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Marcia Kiser

Coloring Outside The Lines
How To Add Depth & Texture To Murder Mysteries -- Part II - Setting

Editor's Note: In her last article, Marcia Kiser discussed how mystery writers can color "outside the lines" by going beyond standard character descriptions. In this installment of her three-part series, Marcia looks at adding texture and depth to mysteries through setting.

My artistic endeavors as a child centered around a coloring book and a new box of Crayola Crayons. As a teen, I discovered oil painting. Forget that box of 128 colors! I could create any color I could imagine. Bright, vivid, reach-out-and-touch-someone color. And, best of all, the only lines in the painting were the ones I created.

But there is more to a painting than the paint. There are brushes — fat, thick, thin, stiff, and pliable. There are palette knives. There are brush strokes, techniques, lighting, and composition. Just as no two painters sitting side by side with identical brushes, colors, and scenery will create an identical painting, neither will two writers describe a scene, or setting, identically.

Words are a writer's paint and the way in which the writer uses them are the brush strokes. Words give color to a scene, but the way words are structured to describe a scene gives the scene texture. The difference between a blue sky or a sun-washed sky, or a sky the blue of cornflowers after a spring rain, shows how words add texture. A setting, or scene, textured properly can become a character in your mystery, adding another dimension to your writing.

Settings Heighten Emotions
Nevada Barr, author of the Anna Pigeon series, sets her mysteries in different national parks around the country. Hunting Season is set in the Mississippi Delta during the rainy season. "On either side of the two-lane asphalt road, land melted away in a soggy field of stubble rising and falling as gently as the chest of a breathing child, the 'hills' of Mississippi. Ditches ran full and creeks were beginning to back up at the culvert under the road. Leaves blew and fell, stuck and slid with the rain till there was little difference between earth and sky" (Hunting Season, page 172). This scene lets you feel the cold and the dreary rain as Anna drives down the highway. Barr deftly crafts the scene to add to the hopelessness and bleakness Anna Pigeon is feeling while attempting to unravel a murder.

In Blind Descent, the same author creates the setting so well that one begins to feel the chill and claustrophobia associated with caves. "As she sat in the deep puddle, the darkness began to harden around her. It was not a mere absence of light, it was a substance, an element, a suffocating miasma that filled her ears, clogged her nostrils, bore down on her shoulders and chest. When the pressure on her eyelids became such that she could feel the black leaking like raw concrete into her brain, she reached up and switched on her lamp" (Blind Descent, page 19). The reader begins to have trouble breathing reading a passage like that. Again, Barr creates a scene so bleak that the reader feels the chill along with Anna Pigeon and begins to wonder if all the light has been drained from the world, along with all hope of affecting a subterranean rescue of Anna's friend in Lechuguilla Cavern.

And finally, Barr describes the surprises the cavern holds in store, which almost makes up for the claustrophobia she's evoked. "The cavern extended four or five hundred feet. Aragonite chandeliers had hung in defiant profusion from a ceiling of gold. The meandering stream had curved through formations looking more like clouds than solid earth. The end of the room had been cloaked in draperies of such delicacy it would have taken little imagination to see them moving in a non-existent breeze. At their base, filled by a waterfall from the creek, was what had been the room's crowning jewel, a clear blue lake, garnished with lily pads of ruby-colored stone" (Blind Descent, page 236). Through her word choice and structure, Barr builds scenes so engrossing, the reader becomes part of the action, feeling the same emotions, frustrations, tears, and joys Anna Pigeon feels.

Unique Settings Create Texture
A unique or unusual setting will add texture to the mystery, and, crafted correctly, can increase the pace and tension. Nevada Barr and Dana Stabenow both use unusual locations in their mysteries.

In Firestorm, Nevada Barr's protagonist, Anna Pigeon, is on temporary duty to help with a wildfire. "Light was draining from the sky, taking the day's heat with it. ... To the west and southwest the trees breathed up black smoke. As the day faded, pin pricks of orange blossomed. A garish blood-red sunset fired the sky, the last rays bending through smoke so thick the neck bones of Lassen Peak were obscure. Near the horizon the smoky pall blotted out the sun. Higher up, smoke sucked fire from the sun and burned the heavens as the fire burned on earth" (Firestorm, page 6). At this point in the novel, Anna has spent the day fighting a raging forest fire and providing medical attention to team members. The scene is designed specifically to slow the action to give Anna, and the reader, a small respite before the grim realties of fighting the fire begin again. But while Anna is allowed a much deserved deep breath, Barr never lets the focus of the storyline stray from the immenseness of the fire.

During a chase across a mountain in A Fatal Thaw, Kate Shugak, created by Dana Stabenow, is caught by an avalanche. In a few words, Stabenow conveys its awesome power: "the broken, icy floor of the glacier undulated in the sinuous deadly fashion of a serpent. The cornices of the glacier walls cracked, slipped and crashed to the bottom. The walls themselves broke apart and tumbled down in house-size chunks. Huge clouds of pulverized crystal billowed up in the still air, as if in a frenzy of spring cleaning, a Titan had laid hold to the edge of the earth and with one snap of his wrists was shaking it free of winter's accumulation of dust and debris" (A Fatal Thaw, page 185). Stabenow deftly structures her scene to involve the reader in the heavy, shifting earth-creating tension and suspense about whether Kate will survive what Mother Nature has thrown against her.

