LOCATION IS A CHARACTER

The location of a story is often more than a setting. It is a character in the story in its own right. Walden Pond. St. Mary Mead. [1] The mountains in Mark Helprin’s A Soldier of the Great War. Prison, in Keith Hollihan’s The Four Stages of Cruelty. Salzburg, in the eponymous The Salzburg Connection by Helen Macinnes, one of the great and interesting thrillers.

Maybe I like The Salzburg Connection, though, because I have been to Salzburg. [2] Or I appreciate [love would not be the right word here], The Four Stages of Cruelty because I have been in prison. [3]

I love books set in places where I have been. I love even more an author who can make me think I have been there when I have not. Like Eleanor Catton in 1845 New Zealand, in The Luminaries, or Ray Bradbury in Green Town, IL in Dandelion Wine.

I don’t feel like I’m there, though, just because the author names all the streets the character takes, whether chasing a murderer or going out for a beer, as Michael Connelly does with LA or John Lescroix with San Francisco. Yes, it gives an idea of how people live in their cars, and how long a detective has to drive to serve a subpoena, but that gets old and boring in a hurry.

The location is a character, but like any other character, it can make you want to read more, or make you take another trip to the library.

John Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

1] Stay away from Miss Marple. People die when she shows up.

2] Helen and I even danced in the gazebo where “The Sound of Music” was filmed.

3] I went to prison as a chaplain, but you still feel that shiver down your spine when you hear the doors of “stony lonesome” clang shut behind you.

Daughter Katie Kennedy’s Learning to Swear in America will be published by J. K. Rowling’s publisher, Bloomsbury Press, in 2016.

Author guru Kristen Lamb says that author blogs are counter-productive, that a blog must be “high concept.” I have no idea what that means, but just forget about JUST WORDS being an author blog and consider it ‘high concept.”

My novel, VETS, about four handicapped and homeless Iraqistan veterans who are accused of murdering a VA doctor, will be published by Black Opal Books in 2015.

I tweet as yooper1721.

I also write Christ in Winter: Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter. http://christinwinter.blogspot.com/

MY OTHER BOOKS:

NOW THAT I HAVE CANCER I AM WHOLE: Reflections on Life and Healing for Cancer Patients and Those Who Love Them [AndrewsMcMeel & HarperAudio, with Czech and Japanese translations] Paul K. Hamilton, MD, the co-founder of CanSurmount, called it “The best book for cancer patients, by a cancer patient, ever.”

AN ORDINARY MAN [HarperPaperbacks] Randall MacLane just wanted to be an ordinary man. But sent with a message for Custer, he became a drifting lawman with a knack for killing, and a deep well of loneliness. Then a twist of fate brought him full circle…

THE STRANGE CALLING: Stories of Ministry [Smyth&Helwys] I didn’t want to be a preacher, but I made a deal with God to save my sister’s life. Was that really a “call,” though? I said, “I’ll try t for 50 years, and if I still don’t know, I’ll do something else.” These are stories of what happened in those years of questioning the call.

WHEN FATHER RODE THE MAIL and Other Stories of Christmas [lulu.com] ISBN 978-1-300-38566-0

If you like baseball poetry, take a look at “Frosty & the Babe” http://www.baseball-almanac.com/poetry/frosty_and_the_babe.shtml