I love the Janet Evanovich “Stephanie Plum” series. It is based in Jersey. It makes me want to have big hair and loads of hand gestures.
Off hand I haven’t read any fiction books based on Michigan other than the Rosary Murders, but that was so long ago I cannot remember how realistic it was.
There is an award-winning Harlequin writer Ann Eames who bases a few of her stories in Detroit. One was in Royal Oak, and it was excellent in describing the locale. Damned if I can remember the title.
So, what books of fiction are written for your area and how close are they to describing the environs?
And, have you ever read a book for your area or an area you know well and it is so off the mark it makes you want to strangle the writer?
Well, in his book Almost Midnight, **Martin Caidin ** describes a group of nuclear terrorists detonating a nuke at the top of Mt. San Gorgonio, which fills the view from my kitchen window. He got Norton AFB right, and kinda used a generic Redlands for the scenes of distruction. I mean, there wasn’t a bar by that name in town, nor were there streets with those names. Not a big deal, and since it was getting nuked anyway, not a key plot point.
Speaking of New Jersey, science fiction author Michael Flynn is from Edison. Many of his books take place partly in NJ. One of his stories opens with the main character staring out his window at the giant lightbulb tower in Edison. Great author read everything by him regardless of where you are from.
I was once reading one of Harold Coyle’s books (I forget which one) and it had headers at the beginning of each page stating where the action was taking place. The first chapter said “Manning Mountain, Fort Hood TX”. Coincidentally when I opened the book for the first time I was in the Field, sitting in a tent, about 200 meters from Manning Mountain. Felt kinda weird.
In the film “Short Cuts”, Lily Tomlin yells out “When the hell are you gonna get me outa Downey?!?” which is where I currently live. Haven’t read the book, so i can’t speak to the physical descriptions therein.
There are two book that come to mind though, that do not specifically mention where they are set, but whose detailed physical descriptions completely gave the game away.
Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” is set in Cambridge, MA. The college constantly referred to is Harvard, and the hotel scene takes place at the Hyatt Regency on the edge of the Charles River.
The dark, 70s-era hospital farce “The House of God” is set in Boston, MA. The physical description of the Longwood medical area are dead-on, and the hospital where the action takes place is Beth Israel (which my mother tells me was as scary back then as the book describes).
I read a book set in Columbus and it appeared the author simply plugged in names when appropriate. Some of them were actually pretty funny because they were so over-the-top. Apparently, Whitehall is the scariest place on earth.
J.A. Jance wrote a series of detective novels set in Seattle, I think she lived here at the time.
Tom Robbins lives just north of here and a few of his books are set, or make broad reference to the area. Another Roadside Attraction was set in Oregon, if I remember right. (I read it… 35 years ago!?) Jitterbug Purfume starts out in Seattle.
Patricia Cornwell’s “Kay Scarpetta” series are all set here in Richmond, and the first part of Tom Robbins’ “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” is set here as well (he’s from here, IIRC).
There is a great children’s book called “Go to the Room of the Eyes” (it really is quite good) that is set right around Volunteer Park in Seattle. Some day, I’m going to get the book, and follow the clues until I find the house (or at least narrow the area down a bit more).
The best I can do (off the top of my head) is Flight of the White Wolf, a children’s book that describes a teenage boy’s trek on foot across Wisconsin to release his pet wolf into the wild, and Rascal by Sterling North set in Edgerton, WI (masquerading as “Brailsford Junction”), and points north.
I grew up near the Twin Cities in Minnesota, which just so happens to be where many of LaVyrle Spencer sets many of her novels. The most note-worthy is called something like Homecoming and was written shortly after we had moved away. My mother and I were listening to it in audiobook form as we drove someplace, and correctly guessed the year of publication by the fact that one of the main characters drove over to an Italian restaurant in Woodbury for lunch.
Though he usually sets his books in Maine, for Christine, Stephen King had the story take place in a little suburb of Pittsburgh. For that reason, it’s one of my favorites-he gets so many little things. (Fox Chapel being the “ritzy” neighborhood, Dennis and Arnie making fun of Dennis’s grandfather’s “Pixburgh Accent”, the digs at PennDOT).
Kate Wilhelm has a detective series set in Eugene, Oregon. Details are accurate (as they should be, since she lives here). My office appears to be across the street from her protagonist’s.
Meg Wolitzer, **Sleepwalking, ** had strange errors in her details about Swarthmore College, specifically, the library. It wasn’t until I saw Brown’s library that I realized what caused the errors–she’s a Brown graduate, and described her own library rather than Swarthmore’s.
I live in Orange County, California and Dean Koontz and T. Jefferson Parker have both written books that take place in various cities here. I know in one of Koontz’ books the main characters went to dinner at a restaurant located just down the street from me at the time. I can’t remember which book it was though. It’s been probably 10 years since I’ve read any of his books.
Well, I was living in Boulder, CO when I read The Stand by Stephen King. It was pretty creepy.
And I was sitting in the University of Oregon Student Union when reading David Brin’s The Postman, the scene where the title character has a shootout with survivalists in that very building. Brin clearly knew the building because I was able to walk thru its two levels and clearly identify hallways and stairwells where the battle took place.
And, my favorite example was a short story, title long forgotten, by Bruce Sterling about Los Angeles’ new problem with lava flows. A magma pocket bubbles up underneath LA after an earthquake, creating surface flows everywhere, threatening life and property. One scene takes place on Bonita Ave in San Dimas, at the intersection with White Ave. I cross this intersection every day twice a day on my commute.
Another Jersey book, Philip Roth’s The Human Stain. The flashbacks take place in Newark and East Orange, and it’s great knowing all the streets and landmarks the narrator references to (and the story is pretty good too).
A horrible book–Tom Wolfe’s Man in Full–takes place in Atlanta (where I’m originally from). The author goes out of his way to mention every neighborhood and landmark that it becomes totally tedious and unrealistic, but he does make several references to familiar neighborhoods like Vine City and Cascade Heights (and of course, Buckhead) that bring the book “home”, so to speak. Horrible book, though.
Sorta related but not quite: In Lauren Hill’s song “Looking Back”, she sings of her childhood memories in Newark and the Oranges. She gives a shout-out to Ivy Hill…meaning Ivy Hill Apartments. Where I currently live.
So off the mark I wanted to strangle the person who made the book COVER illustration. The book is * Three Little Words* by Carrie Alexander. It is a Harlequin SuperRomance. The book is set on the Upper penninsula of Michigan, on the shore of Lake Superior. A lighthouse is prominent in the plot. The book cover shows Split Rock Lighthouse. Which is in Minnesota, on the north shore of Lake Superior. What really bugged me is that the pictured lighthouse does not meet the description in the book particularly well, and is quite well known in its own right.
I was amused when Split Rock was pictured on the cover of Reader’s Digest, and someone wrote in to say how much it looked like a certain painting by Thomas Kincaide. Of course it looked like his lighthouse, he based his lighthouse on the real one. (Split Rock Lighthouse is often recognizeable because of the nice cliff usually depicted underneath the building.)
The science fiction author Lee Killough wrote a series of three cop novels, set in the near future in Topeka, Kansas.(My home) She lives in Manhattan, Kansas and knows our city well. She used places that are here now, and created believable new ones. Place names matched too. Some jokes are funnier if you actually are from Topeka, like the murdered philanthropist, “two time winner of the Cushinberry Award for philanthropy” A local citizen, from our now, named Grant Cushinberry, was very involved in charity work.
The books are Doppelganger Gambit, Dragon’s Teeth, and Spider Play.
.