A couple of years ago, I wrote a short "things to do this
week" blurb for a Dennis Lehane signing. I began it by noting
that LA and San Francisco had once had the most per capita
PIs, but Boston seems to have joined them as a city of
choice.
I pointed out that Spenser had been joined by Healy's John
Francis Cuddy, Jerome Doolittle's Tom Bethany, Linda Barnes's
Carlotta Carlyle
(a solid series that no one has mentioned this month) and
Lehane's Kenzie and Gennaro. There's also Dred Balcazar, Ned
White's PI in A Very Bad Thing (I remember liking this book
quite a bit when I read it, very dark; did he ever write
another?).
We speculated about the nature of California being the end of
the line
(along with the lure of the film industry) having some effect
on its popularity as a setting. So what is it about Boston?
Sure, these writers are native to the area, so they're
writing about what they know, but is there any other reason
so many ficitional PIs have clustered in this city? Is it due
to anything more than crapshooting publishers thinking, Hey,
maybe it's the setting that made Spenser popular, so let's
find some more PIs from Boston? You know, a publishing
version of the Merseybeat sound, signing any band from
Liverpool after the Bealtes hit. Hell, it happened in the
Boston music scene, too, with the overhyped "Bosstown Sound"
of the early '70s.
Mark
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