Well, stories do get set in L.A., though it’s probably far behind such desirable plot locales such as NYC, London, and several major European cities.
But let’s try to be more specific. Raymond Chandler puts much of the action in his stories in “Bay City”, which was supposed to actually be Santa Monica. I live quite close to that.
I grew up not far from Mulholland, where Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle set some of the action in Lucifer’s Hammer. The novel, in which a civilization destroying comet strikes the earth, also has a tsunami sweeping away most of the L.A. basin; a surfer rides this wave inland and gets squashed against one the Barrington Plaza Apartment towers, though the authors misstate its height at 30 strories. I live just down the hill from that.
Venturing into the realm of TV, I’m right smack in the middle of Curb Yor Enthusiasm Land–not the opulent neighborhoods north of Wilshire where the characters live, but in the area where they do their shopping, banking, dining-out, and post-office type stuff. A few of my favorite restaurants, the local post office, and so on have been featured in that show.
I’m sure I’ve read more allusions to my vicinity, but that’s all I can think of for now.
Now that I think about it, I almost moved into that building! The last time we moved, we did look at a couple of units there, but decided we got a better value in sq. ft. in a building just down the hill, where we still live.
Wally Lamb’s *I Know This Much is True * takes place in a fictionalized version of Norwich, Connecticut, where I lived with my first husband (and where he grew up). It was pretty cool reading about the places in the book and knowing where he was talking about.
Many Finnish writers base their stories in Helsinki, since it’s the capital city and thus the most recognizeable locale for realistic tales. In summer, some literary associations organize walking tours through Helsinki that take people to see the locations of, say, a certain author’s works.
Finnish crime and detective literature especially has some great stories which take place in Helsinki. As an example, Matti Yrjänä Joensuu, a Finnish author, has written ten novels starring Harjunpää, a police officer in Helsinki. These books are widely acclaimed as portraying police procedures extremely realistically (this is because Joensuu himself is a police officer), and the locations are described in great detail. For example, Joensuu’s newest novel deals with a serial killer who stalks the Helsinki subway system. In previous novels, Harjunpää has chased killers in various parts of Helsinki, including a part of town very close to where I used to live until last year.
If you ever get chance, read Harjunpää and the Stone Murders. The books are all great, but that one is the only one that has been translated into English. Harjunpää ja rakkauden nälkä (Harjunpää and the hunger for love) was nominated for the Finlandia Literature Prize in 1993.
Not necessarily a bad idea. It’s a good book, although I think it’s quite a bit overrated. It’s also quite disturbing. Skeeved me out more than just a little, actually.
Well, if I get a chance, I’ll look up the short story title so you can read it. I think it was in his shorts collection, Globalhead.
Now… thinking more about the LA area, both Greg Bear’s Queen of Angels and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash are set in LA… as is part of Gibson’s Virtual Light… but the LA of these cyberpunk novels is nothing like the LA of today.
Cambridge (UK): The Liar; Quicksilver; I’m sure there are plenty more.
Worcester (UK): I can’t remember, but there’ve been some books set in the civil war, I’m sure one mentioned it.
If I move to london, of course…
Some places you feel surprised enough they get mentioned, like a friend who lived in Malmsbury, which, so far as I know, is a typical unnexceptional small town, but in Name of the Rose, I think one monk was “Hugh of Malmsbury”.
The Kat Colorado Mysteries by Karen Kijewski are set in and around Sacramento. I read the first couple; pretty good, but I’m not really a mystery novel fan.
British dopers will know Melvin Bragg - Lord Bragg of Wigton, who has set his last 3 novels in that town. Actually I live just outside the town but in "a Son of War’ he describes a bus journey to the seaside that requires the passengers to get out and push the bus up the hill at Waverbridge, - that’s where I live.
Good books.
Kurt Vonnegut’s Hocus Pocus seems to take place in my area of upstate New York , but he plays around so much with the place names and geographical descriptions that it can’t really be considered accurate.
I was halfway into it before I realized that Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale was set in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I could clearly identify most of the locations in the story – Harvard Square, Harvard Yard, the Hyatt Regency on Massachusetts Avenue… No doubt in my mind at all. Then I looked in her biography, and found that she’d lived in Cambridge for a while. The idea of such a bastion of liberalness as the People’s REpublic of Cambridge becoming an oppressive patriarchy is pretty mind-blowing and ludicrous, but I suspect she had in mind showing that you can’t just say “it can’t happen Here.”
Just about everyone who has written mysteries in Salt Lake City has gotten the geography hoppelessly wrong, proving that they don’t live there. Starting with Arthur Conan Dioyle’s first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet (where he puts the Salt Desert to the East of town, and has the Mormon pioneers trudging across “the Great Alkali Plain” on their way to the Promised Land) to Robin Cook’s Tabernacle (Cook’s transplanted New Yorker doesn’t even grouse about the lack of good bagels, places you can smoke, good coffee shops, and bars serving anything stronger than 3.2 beer), and even the factual accounts of the Hoffmann documents scandal manage to screw up the geography. The only one to get it right is Robert Irvine, whose series of Moroni Traveler mysteries are the real Mccoy. Irvine clearly lives, or at least lived, in SLC.
By the way – regarding Vonnegut. His short story “Deer in the Works” is clearly set at the GE research center in upstate New York, where I worked for a time. And whenever i drive on rute 15 through Connecticut, I pass the ostentatious Hi-Ho Motel, and I can’t help but wonder if it helped inspire that “mental hiccup” in his novel Slapstick.
Speaking of upstate New York, some of the characters in Johhny Hart’s B.C. were inspired by people at the GE plant in Binghamton, N.Y. (where I also worked for a time. So did Johnny Hart.). Thor and Peter are based on real people! Binghamton is located in Broome County, whence the name “B.C.” comes from. The Golf competition there is still called the “B.C. Open”, and businesses with “B.C.” in the name abound. I’ve also long felt that the name inspired Berkely Breathed’s “Bloom County”.
My town appears occasionally in Robert Parker’s *Spenser for Hire * novels, mainly as the locations of restaurants he and Susan like, but it is hardly integral to any of them. The only books I know of actually set here are a couple for children about an elementary principal with a collection of weird neckties (he’s a great guy in reality, actually). The main attraction of the Spenser TV show was identifying shooting locations, and admiring his ability to find parking spaces right in front of every place he visited.
Going a little further abroad, into Boston’s North Shore and back into fiction, there’s Harry Kemelman’s Rabbi mysteries - you know, the ones with the days of the week in the titles. I have to get into them sometime. I’ll skip over the Puritan-era crap; the settings are not really connected to modern times.
Cal, my wife is from Trenton (well, Hamilton Township, but just a few blocks from the line) and is happy to forgive Janet Evanovich any errors in describing the old home town.
Speaking of GE plants and Vonnegut, the Schenectady operation is “Illium” in Player Piano. He worked there in the Propaganda Department for a time in the Fifties, and got the culture down well. The island where he describes the management “summer camp” existed but the operation has been relocated.
James Patterson set Kiss the Girls in Chapel Hill and Durham, NC. I enjoyed the story, but would it have killed him to look at a map while he was writing it?
Why on Earth would the killer take I-85 to I-40 to go from Durham to Chapel Hell? I know he wasn’t in a hurry, but that’s a 30 mile route to go 5 miles.
Remember, aspiring authors, buy a map of the area you’re writing about.