setting
Exploring the Isolation of the British Countryside
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There is a magnificent bit in a Sherlock Holmes story, which—subconsciously in the beginning, I guess – gave me the inspiration for my first detective novel, Death Under a Little Sky. Holmes and Watson, that charming odd couple of nineteenth century fiction, are on a train, chewing over the details of some seemingly baffling case,…
What Makes a Forest Such a Seductive Setting for Fiction?
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The woods have been a popular setting in literature for centuries, from the Grimm Brothers to today’s bestsellers, but what makes a forest such a seductive setting for fiction? When I started putting together ideas for my second novel, What Waits in the Woods, I turned to this interesting and ubiquitous setting. But why? What…
Fictional Versus Real Settings: A Writer’s Dilemma
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Every story has to start somewhere. And be somewhere. Take Dennis Lehane’s 2003 novel, Mystic River. Its setting is so pivotal to the plot that you can find it right there in the title. As it happens, Mystic River is a real river in Massachusetts, coursing seven miles through the towns of Arlington, Somerville, Everett,…
(Un)Safe Harbor: Thrillers Set in Remote Island Locations
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I have spent a lot of summer weekends on an island in Lake Huron’s Georgian Bay. It’s a beautiful, wild, windswept place that can, as Gull Island does in my book, feel utterly remote. When Jude makes her way there, it’s early April, cold, and lonely. Her mother, now suffering from dementia, has asked her…