If you read mysteries on a regular basis, you are probably an arm chair traveller at heart. Part of what draws you to mystery fiction is the thrill of discovering a new place, and feeling like you’ve escaped there for the few hours that you are engrossed in the book.
It is an art for a writer to do this really well – to describe a setting that is convincing both to readers who have never been there and want to know what it’s like, as well as to those who know the location intimately and use the pages to revisit a favourite place.
I decided to use a recent visit to Montreal as a way to better understand how mystery writers use setting. So I pulled two favourites off the shelf and headed to the airport. The first was the debut novel Deja Dead by Kathy Reichs. The second – City of Ice by John Farrow – is not a first novel, (find out why here), and even though it’s more of a thriller than a mystery, it is on my long-list favourites. Both are set in Montreal – one in the heat of summer, the other in the dead cold of winter.
When it comes to Montreal, I fall into the category of readers who know the city well, and want to revisit a well-loved, but distant place by reading about it. There are some great descriptions of Montreal in both novels. Reichs and Farrow obviously know est from ouest, and each conjure up striking imagery of the two solitudes.
After fuelling my imagination on the plane, I was ready to explore the real thing. I set out for St. Laurent Boulevard, “The Main” and the three square blocks that were the centre of my existence during my student years. Reichs describes one of these very blocks in Deja Dead. She calls it a “rain forest” inhabited by “sympatric breeds, populations living side by side but occupying different niches. One group is active by day, the other is exclusively nocturnal.”
I remember working one summer at the 24-hour smoked meat deli, a place where these two groups collided during shift change. I went back there last week. I stood at the counter and ordered a pound of “lean” to bring home to my husband. The woman at the counter was the same suspicious-eyed waitress who’d trained me almost twenty years ago. She still looked at me as though I was trying to steal her tips.
I hope to write about Montreal someday, but I think I will need to have mastered my craft much more in order to evoke the complex, multi-faceted city that was the setting for my coming of age. In the meantime, I am satisfied that writers like Reichs, and Farrow have done such a good job bringing my favourite city to life, within my favourite genre of fiction. And I am actively seeking out more mysteries set in la belle ville. Please post in comments if you can think if some.
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