Jim Doherty writes of some Burnett novels:
<< all set in the same unnamed
Midwestern metroplis. Some say the city was a
fcitionalized Chicago. Kathy Harper thought it
was
either Toledo or Youngstown (Burnett's home state
was
Ohio). >>
I'm reading GM 822, "Man on the Run" by Charles Williams,
which I'll report on when I'm done. One thing that struck me
though was the unnamed locale
(and then Jim Doherty mentions something similar above). It's
a gulf port with a few hundred thousand inhabitants, but it
also has cold weather/sleet
(Does it sleet in Galveston or Mobile, or is it a different
gulf?) Can someone say something about the trends
in/imperative toward naming your city?
McBain's fictional city is obviously New York, but
there are other fictional cities that could be any
medium-sized port city, or a moderate-sized midwestern city.
I thought that maybe the hope was that readers would imagine
their own city or a city they knew and inject themselves into
the scene, so to speak. Do publishers and readers today want
places named? A couple years back I read a novel set in my
hometown of Portland, Oregon, that would've been better if
the setting had been an unnamed fictional city. (Though the
great crime novel of Portland -- Kent Anderson's Night Dogs
-- benefits from its geography (at least to my local ear)).
Doug
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 06 Aug 2002 EDT