Let a crime writer into your home

Paula Woods writes up a lengthy piece in the LA Times about the importance of locale in crime fiction, especially of LA writers like Ross MacDonald, Raymond Chandler, Sue Grafton, the Kellermans, and more:

When a mystery writer uses her own residence as the home of a protagonist (or victim), it’s fine, but to use a family member’s or friend’s own (or that of a stranger) raises issues of confidentiality. Jerrilyn Farmer, author of eight Madeline Bean catering mysteries, used a Whitley Heights home owned by her brother and sister-in-law for her heroine’s home.

“It was formerly owned by silent film star Ben Turpin, so I suppose it had already given up its claim to anonymity,” she says. But in her just released “The Flaming Luau of Death,” Farmer found an even better choice for a home being renovated by Madeline’s friend Wesley Westcott — one in real life being restored by Farmer’s best friend, Brandon Hoskins. “The house Wesley restores is in the coolest, tucked away, historic neighborhood called Hightower, above the Hollywood Bowl. Most people have never heard of it. You have to take an elevator to get there and it’s all pedestrian up there.”

Historic neighborhoods also hold a special appeal for writer John Morgan Wilson, who lives in West Hollywood and set his latest Benjamin Justice mystery there. “The plot of ‘Moth and Flame’ revolves around the city’s historic architecture,” he says. I set scenes in homes ranging from turn-of-the-century cottages to the lush apartments of the historic Garden District to the famous Schindler House, which became the setting for a murder.”

While Wilson can walk his West Hollywood neighborhood, more writers are like Farmer, who uses friends’ homes as locations. “I am brutal with my poaching,” confesses Ayelet Waldman, author of the Mommy Track mysteries. “I know that’s terrible to say, but that’s what writers do. We cannibalize other people’s lives.”

Waldman is, to my mind, dead on. Of course, there’s a fair amount of cannibalizing of your own life that happens in writing as well, but really, to know a writer is to realize that far too many things become fair game…