Setting the Scene

 Happy June! Happy Summer!

Time for a bit of "writing craft talk."

Specifically, setting the scene.

I have written here before about using "Setting as Character," and I'll be dealing with setting again today, just a different aspect of setting.

Specifically "establishing setting," or, put more prosaically, "setting the scene." And I'll be sharing examples of authors doing so effectively in a whole host of ways.

First things first; it's important to separate short stories from novels, as, due to differences in length, short stories tend to drop their characters right into the scene fairly quickly, where novels have more space with which to work. Let's start with short stories.

Short Stories

The following scenes are written by authors who also wrote (and have been celebrated for) novels. We will revisit their scene setting in the section on novels:

Friday night is fight night at the Steiner Street house. This particular one was my first idle evening in several weeks. I had gone up to the rink, fitted myself to a hard wooden chair not too far from the ring, and settled down to watch the boys throw gloves at one another. The show was about a quarter done when I picked out this pair of odd and somehow familiar ears two rows ahead of me.

–Dashiell Hammett, "The Whosis Kid"

   *    *    *

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry

Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.

It had been open about a week and it wasn't doing any business. The kid behind the bar was in his early twenties and looked as if he had never had a drink in his life.

There was only one other customer, a souse on a bar stool with his back to the door. He had a pile of dimes stacked neatly in front of him, about two dollars' worth. He was drinking straight rye in small glasses and he was all by himself in a world of his own."

–Raymond Chandler, "Red Wind"

   *    *    *

The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white. On this
side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. Close against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep out flies. The American and the girl with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the building. It was very hot and the express from Barcelona would come in forty minutes. It stopped at this junction for two minutes and went on to Madrid.

"Hills Like White Elephants" by Ernest Hemingway

   *    *    *

Three authors celebrated for both their short stories and their novels. The interesting thing? As you’ll see when we pull examples from their long form work, the approaches of these three celebrated early 20th century authors don’t vary markedly from their approaches in their short stories.

Put simply: “Drop ‘em on in it, and let the reader know right away something is 'off.'”

Hemingway especially was known for the brevity (some would call it “terseness”) of his style. Any number of literary analysts have alluded to Hemingway’s early training as a journalist while working first for The Kansas City Star, and then moving to Europe, where he went to work for the Toronto Star during the 1920s as having been incredibly influential on his style.

And that’s likely true. Hemingway himself repeated stated that the only “how-to” book he ever consulted was The Kansas City Star’s “Star Copy Style Sheet.” For his part Hemingway called it: "the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing."

Hammett, too, developed his style on the job as a detective for the Pinkerton Agency-writing up things like case files and surveillance reports. Is it any wonder then, that Hammett, like Hemingway, varied his approach to scene-setting very little in between short stories and novels?

As for Chandler, learning to write fiction "on the job" was pretty much the opposite of his experience. Graduating from Dulwich College, he received a first-rate classical education, and wrote poetry that went unnoticed, before chucking it all and moving out to California and developing an accounting system for an oil company that led to several promotions before an abrupt dismissal for drunkenness.

Novellas

Novellas, once left for dead largely as a result of the advent of television scripts, which tended to be about the same word count as novellas (and infinitely better paying), have begun a long, slow comeback thanks to the ebook revolution.

You won't see them advertised as such most of the time, but take a look at the word count on some of the indie thrillers out there and we are talking long short story/novelette/novella length. Here's a scene being set pulled from the pages of an actual novellas (and it's one of mine):

“You ain’t Clute."

I turned in the speaker’s direction. “I beg your pardon, sir?”

“You ain’t Clute,” the man repeated. He sounded as if his mouth was full, in that manner distinctive to tobacco chewers.

I looked about the makeshift train platform. A rude log cabin abutted it and everywhere the green of the forest pressed in upon it. A chalked sign above the only door read “Coal Creek.” The platform itself wholly consisted of uncured logs, cut into planks so recently the soles of my shoes were already tacky with resin. Aside from the crew tending the locomotive which had carried me up the spur line from Renton, there were only three people on it: the hatless, bald, barrel-chested man asking about “Clute,” a Chinaman in suit and tie, standing diffidently a respectful distance behind the speaker, and me.

–Paper Son by Brian Thornton

Shorter in length, so still honoring the short story's economy of language, and dropping the main character right in it, while signaling to the reader that the scene described is not 'normal.' There are novellas out there (Conrad's Heart of Darkness comes to mind) that take their time building the setting. Conrad was a hell of a writer and could pull that sort of thing off, as is attested by the continuing popularity of his writing even in this day of Tik Tok-eroded attention spans.

