 |
| Los Angeles, circa 1875--Spring Street at Court Street |
Aside from her
tendency to think of weird ways to kill people, Anne Louise Bannon is
appallingly normal. Her only real quirk is wearing earrings that don’t match.
She is the author of the 1920s set Freddie and Kathy series, the Operation
Quickline series of cozy spy novels, and the Old Los Angeles series about a
winemaker in 1870. Learn more about Anne and her books at her website.
Old Los Angeles as the Setting
I call it the Cabot Cove
Syndrome, after that old TV show Murder
She Wrote. It was a tiny town in Maine that had, like, a murder a week.
You’d never want to live there. Nor would you want to live in most of the small
towns, fictional and otherwise, featured in cozy mysteries because the murder
rate is so incredibly high.
Most cozy writers simply
ignore this and most of us play along because that is, after all, the
convention of the genre. In my Freddie and Kathy series, it’s ridiculous that
they come up against so much murder and mayhem, even in the series’ 1920s New
York setting. But we all know that in real life the murder rate in most small
towns is something like one every few years, and even in the “Big Bad Cities”,
very few people apart from the police come nose-to-nose with a real murder.
However, as I was doing the
research for my Old Los Angeles series, I quickly realized that I had a time
and place where one really could run into enough murder to make a series plausible.
L.A. in 1870, was an incredibly violent place. It probably wasn’t as bad as one
wag put it, with a murder a day. Historian Scott Zesch put the rate at 13
murders a year around this era, based on newspaper and court reports, and it’s
likely that those numbers are a little low.
Even if we go with 13 murders
a year, it doesn’t sound like much until you think about it. Los Angeles now
has roughly four million people and gets around 300 murders a year, which is
considered a relatively high rate. That’s between six and seven murders a year for
each 100,000 people living in L.A. In 1870, there were roughly 5,000 people
living there. At 13 murders a year, that’s a murder for roughly every 350
people. That’s a very violent place.
What made it so violent was
that it was a frontier town. The population was largely transient, with all
manner of men coming and going as they looked for work or to make their
fortunes. Most of the murders were bar brawls, knife fights, and shootings.
One of the reasons I picked
1870 to start my series was that L.A. was on the cusp of civilizing. They had
just set up the police force in 1869 (in fact, this year is the 150th
anniversary of the LAPD). The city would double in population during that
decade, with more women and families moving in. This makes for a really nice
cross-section of social strata. Add in the mix of Whites, Chinese, Blacks and
Mexicans, and you’ve got one heck of a set-up for plenty of mayhem.
It gets even better when real
history cooperates. The incident that Death
of the City Marshal is based on really happened. Okay, I massaged the facts
a little when Marshal Warren does not actually die of his wounds. But he really
was shot by his own deputy in a dispute over the bounty on a prostitute.
I’m not knocking the
small-town cozy. I love books like that. I’m more than willing to suspend my disbelief for a
good puzzle and some quirky characters, like the lovely Ms. Pollack, whose blog
this is.
But,
dang, a real-life time and place that already has an abundance of nefarious
goings-on? How could I resist? Cabot Cove is a wonderful setting. But so is Old
Los Angeles.
Death of the City Marshal
Old Los Angeles Series, Book 2
When
the city marshal gets into a gunfight with his deputy, winemaker and physician
Maddie Wilcox is on hand to care for the marshal's wounds. Then the marshal is
smothered in his bed the next morning, sending Maddie on the hunt for a
killer prepared to do the worst to keep that most basic of human desires: a
home.
No comments:
Post a Comment