Globe Trotting with Jeannette de Beauvoir

INGRID THOFT

Our own Lucy raised the issue of setting a few weeks ago—how well does a writer need to know their setting for it to ring true?—and today, Jeannette de Beauvoir joins us to share her experience with choosing the perfect place for her mysteries.  

Where in the World?
I wrote my first novel when I was eight years old. (It wasn’t very good.) I was living in my hometown of Angers, France, and it didn’t occur to me that Angers was a very nice place to live and would make an excellent setting for a book. Instead, I invented a place. I’m not going to blame the book’s awfulness on the venue I invented, but that should have told me something.

Over the years I followed up that rather pathetic beginning with a bunch of historical fiction rooted mostly in time—which has always been important to me—and in place only incidentally, merely because it happened to be where the events I used as a backdrop to my stories actually unfolded.

I remember the first time I realized how exciting it was for readers to read a novel set in a familiar place. It was one of Linda Barnes’ Carlotta Carlyle mysteries, and at the time I was living in Cambridge: I remember being entranced, not just by the story or the characters, but by the familiarity of the setting. I know that street! I eat at Mary Chung’s!

That familiarity delivered something a lot of the other mystery novels I was reading at the time didn’t: an instant physical rapport with the character. A sense of belonging in their world. And the more I thought about it, the more I wanted that to be part of my writing, too. 

It works two ways: people who live in the venue feel at home, and people visiting it for the first time feel like they’re coming home.

There’s a story about the wonderful suspense novelist Phyllis Whitney that’s probably apocryphal (though I hope it’s not): it’s said that she would decide where she next wanted to go on vacation—say, Greece—and that choice would then become her setting for her next book, her vacation turning into a (pleasant) research trip. I can say from experience that visiting a place through a novelist’s eyes really does bring a new dimension to one’s travel: one is always wondering what if my protagonist went here? Who might she meet there? Where could some adventure befall her? It’s a game I play now all the time, and even though most of the places I visit don’t end up actually being used in a book, the exercise is rather fun.

I fell in love with Montréal decades ago when I first visited, but it wasn’t until I started really thinking about the place as inspiring the story—instead of the other way around—that I did some serious research into the city’s past and found the historical events that inspired "Asylum" and "Deadly Jewels," my two mysteries centering on PR director Martine LeDuc. And it wasn’t until I’d lived in Provincetown at the tip of Cape Cod for several years that I felt I really knew the place enough to situate a mystery series there; that’s the one I’m engaged in now, with wedding consultant Sydney Riley becoming what one of the shop owners in town calls “Provincetown’s answer to Jessica Fletcher.”

And while I love what every mystery novelist loves—readers contacting me about how they like a story, or my characters—what I love most of all is people who’ve lived here for decades telling me that I’ve really captured a sense of Ptown, that for them the venue is as much a character as the people who inhabit it.

I gave my dentist copies of my Montréal books to read before she and her husband went to Canada on vacation, and I was delighted when she came back and said, “okay, so I know that Martine prefers St. Viateur bagels to Fairmount bagels, but we tried both and I have to say I disagree with her.” While she obviously has no taste in bagels—Martine takes after me, professing St. Viateur allegiance in the long-established rivalry between the two bakeries—I was pleased that I’d made the city come alive for my dentist before she went, and enlivened it for her while she was there.

I’ll be honest: I’m not the world’s best mystery reader. We’ve all consumed authors who present startling twists at the end of their stories–Thomas H. Cook comes immediately to mind–but I’m the kind of reader who finishes any story—Agatha Christie, Jodi Picoult, anyone—and says, “Whoa, I never saw that coming.” I am not one of those who figures out who did it in the first three chapters. In fact, once I’ve finished reading a novel, I’m still muttering about how I still didn’t “get” this or that. I’m always surprised by the ending. So you could argue that someone as little engaged with plot as I am would indeed look to other ways to engage readers in a story.