Novels

The final turn took me around a shielding wall of popsicle cedar trees to the forecourt of the Montgomery place where a soft pattering fountain sprayed cool water in through the car window. The mansion was an L shape with the front door in the crease of the elbow. It was a nice family home if your family was everybody in Kansas. The windows were small and many and a heavy roof hung over it all like a furrowed brow. A low row of garages stood at the side. The doors were open and identical black Packards winked and gleamed in the shade, big as trains but better kept, perfectly waxed and ready to serve, glinting side by side. I parked my dusty Olds, got out and went up the steps to the front door.

-The Second Murderer by Denise Mina

As I stated above, novels are allowed to take their sweet time. And a skilled writer like Denise Mina knows how to make use of every word, to say nothing of employing sly wit (The "Kansas" line.).

Compare the above with a similar scene penned by the great Ross MacDonald, below.

   *    *    *

The cab turned off U.S. 101 in the direction of the sea. The road looped round the base of a brown hill into a canyon lined with scrub oak. 

“This is Cabrillo Canyon,” the driver said. 

There weren’t any houses in sight. “The people live in caves?” 

“Not on your life. The estates are down by the ocean.” 

A minute later I started to smell the sea. We rounded another curve and entered its zone of coolness. A sign beside the road said: “Private Property: Permission to pass over revocable at any time.” 

The scrub oak gave place to ordered palms and Monterey cypress hedges. I caught glimpses of lawns effervescent with sprinklers, deep white porches, roofs of red tile and green copper. A Rolls with a doll at the wheel went by us like a gust of wind, and I felt unreal. 

The light-blue haze in the lower canyon was like a thin smoke from slowly burning money. Even the sea looked precious through it, a solid wedge held in the canyon’s mouth, bright blue and polished like a stone. Private property: color guaranteed fast; will not shrink egos. I had never seen the Pacific look so small.

– The Moving Target by Ross MacDonald

Different rich people. Different approach to delineating the difference between their world and that of the protagonist, as stand-in for the reader. 

   *    *    *

And then you have the gritty realism of a Michael Connelly police procedural:

The patrol officers had left the front door open. They thought they were doing her a favor, airing the place out. But that was a violation of crime scene protocol regarding evidence containment. Bugs could go in and out. Touch DNA could be disturbed by a breeze through the house. Odors were particulate. Airing out a crime scene meant losing part of that crime scene. But the patrol officers didn’t know all of that. The report that Ballard had gotten from the watch lieutenant was that the body was two to three days old in a closed house with the air-conditioning off. In his words, the place was as ripe as a bag of skunks.

– Dark Sacred Night by Michael Connelly

  *    *    *

And the grim winter of Ann Cleeves:

Fran Hunter had a car but she didn’t like using it for short trips. She cared about global warming and wanted to do her bit. She had a bike with a seat on the back for Cassie, had brought it with her on the Northlink ferry when she moved. She prided herself on travelling light and it had been the only bulky item in her luggage. In this weather though a bike was no good. Today she wrapped Cassie up in her dungarees and coat and the wellingtons with the green frogs on the front and pulled her to school on a sledge. It was January 5th, the first day of the new school term. When they set off it was hardly light. Fran knew Mrs Henry already disapproved of her and didn’t want to be late. She didn’t need more knowing looks and raised eyebrows, the other mothers talking about her behind her back. It was hard enough for Cassie to fit in.

– Raven Black by Ann Cleeves

Fran is a preoccupied mother trying to navigate the social maze which is elementary parenting, and Cleeves manages to set the scene queickly and deftly, leaving the point of view character preoccupied by mundane thoughts, heading toward school, and...?

  *    *    *

Katherine Anne Porter was a writer of power and a master of penetrating imagery. As such (and as a rough contemporary of Conrad), she deftly does double duty with setting the scene below from her short novel Pale Horse, Pale Rider. Not only does she take the long way toward describing where her main character actually is, but also manages to convey to the reader the unsettling fact that she is not where she ought to be from the very first sentence.

In sleep she knew she was in her bed, but not the bed she had lain down in a few hours since, and the room was not the same but it was a room she had known somewhere. Her heart was a stone lying upon her breast outside of her; her pulses lagged and paused, and she knew that something strange was going to happen, even as the early morning winds were cool through the lattice, the streaks of light were dark blue and the whole house was snoring in its sleep.

– Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter

  *    *    *

And let's close with another example from Chandler's work. Setting the scene at the beginning of 1939's The Big Sleep:

The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn't have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn't seem to be really trying.

There were French doors at the back of the hall, beyond them a wide sweep of emerald grass to a white garage, in front of which a slim dark young chauffeur in shiny black leggings was dusting a maroon Packard convertible. Beyond the garage were some decorative trees trimmed as carefully as poodle dogs. Beyond them a large greenhouse with a domed roof. Then more trees and beyond everything the solid, uneven, comfortable line of the foothills.

  *    *    *

A quick confession: I generated the images used in this post using a terrific graphics-proficient creative AI called Midjourney. And how did I do it?

I took each of the entries above and used them as the prompt for what  eventually became the image I would use to illustrate each entry.

Good writing is descriptive. Great writing puts you right there. With or without an AI assist.

And on that note, that's all for me this time. What tricks do you use in your scene setting? Feel free to add them in the comments, and let's talk all about setting the scene!

See you in two weeks!

In The Zone

 I've been reluctant to bring up this topic because it smacks of woo-woo and I am a dedicated anti-woo-woo person.  In fact when I ride my bike around town people point at me and whisper to each other "There goes a dedicated anti-woo-woo person." At least that's what I hope they're whispering.

I just read an interesting quote from Frederick M. Knott.  He was the author of two classic plays of suspense which were made into classic movies of the same: Dial M For Murder and Wait Until Dark. Knott wrote: 

There was a time when this play was becoming more and more complicated so I stopped everything and reconstructed it, which is an agonizing problem bur it has certainly paid off. A reverse process seems to have set in now and it seems to get more and more simple, and I am getting what I call the bonuses, i.e., good little things that grow naturally out of the writing, more than I bargained for and that is always a good indication that one is on the right tack at last.

What interested me was his comment about those bonuses.  I believe he is describing what I think of as being in the zone.  Here's a definition from Crossidiomas: "Being 'in the zone' is a term that describes a mental state where an individual is fully immersed in their task or activity. It’s a feeling of being completely present and engaged with what they are doing, without any distractions or interruptions. When someone is in this state, they may feel like time has slowed down or even stopped altogether."

It's usually used to describe athletes but it applies to writers as well.  For me it is the experience when pieces of your story fit together unexpectedly, making connections you didn't expect.

A favorite example: Back in 2015 Bouchercon was held in Raleigh. They announced that they would have an anthology and I decided to send them a story.  The problem was that the story I had ready, "On the Ramblas," was about a pickpocket  in Barcelona.   Nothing wrong with that, but I figured a story with some connection to Raleigh had a better chance of making it into the book. 

The name of the Bouchercon was Murder Under the Oaks, so I thought I might increase the odds of connecting to the book if I could fit something about oak trees in.

I should explain that the first sentence of my tale was: "Tourists wandered down the Ramblas like sheep waiting to be fleeced" and there were several other places where tourists were metaphrically compared to animals. 

I looked on the web for "Spain AND oak" and guess what? It turns out that that country brags that it has the best ham in the world because of pigs that forage under oak trees, living on acorns.  And there was my connection between my metaphorical animal/tourists and the theme of the book.  Bonus! My story is the last one in the book because the editor Art Taylor liked the ending so much he wanted it to be the last thing readers read.

Here's another example I have written about before.  When my sister Diane Chamberlain began work on her first novel, Private Relations, she decided that most of the characters would live in a big house in Mantoloking on the New Jersey shore. She found an appropriate house, took photos, and used them for inspiration.

Later, looking at photo collections at our parents' house, she found a picture of herself, age 16, in front of that same home.  Of course, this was part of the subconscious mind, what I call the Miner, helping her out.  

 And now I am working on a short story whose plot requires a bunch of characters to sit around talking for a few minutes.  Problem was I had no idea what they should be chatting about.  But darn it, I needed them talking.  So I literally wrote FILL THIS IN and went on with the story.

A few pages later, wouldn't you know it, I realized I had another problem.  I planned to send this story to a mystery magazine, which of course meant there had to be a crime in it.  And there was, but it wasn't revealed until the ending. I knew that the average mystery reader, clever and sneaky, would wonder why no crime had appeared, which might lead them to suspect exactly what I was up to.

