Carrie,
Re your question below:
> I'm curious about other writers who have done
this,
> either invented their
> own city or constructed a fictional area within
a
> real city.
A few cop-turned-novelists who've done this come to
mind.
Maurice Procter, a twenty-year beat cop in England's Halifax
Borough Police, wrote a long series about Inspector Harry
Martineau that were set in the North England industrial city
of "Granchester," apparently a fictionalized version of
Manchester much as McBain's Isola is a fictionalized version
of Manhattan.
Another Englishman, John Wainwright, my personal favorite
cop/writer, spent two decades as on officer in the West
Riding County Constabulary, before starting a long series of
books set in the fictional cities of "Lessford" and
"Bordfield," which are, as near as I can tell, fictional
analogs for Leeds and Bradford in the West Riding of
Yorkshire.
Retired San Jose Police Chief Joseph McNamara created a
fictional city in a real place. The real place is the
collection of cities and unincorporated area in the portion
of Santa Clara County south of the San Mateo County line and
north of San Jose. The fictional city he sets there is called
Silicon City. He simply imagined what might've happened if
all those disparate communities decided to combine into one
big town, than wrote a cop novel called FATAL COMMAND in
which that happened.
Judith Smith-Levin was an officer in the Worcester, Mass, PD
(is that town in the Boston Metro Area?) Her series cop,
Detective Lieutenant Star Duvall, works in a New England town
called Brookport. I'd say it's safe to assume that Brookport
is, if not a fictional analog for Worcester, at least has a
lot in common with the real-life town where Ms. Smith-Levin
spent her law enforcement career.
Of course there are the classic HB examples. Raymond Chandler
called Santa Monica "Bay City." Ross Macdonald called Santa
Barbara "Santa Teresa" (a tradition Sue Grafton continues)
and the Bay Area's Half Moon Bay "Luna Bay." I'm not sure
whether or not anyone's ever figured out precisely what the
model for Hammett's "Personville" is, but a lot of Hammett
scholars think it's a fictionalized Butte, Montana
(which is a town Hammett mentions in the very first sentence
of the book).
JIM DOHERTY
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