T is for Travel Trouble

This post is another last-minute change from the one I had planned.

I spent forty years of my working life travelling the roads of England, Scotland and Wales. There are only a few small areas I haven’t visited. For this reason, the majority of my work is set in this country, and even if many of the locations are fictitious, they’re based on real places.

There is one exception. It’s STAC Mystery #9, Costa del Murder. It’s set almost entirely in Torremolinos, on Spain’s southern coast.

It picked up a four-star review on Amazon UK a few days ago. The reader liked it. (S)he wouldn’t have given it four stars otherwise. But there’s a little snippet in it which attracted my attention.

“… Local knowledge a bit ropey…”

Now before you get to thinking, hey up here’s another author with a bruised ego, you’re wrong. The reviewer says he/she is just nitpicking, but I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment.

And that’s the problem when you set novels in locations which you don’t know like the back of your hand.

I know Torremolinos, but I know it as a tourist. I know what the seafront is like, I know how well you can see the aeroplanes coming into land at Malaga just up the road. I know the perfume shop on Calle San Miguel, and I know the bar where Joe meets some of the little Englanders (but it’s not called Wiley’s).

That knowledge is superficial. I can’t tell you how often the buses run up and down outside Apartmentos Ingles, I really don’t know what kind of shifts the locals work in their chosen industries, I don’t know anything of the local political, administrative or legal troubles the town suffers, or taxation issues, and I certainly don’t know about the local TV channels or the press for the simple reason it’s all in Spanish and as I said on a post a few days ago, I speak very little.

These may not appear to be huge factors in storytelling, but if you compare Costa del Murder to, say, Death in Distribution, the latest STAC Mystery, you’ll see where they fit in to add colour and depth to the tale. And I just didn’t fit enough of it into Costa.

Having said all that, the mystery stands up well, and even my friendly, albeit anonymous reviewer said so.