Where'd you say you were from?

Jen's post yesterday generated a lot of thinking about where we set our crimes so I thought I'd talk about my own setting. It's not nearly as romantic and sophisticated as San Francisco, the home of Jen's mysteries, nor is it as charming as her hometown of Swindon.

I set my mysteries in my hometown of... Placentia, California.

Yes, that's pronounced Pla-SEN-cha, a Latin word for "a pleasant place to live." It is not, as my brother says, "Afterbirth, California." The town began around 1837 as Rancho San Juan Cajon de Santa Ana but that wouldn't fit on the envelopes at the post office, so some woman named Sara Jane McFadden suggested Placentia. For some reason, that stuck.

It's now about 6.5 square miles, with 50,000 residents, surrounded by Fullerton, Brea, Anaheim, and Yorba Linda. All just names of cities to most of you, without any flavor or interest. Sure, Anaheim has Disneyland, Angel Stadium, and Honda Center (home to the Ducks hockey team), but a stranger to southern California would probably race down the freeways without even noticing they've left one zip code for another.

Hell, I did.

After I had lived in Placentia for a few years, I began to notice the difference. It feels more like a small town, more intimate. It also feels more Hispanic and truer to its heritage. The schools are diverse, filled with ethnicities from African-American to Samoan and everything in between. For a multi-racial family, we were planted in the right soil.

When I started planning my mysteries, I thought a lot about inventing a fictional town that looked a lot like Placentia. I wanted a small-town feel in a large metropolis setting, so that strangers could wander in and out. In a big city, one murder is barely a ripple and may not even make the news. In a small town, you can only kill off so many residents before property values start to head south.

I imagine Peri's house looks like this.

But in a town like Placentia, with so many towns nearby and a train track running through it, well, you can have quite a few murders!

While I was thinking of a town name, it slowly dawned on me that readers might actually look on a map for my setting. Perhaps I should include a little blurb that explains it's a fictional town based on my hometown, the way Sue Grafton's Santa Teresa is really Santa Barbara, wink, wink.

After a few days' thought, I decided to hell with winking and making up names, etc. It didn't matter what I named the town, it was Placentia. Let's call it what it is.

The landmarks and streets of Placentia are used in my book, although I change a few things to fit into the story line. I moved a street in Hit or Missus because I needed Peri to have a flat tire at a specific location. I'm also a little leery of naming actual restaurants now. Two restaurants have closed after I mentioned them in my books.

I don't want to be anyone's jinx.

The Backs Building - where the first body was found.

Although I try to put the reader in Placentia, I doubt if I'm enticing people to come and visit this exotic locale. In fact, I'm certain my motives for setting my books in my hometown are purely selfish and lazy.

I want my murders to be nearby, so I can be a part of the action.

The New Gal Confesses All

by Gayle Carline
First of all, let me thank the Crime Fiction Collective for inviting me into your cult. I can't wait to learn the secret handshake. In the meantime, I thought I'd let you know how I got into writing mysteries. It's not a pretty story, but I promise to spill all.

I've written all my life, but I didn't think about doing it for publication until I bought my first horse. My girlfriend, who had also been my technical writing instructor, introduced me to her editor at Riding Magazine, and before I knew it I was covering horse shows and interviewing horse folk. It was fun, but I wanted more. I like to write humor, so in 2005 I queried my local newspaper and ended up with a weekly humor column in the Placentia News-Times.
My dream, however, was to write a book.

I love to read mysteries, but I thought they'd be too hard to write. The best mysteries have a bunch of threads that weave together until you have a big, fat rope at the end, tied into a hangman's noose. I couldn't possibly write anything as complex as that, so I decided to write literary fiction instead.

Let's think about this for a moment. Picture, if you will, Herman Melville, telling someone, "I really wanted to write westerns, but I thought they'd be too hard. So I had this idea for a whale story."

The lovely part about naivety is that it comes with such a large side order of audacity.

So I wrote a 90,000 word tome. It took me over a year to finish. I now refer to it as my beautifully written piece of crap. I knew it was bad after I'd gone through two rounds of edits. The words are luscious, it has a beginning and an end, but it doesn't go anywhere and doesn't do anything. I'd tell you what it's about, but I don't know, and I wrote the damn thing. It did teach me a lot, however. Not only did I learn that pretty words are not enough, I learned that I could write 90,000 of them. I just needed them to tell a good story.

I turned back to the mystery genre. I had won a flash fiction contest with the tale of a seedy little man hiring a P.I. to find an ice cube tray in his own freezer. It was a kind of comic noir piece. I started to think… what else could you find in a freezer? Something you wouldn't suspect was in there? How about a body part?

Freezer Burn was born, my story of a housecleaner-turned-detective, who is roped into helping a former client clean his freezer and finds a severed hand inside, wearing an expensive ring. My P.I. is a 50-year old woman named Peri Minneopa, whose name is mangled by others as a running joke, one of the ways being Peri Menopause. The client is an annoying little man who is using his inheritance to buy Dean Martin memorabilia on eBay. I started out wanting to keep it noir, but sooner or later, the humor took over.

I'm such a nerd, I used an Excel spreadsheet to make certain the right clues were found by the right people in the right sequence. I kept the plot fairly simple, so I didn't have a lot of threads, but I wanted them to weave together in the end, even if it wasn't a very thick rope.

Freezer Burn was picked up by Echelon Press and published in July 2009.

My next book in the Peri series wasn't published until May 2011, mostly because it was a petulant child and refused to be constrained by spreadsheets. One day, as I was dutifully following my outline, I got a little bored. If I'm bored, I know the audience will be. So I hit Peri in the head with a golf club. At that point, I left the outline and went rogue. The book turned out to be a fun, if terrifying, writing ride for me, and I swore not to do that again. Or maybe I just swore.

In Hit or Missus, Peri is hired to investigate a wealthy, possibly cheating wife, but the wife's girlfriends have other ideas. After all, a friend will help you move. A good friend will help you move a body.

The third book is humming along. I'm now trying something a little different, and doing journals on my characters to help me with their motivations. I'll still do an outline, but give myself permission to leave it as long as I promise to return.

Thanks again for inviting me, and I hope to keep you entertained every other Thursday. As an example of my humor, I'll leave you with the book trailer I made last summer for Freezer Burn: