Having previously avoided all the Rebus novels and TV adaptations, I’ve just finished Ian Rankin’s Fleshmarket Close. Which I liked both for its general style and plotting, but also for what I’d always realised: the Edinburgh setting was surely going to resonate.
Yet it was still a surprise to discover that Rebus’s flat is literally just around the corner from an address I spent a year living in. I probably could have seen his place from our back window.
So, places you’ve lived in that are a stone’s throw from fiction?
I don’t think the fictional address is made explicit, but I also have lived in London just around the corner from the real-life flat used by Joan Bakewell and Harold Pinter for their affair that the latter fictionalised as Betrayal.
I have never lived in Santa Fe, but it is the capital of my state, and I have visited a few times.
Donald Hamilton lived there, and the first couple of Matt Helm novels are set there. Somehow, you can tell that he was writing about the real place, not some generic city.
Roger Zelazny spent the last few years of his life there. Some of the later Amber novels have scenes set in Santa Fe. His descriptions ring true.
I’ve also lived in Edinburgh New Town and various parts of Leith, so take your pick. I lived within 50 yards of the site of the station that is referred to in the title of Trainspotting. For every 6 books I’ve read that have locations near places I’ve lived in the EH postcodes, there will be another 20 that I haven’t read.
The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks isn’t set anywhere in particular, but when I read it I thought the descriptions of the geography were very reminiscent of the area between Tain and Portmahomack in Easter Ross. Later I discovered that like me, Banks did actually live in the area at one point and that it was where he imagined the events in the book happening.
The same happened with Banks’ A Song of Stone; I recognised the geography as being the wide valley west of Stirling, and later saw this confirmed in a Banks interview.
I live in a few towns over from where the film On Golden Pond was both set and shot. The pond referenced in the title is actually Squam Lake in New Hampshire’s Lakes Region.
Part of Stephen King’s Cell takes part in the town where I live and in neighboring towns. I don’t remember exactly, but I think the characters passed about a mile from my house. It’s obvious King knows the area well. I believe his brother lives or used to live about 10 miles from me.
In terms of fiction, I live literally a little bit more than a quarter-mile from the old Dallas Cowboys’ practice field on Forest Lane- the eponymous “North Dallas Forty” from the book and movie.
Movie-wise, I also live about 5-10 minutes from Officer Murphy’s house from “Robocop”. And in the movie “The Chase” with Kristy Swanson and Charlie Sheen, they filmed the scene where they first get on the freeway about 3/4 of a mile from my childhood home- about halfway between it and my high school as a matter of fact. One of my summer job employers was actually in the shot as they got on the freeway.
Takes place, I mean. I should probably have added that while Stephen King and I both live in Maine, my town in the southwestern corner of the state is a good 3 hours’ drive from his home in Bangor. So it’s more impressive that he got the details right than it would be if I lived two towns over from him.
Well, Elizabethtown is where I grew up. It still amazes me there’s a movie, it’s not a huge place. However, it was actually filmed in Versailles (pronounced vur-sails) which is not too far from where I now live.
I actually worked at the care home mentioned in Douglas Copeland’s “Girlfriend in a Coma” as where the title character lived. I know Douglas Copeland grew up in West Vancouver, so would be familiar with the place.
A number of Alice Munro short stories are set in the Kitsilano neighbourhood of Vancouver, I walked that area daily until I moved a few years ago.
I was halfway through Margaret Atwood’s the Handmaid’s Tale before I realized that it was recognizably Cambridge, Massachusetts (where Atwood had lived for a time), and that a lot of the action takes place in and around Harvard Square. One scene takes place in what I have no doubt is the Hyatt Regency Hotel on Memorial Drive, next to the Charles River. Ironically, the Arisia science fiction convention was held there for several years. As an undergrad I had lived in the MIT dorms just down Mem drive from there (and two miles down Mass Ave. from the Square).
Janet Evanovitch went to my high school in New Jersey. So far I haven’t seen any scenes of my home town in her stories, but several of her Stephanie Plum novels have identifiable New Jersey locations, like Quakerbridge Mall.
Part of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise is set in Minneapolis, MN. When I read it, I could picture exactly which parts of town he was talking about, and I recognized all the landmarks mentioned (I used to go past Minnehaha Falls every day on my way to work).
Living in Moscow, of course, I knew where many of the places mentioned in literature were located and was able to spot goofs in movies like Dr Zhivago (the statue of Yuri Dolgoruki seen in the background when Omar Sharif leaves his office wasn’t erected until 1947). The geographic discontinuities in Val Kilmer’s The Saint were jarring, to say the least.
It’s uncommon enough that Cleveland shows up in a work at all to be notable to me, even if it’s not “right around the corner”. But there was a science fiction story I read a couple of years back that never explicitly said that it was Cleveland, but gave enough details to make it clear.
And I haven’t read them, but there’s a series of detective novels set in one of the suburbs, wherein the real-life police chief of that suburb shows up. Who happens to be my uncle.
Oh, I’ve been thinking about this thread overnight, and a few more things spring to mind.
I lived in Montreal during my university days. Now I mostly lived in Notre Dame de Grace, a neighbourhood on the western part of the city, so not so much fiction written about that part. But I certainly knew where all the historic, Mordecai Richler, older Can lit s etc stories were set. St. Urbain’s Horseman etc. I also certainly knew the neighbourhoods in “Lullabies for Little Criminals” by Heather O’Neill, and her “The Girl who was Saturday Night”.
Winnipeg is Miriam Toews country. “A Complicated Kindness” has Winnipeg references, though it is basically set in a fictionalization of Steinbach. MB. “The Flying Troutmans” starts in Winnipeg, but “All My Puny Sorrows” is so Winnipeggy it might as well be served with a Salsbury Hamburger Nip, at the Forks, while slapping mosquitos. I love the city of Winnipeg with an irrational passion for someone who was not born there, and I lived in Osbourne village for one happy year. AMPS made me homesick one sucky rainy winter in Vancouver.
If it is a Canadian story about a long distance road trip it has to pass through Thunder Bay. Off the top of my head I can mainly think of Stewart McLean’s Vinyl Cafe stories, but I know there are others.
I’ve never lived in Toronto, but spent enough time there to recognize it in fiction even if it isn’t explicitly named.
On reflection, I’ve lived in 4 provinces, 3 somewhat major Canadian cities. If you are Canadian “CanLit” has you covered. Particularly Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, but also lots of regional centres. Then again, to paraphrase what is said about “Sex in the City” the landscape (urban or rural or hinterland) is often a character in Canadian Literature.
A lot of Stephen King’s fiction is set in New England, so I frequently run across something set not that far away. the opening of Cell is on Boston Common, and a lot that follows is close by.
Similarly, H. P. Lovecraft usually set stories near his hometown of Providence (The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is not only set I recognizable places, but goes out of its way to name them. Some parts at the beginning read almost like a guidebook), although he branched out to Boston (Pickman’s Model is set in Boston’s North End, and names several locations there and in the center city) and Salem (Dreams in the Witch House). Locations in the Shadow over Innsmouth have been identified as being in Gloucester, MA, although I think the historical situation fits Salem better. One booklet was published identifying sites in The Dunwich Horror as being at or near Mystery Hill in North Salem, New Hampshire (Although Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi says he didn’t visit the site until after he wrote the story). I live not that far from many of these sites, and have visited them often.
Slightly hijacking my own thread, but the geography of The Crow Road is interesting. While I grew up in the west of Scotland, so the book (and the TV version) resonates, but it’s set somewhere way down Argyll that I’ve never been to. Yet when you check out the setting, it’s very, very, very specific. The oddity is that he then invents a completely fictitious rail link, with some enormous bridge across Loch Long at Portincaple, simply to make it easier for the characters to get to Glasgow.
Yes, I suspect Banks spent a long time looking at maps working out the route of this railway, where the bridges and viaducts would be. I think it also requires a big bridge across Loch Fyne.
