town of Whitley Bay in The Seagull. Not every place ends up as real in the book – I feel free to invent, or to merge. But the human geography is always real and at the heart of the story.
The Seagull, a Vera Stanhope novel, grew out of a conversation with regulars in my local pub. They were talking about how my home town had changed over the years, from a thriving holiday town, packed by visiting families in the summer, to a party town, rather sleazy and depressed. Now it’s regenerating again into somewhere a bit smarter and arty, with an independent cinema, a poetry festival and a thriving community garden. Still a bit scruffy, but definitely more alive. The theme of the book is about the possibility of change and growth, both for places and for individuals. That theme grew out of the place and the book would never have been written without it. In turn, I needed to find characters who had changed and developed too and that meant a plotline about digging into the past, an explanation of the protagonists’ growth.
With the Shetland books, the scope is rather different and more limited. There are no big cities, not even any large towns. While the geology varies, the landscape experienced by people is similar: bleak, bare and beautiful. That’s why I stopped writing about the place after eight books, and why the TV series has developed story-lines with wider themes, taking their characters away from the islands to Glasgow or Norway. However, the books are still entirely influenced by the place, and by the preoccupations of the people who live there: crofting, the decline of oil wealth, the importance of family and tradition. That’s the element of human geography again. In a more direct way, how Shetland looks has a bearing on my writing. I love the contrast between the open landscape – there are few trees, so usually it’s possible to see right to the horizon in all directions – and hidden secrets. The Shetland books are all about secrets and the kind of psychological archaeology that digs into the past to explain family rivalries and tensions.
So, that’s how I work, but if you’re a new writer trying to decide on a setting for your book, what’s the best way to go about it? Do you have to choose a place that you know well? I hesitate to give advice, because everyone has his or her own way of working. Famously, it’s said that Harry Keating had never been to India before writing his Inspector Ghote books, and for me they conjure up perfectly the heat and the noise of the place. But I’ve never been to India either and someone born and brought up there might see things rather differently.
Of course, it’s easier now with Google Maps and all the information at the click of a mouse to get a sense of a place. It’s still possible to get things wrong, though, and locals can be unforgiving about a small mistake. A very fine writer set a book in Shetland without visiting. She did a lot of research and saw that the islands were famous for their seabirds and specifically for puffins. In one scene she had a puffin perching on a windowsill. Anyone familiar with the islands, or with natural history in general, knows that the puffin nests in rabbit holes on the tops of sea cliffs. They spend all their time over the ocean and never venture inland. Unfortunately, this one error clouded some people’s judgement about what was otherwise a very scary and exciting book. That was all they remembered.
I might set a piece of short fiction in a place I’ve only visited briefly. That initial stunning response to a place can trigger an idea for a whole story. I’ve set work in Alaska, Tanzania and Finland on the basis of the first excitement, of feeling that I have an understanding for a place in a single moment. We’re immediately aware of the difference, the smells, the sound, the sense of being an outsider, and that instant impression is invaluable. One never sees a place in exactly the same way again. Once we’re used to it, the impact is gone. A novel is rather different, however. I think a novel needs a longer knowledge. The imagination needs time to simmer.
We come back to the human geography when we talk about researching a place that’s new to us. Of course, drive around the area you have in mind for the setting of your book; take photographs and look at Ordnance Survey maps. Pick out small, interesting details in the landscape and the built environment that make the area special. As with character, it’s the small specifics that bring a scene to life. But meet the people. Hang out in cafés and shops, lurk in the library, use the public transport. If you have questions, ask them. Most people will be fascinated to hear you’re a writer and nearly everyone likes talking about their lives.
We think it’s entirely natural to talk to experts about police procedure and forensics. When it comes to place, the experts are the people who live there, and they’re easy to get to know with just a little effort. It’s impossible to write with any authenticity if you don’t understand a region’s anxieties and preoccupations. In a village café in the Northumberland National Park, much of the conversation will be about sheep. In Shetland it might be about fish, or fiddle music, or the extortionate price of the ferry. In a city it might be school closures, or theft or vandalism. But you won’t know until you listen. None of this detail might come into your book in a hard, indigestible chunk, but it will be there in the confidence with which you create your characters and in a greater ease when you’re driving the plot.
Of course, the easiest thing is to set your work where you live or have lived for some years, and I’ve taken this route, which feels at times like cheating. This has its dangers too, though. We can make assumptions about the places we know well; a region can change and we can have an impression of it that might be stuck in the past. We don’t approach it with the same clear-eyed vision that we do a place new to us. And we can be so close to a place that we blur the line between fact and fiction, introduce real people and real issues without quite realizing.
I make no apology that my fiction can be escapist. I love the fact that people can lose themselves in my stories and the world that I’ve created. We all need times of escape. I want there to be a certain authenticity, though. I want readers to believe in my characters, in the relationships I describe, the ways families might fracture or hold together, the communities in which a murderer might grow. And in my opinion, I have to understand place before I can attempt that kind of reality.
Writing in 1986, Robert Barnard, who had spent most of his adult life lecturing in Australia and Norway, said that when he was writing his early novels he felt so out of touch with his native Britain that he eventually moved back home. He had felt that ‘at least the British people in my books would start talking as British people do today. He believed that visits to a country, even your own, only allow you to skim the surface of local life, and that ‘package-tour mysteries … are always less than satisfactory’. He gave examples of books written by three Detection Club members, Agatha Christie (A Caribbean Mystery), Ngaio Marsh (When in Rome), and Ruth Rendell (The Speaker of Mandarin) and concluded in Colloquium on Crime: ‘Better to invent your own country as in [Christianna] Brand’s Tour de Force.’
But you really do not have to be confined to your homeland or to invent a country unless you wish to. Christie’s personal experience of archaeological digs in the Middle East, for instance, strengthens books such as Murder in Mesopotamia. Ngaio Marsh was equally at home writing whodunits set in Britain or her native New Zealand. Many authors have shown that it is possible to write novels which carry the flavour of authenticity despite being set in a country where they have never lived. Michael Ridpath explains how it can be done.
Setting Stories in Unfamiliar Places
The Icelanders have a saying: ‘Glöggt er gests augað’, which means: ‘A guest’s eye sees better.’
