The Fire in Fiction (17 page)

"How much?"

"Hundreds of thousands. Maybe millions."

Expert characters are useful devices for explanation in many types of novel. Here, Grossman uses Margaret not only to explain the MacGuffin (the object that everyone is after), but also to set the stakes. The Codex, if found, would be a major literary discovery and

a financial windfall. As important as that, though, is the allure that the Codex exerts on scholars—and eventually on Edward too, who slips into addiction to a weirdly realistic computer game that mimics his search for the Codex and may be connected to it in ways not immediately obvious.

Rare books are also involved in John Dunning's mystery series featuring Cliff Janeway, an ex-policeman turned book dealer. In
The Sign of the Book
(2005), the fourth title in the series, Janeway investigates the murder of a collector of first editions at the request of his girlfriend, Denver criminal attorney Erin D'Angelo. The case grows complicated as Janeway learns that the victim was Erin's first love and also that the confessed killer, the collector's wife, is likely not guilty.

Dunning takes a different approach to creating the milieu of rare books. Instead of a establishing the importance of a particular special book to Janeway, Dunning reveals Janeway's perspective on the rare book trade itself, mainly that he feels it has changed for the worse thanks to the Internet:

The next day I made some bold predictions.

In a few years much of the romance would disappear from the book trade forever.

The burgeoning Internet, as it would later be called, would bring in sweeping change. There would be incredible ease, instant knowledge available to everyone: even those who have no idea how to use it would become "experts." Books would become just another word for money, and that would bring out the hucksters and fast-buck artists.

No bookseller would own anything outright in this brave new book world. One incredibly expensive book would have half a dozen dealers in partnership, with the money divvied six ways or more when it sold. "I might as well be selling cars," I said.

Janeway not only knows books but the book trade. His nostalgia for the way it used to be combines with bitterness over the way it

has changed. Janeway's opinion is strong and grounds the reader in the rare book business. We know where we stand. The world of rare books is alive for us even as its romance is dying.

The lesson for us is that a milieu exists not in a time or place, but in the mind and hearts of the characters who dwell in it. Their memories, feelings, opinions, outlook, and ways of operating in their realm are what make it real.

SETTING AS A CHARACTER

Sometimes the setting itself may participate in the story. Blizzards, droughts, and other natural phenomena are obvious ways to make the setting active. But there are certainly more.

Find in your setting specific places that have extra significance, or places where events recur. You know, those spots that are legendary. Maybe in your hometown there was a quarry turned into a swimming hole, where boys tested their nerve, girls lost their virginity, and the cops regularly busted potheads or fished bodies from the water. Such a place was legendary, right? What about where you live now? What's the spot that everyone knows but isn't on any tour?

In my neighborhood in New York City that's the 72nd Street entrance to the Dakota apartment building where John Lennon was murdered in 1980. No plaque or statue marks the spot, but every neighborhood resident brings visitors by to point it out. When giving out-of-towners a personal city tour I also like to show them an unremarkable bar in Greenwich Village that is called the Stonewall Inn. It was a riot there in 1969 (some of the rioters in drag) that began the gay rights movement in America.

New York City is chock-a-block with special places, needless to say. One of them is the boardwalk on Coney Island. It has been featured in countless movies, songs, and novels, but one of my favorite uses is in a recent novel in Reed Farrel Coleman's gritty series of New York mystery novels featuring ex-cop turned P.I. Moe Prager.
The James Deans
(2005) won the Shamus, Barry, and Anthony Awards. In
Soul Patch
(2007), Coleman focuses on Coney Island. The novel begins with a meditative prologue that slowly zooms in, cinema style, on the boardwalk a number of years before the action of the story, to a group of four men:

At the steps that led down to the beach, one of the four men decided he was having second thoughts. Maybe he didn't want to get sand in his shoes. No one likes sand in his shoes. The man standing to his immediate right waited for the rumble of the Cyclone—several girls screaming at the top of their lungs as the roller coaster cars plunged down its steep first drop—before slamming his leather covered sap just above the balking man's left knee. His scream was swallowed up by the roar of the ocean and the second plunge of the Cyclone. He crumpled, but was caught by the other men.