And then I saw that Problem 1 was the solution to Problem 2, and vice versa.  The characters would chat about various crimes! While the readers were trying to figure out which anecdote being discussed was the one the story was really about they wouldn't notice the rabbit I had up my sleeve.  Bonus!

As I've said before, sometimes writing is a hard slog, but when you're in the zone, it can be magic. Tell me about when it has happened to you...

A History Mystery

Abraham Lincoln sat behind the counsel table in the Springfield, Illinois courthouse. Beside him, his clients, Archibald and William Trailor, waited anxiously. They would soon, all observers knew, be convicted for the murder of Archibald Fisher. The gallows awaited them both.

The prosecution’s case was simple. William Trailor, from Warren County, Illinois, traveled in May 1841 to Springfield to meet his brothers, Archibald and Henry. All three, described as "sober, retiring and industrious," were joined by William’s housemate Archibald Fisher, a handyman rumored to have saved a fair sum through odd jobs and frugal living.

Arriving in Springfield, they met Archibald Trailor, a carpenter. After lunch, all four walked around town. The three brothers soon separated from Fisher. That night, when Fisher did not return, the brothers searched for him.

The next day, they searched again without success. After another fruitless day, William returned home alone.

The story circulated through Warren County that Fisher had died and willed his fortune to William. The local postmaster notified Springfield of the suspicious circumstances. Within days, all three Trailor brothers were arrested.

After interrogation by the mayor and state attorney general, Henry Trailor confessed. He claimed his brothers killed Fisher and stole his money, admitting to helping hide the body. Despite the town’s efforts, Fisher’s remains were not found. Lincoln later wrote, “[E]xaminations were made of cellars, wells, and pits of all descriptions, where it was thought possible the body might be concealed. All the fresh or tolerably fresh, graves at the grave-yard were pried into, and dead horses and dead dogs were disinterred.”

The mood of the public darkened. Even though the body had not been recovered, it seemed clear that only a speedy trial followed by prompt punishment might avoid a lynching. During pretrial hearings, Henry Trailor repeated his confession. The investigators testified that they found deep buggy tracks and signs that something had been dragged through the grass. The tracks, they reported, ended near a pond, a perfect place to hide a body. Investigators further claimed they found human whiskers on a club near the tracks. Finally, a responsible local woman testified that she had seen two of the Trailor brothers walk into the woods with Fisher. Later, she saw them return from the woods alone.

The crowded courtroom felt hot on the cusp of summer, 1841. The heat must have seemed even more oppressive for the defendants. The weight of the evidence and the ire of the townspeople pressed down on them.  

Lincoln called his sole witness, Dr. Robert Gilmore, a respected physician. Gilmore testified that Fisher had lived with him and, due to a head injury in his youth, was forgetful and prone to wandering. He suggested Fisher likely wandered off and lost track of where he was.

The doctor offered proof to support his theory: Archibald Fisher was still alive and recovering from illness at the doctor’s house. The ailing man had no memory of his time in Springfield and had journeyed all the way to Peoria before recovering his mind.

The charges were dropped and the Trailors released.

The day after the trial, Lincoln wrote to Joshua Speed that “[w]hen the doctor’s statement was first made public, it was amusing to scan and contemplate the countenances and hear the remarks of those who had been actively in search of the dead body: some looked quizzical, some melancholy, and some furiously angry.”

The Trailor trial explores the limits of the criminal justice system. Henry’s testimony followed three days of interrogation, prompting a false confession. This case, from before Miranda rights, should remind us of today’s constitutional protections. Confirmation bias appears—authorities let conclusions drive facts. Finally, “junk science” is evident too: the whiskers were cow hairs, and the pond grass was matted by children playing.  

As a writer’s blog, however, I’d like to focus on the story. Abraham Lincoln penned a fictional tale about the murder trial and published it in the Quincy Whig on April 15, 1846, under the title, “A Remarkable Case of Arrest for Murder”. Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine republished that story in March 1952 as “The Trailor Murder Mystery”. Finally, Otto Penzler included it in The Best American Mystery Stories of the Nineteenth Century (albeit labeling it a curiosity rather than an example of compelling storytelling or distinguished literary style).

Abraham Lincoln, therefore, can rightfully claim to be America’s most famous mystery author. To the list of his accomplishments: rail splitter, lawyer, politician, president, please add crime writer.

Until next time.

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For more information, see Logan and Lincoln by William Townsend in The American Bar Journal, February 1933.