My thanks to Dorothy James for stopping by City Girl Who Loves to Read for a guest post during the blog tour for her book, A Place to Die.Guest Post
Setting My Mystery Novel
It is not by chance that my mystery novel is called A Place to Die. Place is very important to me. Plot, characters, setting—all ingredients of a novel, and if you equate “setting” with “background,” you might regard it as being of secondary importance: You tell a story, you create characters and you set them against a certain background. But in my novel and in my thinking, the place is important. It is not just background, it is a fundamental part of the novel’s theme.
Here we have a very specific setting: A retirement home in Vienna. This does not of course dictate the story, the plot, but it determines quite a lot about the characters. I started with the idea of putting a murder mystery in a retirement home because, influenced by the traditional country-house murder mystery, I thought, what better place for such a mystery than a retirement home where you can readily establish a group of characters, close the door on them, as it were, and have a detective gradually track down which of them “did it.” And then, because I was living in Vienna at the time, and knew the city and its history very well. It was the natural place for me to draw a set of characters and use their own past histories in the plot.
The setting is foreign to the American reader, and one might think it difficult to create the impression that all the characters are speaking German when one is writing in English. Of course, I did not want to write some sort of phony German-English, as in a comic show. I did not find it difficult however to observe the standard politenesses of the German language, and a certain formality of language in characters of a certain age. I think there is a difference in the book between the language in which the American visitors to the residence think and talk among themselves, and the language in which the older members of the residence address each other. I did not struggle mightily with this. I felt firmly rooted in the atmosphere of the House in the Vienna Woods, and the language flowed naturally out of that.
Certain aspects of the setting of the retirement home itself are to some extent culture-specific, for example, the café where residents and visitors take coffee and cake and even schnapps in the afternoon, but the basic situation of older people coming to terms with institutional living and with aging itself—this certainly crosses national boundaries. I did not try to make this setting and this situation palatable to the reader—I set out to convey it as it is, with its comic sides as well its heartaches.
Place in this novel is paramount. The plot, the characters, the ideas—they belong in this place.
About the BookA Place to Die
Book Details:
Price: $34.99 hardcover, $23.99 paperback, $3.03-$9.99 ebook
Format: hardcover, paperback, ebook
Published: April 2010
Pages: 436
ISBN: 9781450082709, 9781450082693
Genre: Murder Mystery
Buy Links: Amazon, Barnes & Noble,
Kindle, Nook, iBookstore
Blurb:
Eleanor and Franz Fabian arrive from New York to spend Christmas with Franzs mother in her sedate retirement home in the Vienna Woods. Their expectations are low: at best, boredom, at worst, run-of-the-mill family friction. But when the wealthy, charming Herr Graf is found dead in his apartment with an ugly head wound, the Fabians are thrust into a homicide investigation.
Some residents and staff have surprising connections to the dead man, but who would have wanted to kill him? Inspector Buchner tracks down the murderer against a backdrop of Viennese history from the Nazi years to the present day. Witty, suspenseful, lyrical, this is a literary whodunit that will keep you guessing till the last page.
About the AuthorDorothy James
Dorothy James was born in Wales and grew up in the South Wales Valleys. Writer, editor, and translator, she has published short stories as well as books and articles on German and Austrian literature. She has taught at universities in the U.S., England, and Germany, makes her home now in Brooklyn and often spends time in Vienna and Berlin.
She wrote A Place to Die in her attic apartment on the edge of the Vienna Woods. She has traveled far from Wales, but has not lost the Welsh love of playing with language; she writes poems for pleasure as does Chief Inspector Büchner, the whimsical Viennese detective who unravels the first mystery in this new series of novels.
Connect with Dorothy:
Web Site
Blog
About the TourTribute Books Blog Tours
A Place to Die Blog Tour Site
Tour Participants:
February 6 (guest post)
Proud Book Nerd
February 6 (guest post)
Bibliophilic Book Blog
February 6 (author interview)
You Gotta Read
February 7 (guest post)
vvb32 reads
February 8 (guest post or author interview)
The Character Connection
February 8 (author interview)
I Am a Reader, Not a Writer
February 9 (review)
Kritters Ramblings
February 10 (review)
A Lovely Shore Breeze
February 10 (guest post or author interview)
The Plot Thickens
February 13 (guest post)
Book Dilettante
February 13 (review)
Books and Needlepoint
February 13 (review)
Tic Toc
February 14 (review)
Reviews by Molly
February 15 (guest post or author interview)
City Girl Who Loves to Read
February 15 (review)
The Book Connection
February 16 (review)
Book Dragon's Lair
February 16 (guest post)
Books-n-Kisses
February 17 (review)
Simple Wyrdings
February 18 (review)
Lesa's Book Critiques
February 21 (review)
Words by Webb
February 22 (guest post)
Mama Knows Books
February 23 (guest post)
Fighter Writer
February 24 (review)
Minding Spot
Thanks very much to City Girl for hosting this stop on the tour. The question you pose on the formation of setting in a novel is very interesting to me and I enjoyed trying to answer it. I will enjoy looking at other posts on your blog
ReplyDeleteThanks Victoria for hosting Dorothy today. What a great point. When "place" is a part of the title, setting must be important to the author :)
ReplyDeleteDorothy, I really enjoyed your post. Thanks for putting so much thought and effort into it.
ReplyDeleteYou're welcome, Nicole.