Location, Location, Location
One adage beginning writers learn is to write what you know. There is no area of writing where this is so important as with setting. Writers need to research the setting so that they could walk the streets in their sleep. Nothing is so embarrassing to an author, and irritating to the reader, than to have inaccuracies in the setting, like a north-south street going east-west.

Some authors limit their sleuth's setting to their homes. For example, anyone reading the entire Nero Wolfe series would be able to describe Wolfe's home in great detail from the orchids on the roof to the pool table/shooting range in the basement. Because Rex Stout created Wolfe to be an armchair detective, Stout devoted extra effort to creating the brownstone so everyone reading the novels would "see" it. Thus, the brownstone becomes a part of the ensemble cast. Further, when Wolfe chooses, or is forced, to leave his beloved brownstone, the tension immediately picks up because it is such an extraordinary occurrence and no one knows what might happen.

Many authors use real cities for their sleuths' stomping grounds, like New York and Las Vegas, each of which evokes an immediate response from the reader. Each author, however, adds unique touches. Tony Hillerman has so successfully interwoven the Southwest into his Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn mysteries that they cannot take place anywhere else. The Thurlos' and Michael McGarrity have also captured the American Southwest for their protagonists. Margaret Coel has set her series in Wyoming. Margaret Maron sets her Judge Deborah Knott series in North Carolina and James D. Doss uses southwest Colorado. Each of these authors use their locations not only as a backdrop, but as a device to create settings unique to their protagonists, providing descriptions and examples of the local flora and fauna to add to the enjoyment of the reader, and add layers to their mysteries and texture to unraveling the crime.

Other authors like Nancy Herndon and Sue Grafton used real places, but re-named them. Herndon renamed El Paso as Los Santos, Texas, and Grafton renamed Santa Barbara as Santa Teresa, California. Still other authors create whole towns and cities in which to set their murders. Joan Hess created Faberville, Arkansas, Susan Rogers Cooper created Black Cat Ridge, Texas, Charlaine Harris created Shakespeare, Arkansas, and Penny Warner created Flat Skunk, California. The advantage to this is that there's no way to get a street wrong. One piece of advice if you decide to make up your location: develop a detailed map of the invented city. Even fabricated locations must remain accurate during the series.

Where's The Body?
As important as the setting for the mystery, or the sleuth's neighborhood, is the site where the body is discovered. Gone are the days when bodies were found simply in the bedroom or bathroom, or in a car in a closed garage. In Hunting Grounds, Nevada Barr has a dead body in a bed in a historical site. Margaret Coel in The Eagle Catcher sets the body in a sleeping bag in a tipi, and in The Ghost Walker the body is wrapped in a blanket tossed in a roadside ditch during a snowstorm. Claudia Bishop uses some unique settings as in Murder Well Done when the body is discovered under a traffic light — in the middle of an intersection, while A. Jance, another Southwest author, in Outlaw Mountain has a drugged body impaled on cholla cactus in the desert.

Kathleen O'Neal Gear with her husband, W. Michael Gear, has created a unique series which alternates between First Americans and a contemporary group of archeologists in The Visitant, The Summoning God, and Bone Walker. "...At first the oddity didn't register as she lowered her eyes to the crumbled stone pile on the ridgetop. It was the color rather than the shape that caught her eye. Dark red, wine color rather than bluff. Like two juniper stumps, except...then her stumbling mind put it together. Two bloody feet atop legs stuck out of the dirt" (Bone Walker, page 82).

Even burials can add an interesting layer to your mystery. In Open Season, C. J. Box's debut novel, the description of the funeral adds color to his unique mystery. "The three mahogany stained pine caskets were in the bed of the pickup, two side-by-side across the bottom and the third laid across them on top" (Open Season, page 90). "Then the Reverend Cobb started up the pickup, eased it into drive, and leaped from the cab. Joe watched, as did the rest of the small crowd and the families, as the Ford inched forward and descended into a massive hole. It settled to the bottom with a solid thump, and no one wanted to look down to see if the caskets had jarred loose and broken open." (Open Season, page 92).

Create settings with the same care as an oil painter uses paints. Use words to create, not just an image, but to add depth and texture to your work. By doing so, the fine line between too much description and too little will be mastered and the setting will join the ensemble cast of your mystery.


About The Author
Marcia Kiser writes, works, and lives in Lubbock, TX. She is a member of Sisters in Crime and her short stories have appeared in Nefarious, The Thrilling Detective, Dusty Cowboy, Novel Advice Mysterical-E, FUTURES, and the recently released Novel Advice Anthology. She can be contacted at Mek357@sbcglobal.net.