But I like to think it’s more than that. I like to think that I’ve stumbled across something that’s fundamentally important: that where we are, where our stories take place, is important. That we as people, that our lives, are rooted somewhere. That context is as significant as plot. That Sydney Riley would be a different person if she lived in Albuquerque instead of Provincetown, and that her stories, even with similar plots, would play out differently there.

I’ll never visit some of the places I’ve read about in fiction, though at the hands of a skillful narrator I often feel as though I know them well. One of Mary Stewart’s books begins, “I met him in the street called Straight,” plunging the reader right into the pre-war souk of Damascus. Elleston Trevor’s spy scrambling through a wintry Moscow night made me understand how the city is arranged. (He, of course, apparently never visited the far-flung outposts of which he wrote; he stayed at his desk, armed with guides and maps.)But Sydney is real because the streets she walks on are real, the shops she visits are real, many of the people she encounters are real. So to tempt you to come visit Sydney’s town here on the tip of the Cape, here are some of her favorite things:

1. Best oyster bar: Mac’s Seafood on Shank Painter Rd. There’s a special “happy hour” when the raw bar is half-priced. Mac is a fisherman himself, and it shows.
2. Best museum: Instead of traipsing up the hill to the Monument, stay on MacMillan Wharf and take in the Pirate Museum, filled with artefacts from Black Sam Bellamy’s ship Whydah sunk in a nor’easter off Cape Cod.
3. Best way to get out on the water: Either a cruise around the harbor on the Bay Lady, or renting a 19-foot sailboat from Flyer’s.
4. Best place for a drink (summer): The Aqua Bar. Bring something from one of the vendors at the Aquarium Mall and enjoy a dinner and drink al fresco.
5. Best sunset: Herring Cove beach
6. Best to-go meal: Relish (try their gazpacho!)
7. Required activity: Art’s Dune Tours. You don’t know Ptown until you’ve been on one.
8. Sydney’s clothes shopping: The thrift shop at the Methodist church, Vintage in Vogue, and occasionally something from Marine Specialties.
9. Favorite view: When you’re on route 6 and come to the top of the last hill in Truro and suddenly Provincetown is tin view, lying curved around the water that changes color every day. Sydney often says she lives in a postcard. It never fails to make her smile.

These and many other places make Provincetown what it is for Sydney: home.

Is there a place where you've visited that "speaks" to you?  Why?  Jeannette is giving away two ebooks of her latest, "The Deadliest Blessing."  Comment to enter!

The Deadliest Blessing: A Provincetown Mystery​​
If there’s a dead body anywhere in Provincetown, wedding consultant Sydney Riley is going to be the one to find it! The seaside town’s annual Portuguese Festival is approaching and it looks like smooth sailing until Sydney’s neighbor decides to have some construction done in her home—and finds more than she bargained for inside her wall.

​Now Sydney is again balancing her work at the Race Point Inn with an unexpected adventure that will eventually involve fishermen, gunrunners, a mummified cat, a family fortune, misplaced heirs, a girl with a mysterious past, and lots and lots of Portuguese food.  The Blessing of the Fleet is coming up, and unless Sydney can find the key to a decades-old murder, it might yet come back to haunt everyone in this otherwise-peaceful fishing village.

Jeannette de Beauvoir
I’m a novelist, poet, and playwright, and my work has appeared in 15 countries and has been translated into 12 languages. I like to explore personal and moral questions through different literary genres and I’m the author, under various pseudonyms, of mystery novels, historical and contemporary fiction, an award-winning book of poetry, and a number of produced plays.
​​
As you can imagine, I love to write. All the time. And I’d love to have you read some more of what I’m writing! My blog is over at Goodreads, and you can also find my posts at LinkedIn. And then of course there’s my monthly newsletter, to which you can subscribe on my website.

Finally, I don’t just write; I also edit manuscripts (from simple copyediting to much more substantive work) and teach writing, along with directing writing workshops and retreats, both online and onsite. I’d be very happy to help you with your writing projects!