a bit clearer.
If
you’re setting your story in a real location, that can be very helpful in
immediately creating an intense sense of place among your readers. Mention
London, New York, Cambridge, Paris, etc and the reader knows what the place is
like, either from their own experience or from the depiction of these cities on
film or TV. The author doesn’t have to describe in detail what the setting
looks or sounds or feels like, although the author does have to be true to the
reality. To have your main character walk down Oxford Street and depict the
scene as though he’s walking down a country road would make you look like a
twit.
The
same applies if you create a fictional location within a well-known real
place. By all means create your own
London borough or street or pub or whatever, but make it an authentic feeling
one. A London park that didn’t have pigeons or grey squirrels or the sound of
traffic or planes wouldn’t be like any London park this cockney ever knew!
Creating
a completely fictional location is easier in that there are no preconceptions
to overcome and less chance of making a howler, (“Tut, tut. They don’t have
underground trains in Brighton.”) But it means that the author has to spend
more time producing the sense of place, so that the reader can see it as
clearly as the author can. Using an existing place and tweaking it slightly can
be a useful strategy, although you can come a cropper. My dear pal Joan Moules
set a story in a fictional seaside town and described it so well that people
recognised it as Hastings even though it was called by another name. And then
told her off because “there isn’t a clock on that monument!”
The
other thing about a fictional setting is the challenge of keeping it all
consistent, which is much easier when a real place is used. Is that fictional
town east or west of that one? What shops are in that village? How do you get
from a to b? All those have to be planned and put in place and even though the
setting isn’t real, they have to feel true to life. A small English village
with two pubs, a school and every conceivable shop, all of them thriving,
wouldn’t be realistic in 2018.
The
Lindenshaw mysteries are set in a fictional county that’s not generally unlike
Hampshire, although it’s basically an amalgam of completely fictitious places.
I tried to base Culdover, from “Two Feet Under”, on the town of Andover, but it
refused to play ball. In my mind ,it kept developing into somewhere more
upmarket! No matter how hard I tried to squeeze the “Two Feet Under” locations
into places I’d been the more they refused to oblige.
So
maybe authors (or at least this author)
have less influence over their settings than they’d like.
Two Feet Under began life as a
conversation in a car, when my eldest daughter and I got stuck in a traffic jam
on the way to an author/reader event. It gained a criminal mastermind as a
result of another conversation in the car with her younger sister. It got its
background thanks to the popular television series “Time Team” and a setting
care of the northern part of Hampshire. The plot came from the author’s twisted
imagination, via a lot of checking. And at least one character is based on
people I know. You have been warned.
About Two Feet Under
Things are looking up for Adam Matthews and Robin
Bright—their relationship is blossoming, and they’ve both been promoted. But
Robin’s a policeman, and that means murder is never far from the scene.
When a body turns up in a shallow grave at a Roman villa
dig site—a body that repeatedly defies identification—Robin finds himself
caught up in a world of petty rivalries and deadly threats. The case seems to
want to drag Adam in, as well, and their home life takes a turn for the worse
when an ex-colleague gets thrown out of his house and ends up outstaying his
welcome at theirs.
While Robin has to prove his case against a manipulative
and fiendishly clever killer, Adam is trying to find out which police officer
is leaking information to the media. And both of them have to work out how to
get their home to themselves again, which might need a higher intelligence than
either a chief inspector or a deputy headteacher.
About the Lindenshaw
Mysteries
Adam Matthews's life changed when Inspector Robin Bright
walked into his classroom to investigate a murder.
Now it seems like all the television series are right:
the leafy villages of England do indeed conceal a hotbed of crime, murder, and
intrigue. Lindenshaw is proving the point.
Detective work might be Robin's job, but Adam somehow
keeps getting involved—even though being a teacher is hardly the best training
for solving crimes. Then again, Campbell, Adam's irrepressible Newfoundland
dog, seems to have a nose for figuring things out, so how hard can it be?
About Charlie Cochrane
As Charlie Cochrane couldn't be trusted to do any of her
jobs of choice—like managing a rugby team—she writes, with titles published by
Carina, Samhain, Bold Strokes, MLR and Cheyenne.
Charlie's Cambridge Fellows Series of Edwardian romantic
mysteries was instrumental in her being named Author of the Year 2009 by the
review site Speak Its Name. She’s a member of the Romantic Novelists’
Association, Mystery People, International Thriller Writers Inc and is on the
organising team for UK Meet for readers/writers of GLBT fiction. She regularly
appears with The Deadly Dames.
Connect with Charlie:
To celebrate the release of Two
Feet Under, one lucky winner will receive a swag bag, including magnet, napkins, bookmark, pencils, hanging
decoration, postcards, and a coaster! Leave a comment with your contact
info to enter the contest. Entries close at midnight, Eastern time, on January
13, 2018. Contest is NOT restricted to U.S. entries. Thanks for following the
tour, and don’t
forget to leave your contact info!
