Hi Reader,

The first thing you do when you get to a crash scene is look around. Well, maybe it’s the second thing, after talking to other cops that were first on scene. But the idea is that you take it all in. You look around and try to see what’s there. You pay attention.

There’s obviously the wreckage. Twisted metal and glass strewn across the bitumen. Sometimes the injured are gone. Sometimes they’re not. Sometimes they’re a lifeless body trapped inside a vehicle. Witnesses are often standing around in shock and aren’t really much help in those first few minutes. So, you look beyond the cars and the people and start to read the signs embedded in the landscape.

Is there a bend in the road? A crest hiding oncoming traffic? Loose gravel on the shoulder, or maybe a large stand of gum trees throwing shadows across the lane? Where’s the sun and is it low on the horizon, shining into the eyes of anyone driving towards it? Is it 40 plus degrees, causing the tar in the bitumen to melt and rise to the surface? That’s degrees Celsius, in old money it would be about 105F. Hot no matter which way you look at it.

None of those things are remarkable on their own, but put them together and they can tell a whole new story about how the crash might have happened. Oncoming cars vanish into the surroundings then suddenly reappear, almost out of the ether. It’s all relevant to the story of the crash and yet, it often gets overlooked by witnesses. I’m sure they’re aware of some of it, but, for them, it’s background noise that’s not worth mentioning. Like I’ve said before, people overlook things, or get them wrong. They’re not trying to be unhelpful, they just don’t see the details, or they think they’re inconsequential. But to me, as an investigator, they’re often the most important facts.

Why am I telling you this? Because it makes me think about ‘place’. It makes me think about how important the details and setting are to a story.

Crime fiction deals with the facts. The killer, the detective, the twist. Good stories weave those things together into an interesting narrative. But great stories take it a step further. Great stories include all the small details that change the setting from an ordinary place into something that becomes integral to the story. The place almost becomes another character.

Take Michelle Prak’s novel The Rush, which is set in the outback of South Australia. A handful of intriguing and sometimes naive characters, a remote pub with huge distance to the next patch of civilisation. Then, throw in a torrential downpour and you have a story that has you on the edge of your seat. If you know Australia, you’re immediately on edge because of the setting.

Large cities let people vanish. But a small country town with a few hundred people? That’s when everyone knows your mother and what you did in Year 10. There’s no hiding there. Everyone knows everyone. And everything.

Put the same crimes in those two settings, city and country, and you’ve got two completely different stories.

Deon Meyer is a master at using setting as part of the story. I’ve mentioned his Benny Griessel novels before. It doesn’t matter whether he’s talking about Cape Town or Stellenbosch, he always manages to integrate the setting into the story. His novel Thirteen Hours is a prime example, where a young American backpacker is running for her life, going up the slopes of Lion’s Head in Cape Town just as the sun is beginning to rise over the city. If you’ve been to Cape Town, you know just how dominating and beautiful Lion’s Head is. It’s also a place that gives the runner nowhere to hide and seek safety. Mix in the politics and competing loyalties of Cape Town, and the character flaws of the main detective, Benny Griessel, and the tension rises. Take all that away from the story and it loses its bite. The tension is the city, Griessel’s private struggles, and the time constraint of thirteen hours to find the backpacker.

Lee Child uses place and setting in a different, but equally effective way. In his first Reacher novel, Killing Floor, Reacher gets off a bus in the small rural town of Margrave in Georgia. It’s a quiet little town, smack bang in the middle of nowhere. Reacher finds himself arrested at a local diner for something he didn’t do (oops… Spoiler alert!). When you start to look around, you soon discover that Margrave has far too much money flowing through it for a town of its size. Questions are asked and everything begins to unravel for the locals. It would have gone completely unnoticed in a bigger town or city.

I find I’m often thinking about the same sorts of things as I write my first novel, The Ledger, because I truly believe that place and setting matter just as much as everything else that makes a good story. I’ve set The Ledger in and around Adelaide, starting with a murder in Kapunda. I know these locations well because I spent 32 years as a cop, often travelling around South Australia investigating crashes, and I live in Kapunda. I know the little things that help bring the story to life. I know the weather patterns, the landscape, and the politics.

The locations in my book are not chosen willy-nilly. They’re not random places picked off a map. When I sit down to write a scene, I find myself doing exactly what I used to do when I arrived at a crash. I look around and see what’s there. What’s influencing the story and the characters. Where’s the light coming from? What’s the heat feel like? Once I know those things, I know what the characters would feel. What they would see or hear. I let them become part of the place they find themselves in and then I see where they take my writing.

Old habits die hard, but I hope those habits are making me a more thoughtful and better writer. I hope that when you finally get to read The Ledger, you feel like you’re right there, looking over the shoulder of the characters as you read.

P.S. [[ADD TEXT HERE]]

KEN LYONS Author ​kenlyonsauthor.com​ ​​

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