Location Location Location

Robert B. Parker sent Jesse Stone to work in Paradise, MA, but Spenser worked out of Boston. Nevada Barr set Anna Pigeon wandering through every National Park from Isle Royale to the Dry Tortugas. Loren Estleman frequently sent Amos Walker from Detroit to Iroquois Heights.

Google Maps won’t get you there or to Paradise, MA. According to real estate agents, location is everything. It probably is to writers, too.

The difference is, if writers don’t like their location, they change it.

The main problem with a location is the people who live there. As a writer, if you involve their hometowns in unsavory things, they may complain. They may even complain that you’re writing unsavory things about them.

People do unsavory things. That’s one place where we get our ideas. Carl Hiaasen once complained that whenever he dreamed up a completely wacky plot, he’d pick up a Florida newspaper and see something even wackier.

If we set a story in a big place with lots of people, more sensitive readers can dismiss the possibility that you’re writing about them. That’s one reason why New York is such a popular setting. If there are millions of people there, how could anyone be writing specifically about them? Unless your name is Donald Trump, and the character’s name happens to be Donald Trump, too.

Detroit is a small city getting smaller. In the latest census, it lost about a quarter of its population. But “Detroit” is shorthand for something much bigger. It is a euphemism for the car business which touches almost everyone. Everyone in America either owns a car or occasionally rides in one. Many people wrap their identity in their vehicle.

From the inside, the car business is an incestuous family. You can’t go anywhere in southeast Michigan without bumping into someone you recognize. I couldn’t set a story anywhere inside the real auto industry without literally stepping on someone’s toes. That’s what I know, so some invention was required to prevent trodden toes.

My fictional city is Paris, MI. There is a real Paris. It’s a country crossroads north of Big Rapids. It has a little Eiffel Tower, and at one time someone made replica iceboxes there. There is no risk anyone from that Paris will find themselves on my pages.

My Paris is a city built on pretention and lost dreams. It has a half scale Eiffel Tower that looks like a power pylon. The city’s builders hoped to cash in on their exotic namesake, but they come off as misguided pretenders. Everything faintly echoes all things French, and particularly Cadillac because my fictional benefactors, the dela Mothes, descend from the founder of Detroit. They lost their birthright along with the famous brand in a lawsuit before 1910. Every dela Mothe is obsessed with recovering that identity. My Paris is a monument to that obsession.

A city constructed as a replica of something else is uniquely American and quintessentially Detroit. The façade of the Henry Ford museum is identical to Independence Hall, America’s birthplace. Greenfield Village recreates a lost era when invention seemed commonplace. The Wright brothers’ memories live cheek by jowl with those of Thomas Edison and Stephen Foster. Main Street, USA in Disney World presents a movie back lot image of the Age of Innocence. Except the street is paved and the buildings are always freshly painted. Oh, and no one lives there.

Two landmarks in my Paris are the palatial estates of the dela Mothes. One of them, Blackstone, alleges to be the second largest private home in America, after the Biltmore mansion. Detroit is dotted with places like that. Meadowbrook Hall, Fairlane and Rose Terrace (demolished decades ago) were each monuments to the oversized egos that founded the industry. Whole communities like Palmer Woods, Grosse Pointe and Birmingham were built to display the lesser luminaries spawned by the auto companies in their heyday.

Paris includes the Univers Industries Tech Campus, fictionally designed by Mies van der Rohe. It reflects both the Warren’s GM Tech Center by Eero Saarinen and Ford’s Research Center in Dearborn. Each mimics a college campus in form, but not in the structured thinking inside.

Finally, Paris is flanked by a vast, gritty and ultimately abandoned industrial complex. Anyone who has driven along I-75 in Detroit, Joslyn Road in Pontiac, Van Dyke Avenue or seen the old Rouge Complex can appreciate the way the specter of industrial might still clings to our consciousness. We wish for those lost wages without recalling the rusty acid residue that ate away at our neighborhoods and souls.

By creating a doppelganger that invokes the physical and emotional qualities of real places, an author can resonate with readers who have lived the reality without challenging their memories.

You can keep your memories. I’ll always have Paris.