Why I Set My Mysteries in the Pacific Northwest
By Ron Lovell
[An article written for Mystery Readers Journal, Spring 2002 issue]
Any mystery series with an academic protagonist runs the risk
of becoming boring after one or two outings. I mean, how many
times can a jealous boyfriend kill a professor for sleeping with
his girlfriend or a crazed student bump off a president for accepting
funds from a company that trashes the environment? There are,
of course, a great many situations on any campus that are perfect
source material for a mystery writer’s fiendish imagination. It
is just better to offer something extra from time to time.
That is why I set my mysteries in the Pacific Northwest, specifically
the Oregon Coast, where I have lived for twenty-one years. My
main guy, Thomas Martindale, teaches journalism at a university
fifty-five miles inland—like Oregon State University, where I
taught for twenty-four years. (He also used to be a magazine writer
in New York so he has all these investigative skills and powers
of observation, but that doesn’t have anything thing to do with
his life in Oregon.) He keeps getting dragged to the Coast for
one reason or the other: he is on vacation, he is attending a
marine biology conference—whatever.
The reason for my doing this is simple: the Oregon Coast offers
both physical beauty and a number of locales that are perfect
backdrops to creating a sense of danger, conjuring up menace,
and finding bodies. I mean, how can you beat lighthouses, bridges
built by the WPA, abandoned rock quarries, isolated inlets, and
a cove that used to be a cave until the roof fell in?
I have found this setting irresistible for my first mystery, Murder at Yaquina Head, which will be published by Sunstone Press of Santa Fe, New Mexico
in April. Martindale is just starting his summer vacation when
an old friend, a retired professor of French, asks him to help
her find a publisher for her memoir of her years as a French Resistance
fighter during Word War II. In passing, she mentions that someone
may be trying to kill her. When he finds her body at a nearby
lighthouse—the real Yaquina Head of the title—he begins a hunt
for the killer using clues from the manuscript.
My plans for future novels in the series will set Tom’s adventures
both on the coast and on the campus, which also has its share
of dark laboratories and isolated spots. Along the way, I will
work in the ridiculousness of most university committees, the
cutthroat maneuvering in the search for a college president, and
the exploitation of black football players.
Whether on campus or coast, I always include descriptions of the
locale. And I always work in something about rain. That particularly
Northwest element is well-known and can become almost a character
in any plot. I don’t happen to mind it but it does create those
dark, brooding days which might drive people to commit—you guessed
it—murder.
A Northwest setting for a mystery novel offers another, more intangible
advantage: people in the rest of the country think it exotic and
desirable and that might make them want to read something that
takes place there. Even if Easterners usually mis-pronounce the
state name (calling it “Ory-gone” most of the time), you can almost
see the longing in their eyes or hear it in their voices (“Is
it green all the time?”) when you tell them where you live. My
hope is that they will want to share the grandeur by buying and
reading my new book.