It was much cooler under the boardwalk, even at night. The sea air was different here somehow, smelling of pot smoke and urine. Ambient light leaking through the spaces between the planks imposed a shadowy grid upon the sand. The sand hid broken bottles, pop tops, used condoms, and horseshoe crab shells. Something snapped, and it wasn't the sound of someone stepping on a shell.

The Drifters's song "Under the Boardwalk" just doesn't sound the same to me now. As
Soul Patch
unfolds, an old friend of Moe Prager's, the NYPD chief of detectives, gives him a tape of an interrogation of an informant who was said to know who really murdered a drug lord of the early 1970s, Dexter Mayweather. Soon enough the chief of detectives himself turns up dead, an apparent suicide. It's up to Moe to dig up the truths of the past and present.

What is it that gives the boardwalk at Coney Island its mythic significance in this passage? The Cyclone? The smell of pot smoke and urine? There are other places that have those things. It is rather that something violent—and symbolic—happens there. Without

that, the boardwalk is just a place to get a decent hot dog. To make a place iconic, make something big happen there. Something bigger than cotton candy.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this section, it is also possible to give natural phenomena a plot function, as well. Mystery novelist Nancy Pickard did just that in her stand-alone suspense novel
The Virgin of Small Plains
(2006), which we also discussed in chapter three. Remember the tornado described by two different characters in those passages? That's a perfect example of a natural phenomenon at work in the plot. But Pickard has others at work as well.

As you might recall from the plot description, twenty years before the action of the story a nameless teenaged girl was found in the small town of Small Plains, Kansas, beaten to death, her face unidentifiable. The crime was never solved. The citizens of Small Plains took up a collection and gave the girl a grave and a headstone. This grave has now taken on mystical power. The Virgin, as she's known, is said to heal. Pilgrims come as if to Lourdes.

The Virgin of Small Plains
takes a perfectly flat landscape and finds in it an amazing variety of moods and meanings. Toward the beginning Abby Reynolds, a principle point-of-view character and owner of the town's plant and shrub nursery, is working in the graveyard. Abby's life was upended on the night when the Virgin was found (her high school boyfriend, Mitch Newquist, disappeared that night) and now something in the Kansas prairie stirs in her a resolve:

When Abby couldn't see Verna's car anymore, she stood up and scanned the horizon.

She could never look out over such a span of prairie without thinking about the Indians who used to live there. Her mother, who had loved facts and dates and history, had made her aware of them from the time she was old enough to look for arrowheads in the dirt. And now Abby found herself thinking about another time and another crime that nobody talked about, just like Verna Shellenberger didn't seem to want to talk to her about the murder of the Virgin.

Once, the Osage and Kansa tribes had roamed forty-five million acres, including the patch of ground on which she stood. They had shared it with thirty to seventy-five million bison. If she used her imagination, she could almost hear the pounding hooves and see the dark flood of animals pouring over the fields. But the Indians had been chased and cheated down to Oklahoma, including a forced exodus in 1873. The bison had been killed. Abby had friends who owned a bison ranch, and she had toured it, had stared into the fierce eyes of an old bison bull. In search of native grasses to plant and sell, she had also walked onto the land of Potawatomi, Iowa, and Kickapoo reservations that remained in the state. She had a natural affinity for underdogs, and she thought she had at least some small sense of what it must be like to feel helpless in the path of history. She couldn't solve those million crimes, by she thought that maybe she could help solve one crime.

On her way out of the cemetery, Abby whispered a few words to her mother, and then she touched the Virgin's gravestone.

"If you tell me who you are," she promised the dead girl, "I'll make sure that everybody knows your name."

How the horizon, arrowheads, bison, and the forced exodus of the Indians should combine to fuel in Abby a resolve to learn the truth about the Virgin—"she had at least some small sense of what it must be like to feel helpless in the path of history"—is a non-linear progression and irrational motive that nevertheless feels exactly right. Abby is a Kansas woman connected to the land; more, she knows its meaning.

What does the setting of your current novel mean to the characters in it? How do you portray that meaning and make it active in the story? The techniques of doing so are some of the most powerful tools in the novelist's kit. Use them and you will not only give your novel a setting that lives, but also construct for your readers an entire world, the world of the story.