Minneapolises and other lands

[mrissa]

The other day I was reading Jodi Compton's Sympathy Between Humans, which is a mystery set in Minneapolis. I enjoyed it and would recommend it to people who like mysteries, and it was an accurate Minneapolis, but...it wasn't my accurate Minneapolis. I can't figure out whether War for the Oaks was a more real Minneapolis or just a Minneapolis from closer to my perspective. It looks to me like Emma Bull either loved Minneapolis more while writing that book than Jodi Compton did while writing hers, or else she was more willing to show it.

I don't know; it seemed like for a mystery novel, the Minneapolis she had was maybe the right one. But maybe not: Kate Wilhelm's mysteries are half of them love-songs to Oregon, so apparently that sort of thing can feel appropriate to me in a mystery. And then again, Kate Wilhelm can get away with a lot for me, and she's One Of Us. Not a very good example of the difference between mystery and speculative genres, Kate Wilhelm, for obvious reasons.

I don't know. When I'm reading the mysteries themselves, I'm not always self-conscious about it, but when I think about them, I'm pretty aware of being in a different land than my own. Genre isn't meaningful for every reader, but it's meaningful for me, and mysteries only feel like mine individually, not collectively. So sometimes I try to poke at that and see why it is. I think the answer is somewhere in the difference between Sympathy Between Humans and War for the Oaks, but I could be wrong about that. Happens often, really.

Comments

[telophase.livejournal.com]

When I first read Joe Lansdale's Hap and Leonard mystery/suspense books, set in East Texas, they seemed right to me, because that was the Texas I knew. OK, yeah, the situations and violence are so over-the-top as to be ridiculous, and nothing anywhere near that ever came to my attention, but there's something about the feel of the books that makes the setting ring absolutely true. I have a friend who grew up in the same area that the books are set in, and I mailed him Savage Season and Mucho Mojo when he was languishing in Boston for grad school and missing Texas. He says that he gets the same feel I do.

I'd hesitate to really recommend them to anyone for a taste of East Texas, because of the aforementioned violence and such, because I think they would find it hard to pick out which stuff was the "real" East Texas and which was the cartoon version.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Compton's Minneapolis has violence in it, but not cartoon violence. I wouldn't describe it as sordid or over-the-top, but the dark bits are a different kind of dark than in War for the Oaks.

It's good to have books to wallow in when you're languishing for home, I well remember.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

An interesting experiment would be to read works by different thriller/mystery writers set in the same city: especially if they were also different sub-genres, e.g. cosy and noir. I'm sure I have such on my shelves/in the wobbling piles on the floor.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Hmm, interesting. Our library has shelves of "Local Interest Authors," which usually really annoys me, because when you go in for Dogland or Maud Hart Lovelace or whatever else, you don't know if the books will be shelved in their rightful sections or in "Local Interest." But it'd be a good way to dig up other Minneapolitan mysteries.

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

Not quite the same, but: reading fiction set in rural areas of the US, some sound authentic and others don't. I can usually tell who's been there, and was there for a while.

Mysteries: Don Harstad's. spec-fic: Clifford Simak and Joel Rosenberg. Note that all three used settings rather different in some ways from where I grew up -- but they had the right feel.

[palinade.livejournal.com]

I wonder if it's the difference between an author using a city as mere setting or using a city as character, more involved in the revealation of the story?

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Sounds like I ought to read Kate Wilhelm, as I'm fond of Oregon too.

I'm curious to see what it will be like if Emma Bull ever writes something set in Tucson and how it compares to Terri Windling's Tucson.