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| A lane in Kovalam, India |
Susan Oleksiw writes the
Anita Ray series featuring an Indian-American photographer living in her aunt's
tourist hotel in South India. She also writes the Mellingham series featuring
Chief of Police Joe Silva. Her stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery
Magazine and various anthologies. Learn more about Susan and her writing at
her website.
Setting Versus Place
A successful novel comprises
a number of elements—character, plot, and setting are the most obvious. In some
mysteries, the setting can be more generic than specific, such as a small town
without any distinctive geographical or historical features. But setting can be
much more than a location for the narrative.
Cara Black sets her series
in Paris, and the reader looks forward to exploring one of the arrondissements
in each book. Louise Penny sets her series in a small village in Quebec,
Canada, and its environs. Sara Paretsky gives us Chicago’s South Side. In each
of these series, and many more, the setting becomes a character, enriching the
novel with detail and depth.
In any novel that includes
setting as more than a generic place, we learn about history, economic climate,
the people and their social world, even the way a place smells and looks and
feels. This is the ideal for setting in fiction.
The Anita Ray mysteries are
set in South India. Since most of my readers never expect to travel there, I
try to include details about this world. Anita Ray lives in Hotel Delite, her
aunt’s tourist hotel, located in the beach resort of Kovalam. In the evening she
strolls along the beach Promenade, past the open-air restaurants with their
tables of fresh fish awaiting customers and the smells of Indian curries
cooking. She chases a suspect down a dirt lane lined with colorful saris and
cloth purses. She takes a narrow path to the edge of the resort area, where the
residents live and the old irrigation canals are thick with weeds.
The city of Trivandrum is
nearby, and Anita rides the bus or takes an autorickshaw, a three-wheeled
vehicle with more noise than power. The resort might grow with a new hotel and
more shops, but the real change is happening in the city. When I lived there in
1976, in a flat that was considered to be in the middle of the city, I walked
to a bus stop located across the road from a lumberyard. Huge teak tree trunks
were piled in the yard. Just past the yard were narrow lanes with one-storied
buildings, where advocates (or lawyers) had their offices. Across the street,
next to the bus stop, was the courthouse. The lumberyard is gone, the street
has sidewalks, and the courthouse was abandoned for almost thirty years. It’s
now being refurbished and reopened.
To make sure Anita Ray’s
activities make sense, I travel around the city, exploring neighborhoods, checking
out restaurants, and searching for quiet lanes where my characters carry out
their criminal deeds.
No novel can give a true or
full picture of the culture of a foreign country. But I strive to bring the
flavor of India (its colors, smells, tastes, and people) into the story, to
keep the setting vivid.
When Krishna Calls
An Anita Ray Mystery
In the glorious beauty of a
tropical night, a young woman abandons her daughter in the Hotel Delite
compound and flees into the darkness. In the morning Anita Ray recognizes the
child as the daughter of an employee, but before she can track her down, the
police arrive at the hotel looking for her. She is the main suspect in the
stabbing death of her husband. This seems impossible to Anita, but so does the discovery
that Nisha and her husband were involved with unscrupulous moneylenders from
their family's village.
Anita is ready to let the
police do their work as she prepares for a one-woman photography show in a
prestigious gallery, but fate conspires against her. An accident wrecks her
schedule as well as her car. She sets up her camera for one last shot, but it
fails to work. When she inspects the camera she finds a piece of paper wrapped
around the batteries and someone else's memory card inside.
Whether she likes it or not,
Anita is drawn into the frantic search for a young mother and the murky world
of moneylenders and debts of honor, a hidden corner of life in South India.
When Krishna Calls asks how far will a woman go for love and family? Anita Ray thinks she
knows how Nisha would answer, but before it is all over Anita must also answer
that question. How far will she go to protect her family and her home?
