Authors, take care to research your locations properly!

17th February 2025

Authors, take care to research your locations properly!

I was recently trawling through Social Media and on Threads I saw the following post, which got me thinking about the portrayal of a setting.

The comments below the post mostly highlighted the glaring error that there can be no fishing village in the Cotswolds because the Cotswolds are landlocked, and although the tiny fishing village is ‘fictional’, it nevertheless feels really quite misleading. It’s on a par with hiking up a snow covered mountain just outside London or going ocean scuba diving in Switzerland. People might certainly choose to visit the Cotswolds in real life, inspired by the setting in a novel, but in this case they would be very disappointed by the lack of fishing villages!

There is, I suppose, something about the Cotswolds that fires authors’ imaginations. It is pretty and twee and is like a magnet for the inexperienced scene setter. Films like The Holiday show off the picture perfect Cotswolds, just like Love Actually paints a glowing and scenic picture of London. But when it comes to literature, readers can perhaps be more discerning and if something doesn’t feel right or is incorrect, it jars. Further afield, for example, Tanzania has caused a ruckus in the TF office with some odd and inept descriptions in one novel. St Petersburg, Berlin and London are all favourites but unless depicted carefully, they can soon raise the ire of a reader with an ineptly portrayed sense of place. Authors, you have been warned, there are acute eyes at work on your sense of place!

The TF postcard in the COTSWOLDS

Here at TF we have, of course, read plenty of novels that are strong on setting and naturally there is some leeway in how an author might choose to research and then present a setting as a backdrop for their story. You can never go wrong with an author like David Hewson, who will carefully structure his setting so that it feels real to anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of the backdrop. Find out more about the Venice location, for example, that he has carefully crafted in The Borgia Portrait where ‘each clue in Lizzie and Arnold’s riddle is to do with a real-life place, all of them’, he is proud to state, ‘well-hidden from the normal tourist routes’.

Just because an author writes ‘fiction’ doesn’t mean they can mess with setting. To be inspired by a place is great but if the finished descriptions are so far from the original, then it’s time to invent a totally imaginary place and be done.

Consider the innumerable tourist pilgrimages inspired by the setting of novels: The Rebus Tours of Ian Rankin’s stories set in Edinburgh; the allure of Maya Beach in Thailand after reading The Beach by Alex Garland; the trips made to Rosslyn Castle because of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code; and before Covid TWO plane loads of tourists arrived in Sicily EVERY DAY to follow in the footsteps of Montalbano, the detective created by Andrea Camilleri. Moreover, check out our post on “Literary Walking Tours” if you want to see how far and wide literary wanderlust is spreading.

Certainly, when I read a novel where a good sense of place is part of the narrative, I want to connect with the streets and imbibe the sights, sounds and smells. I don’t want to have my experience derailed with deeply inaccurate description. Innumerable times I have noted an interesting aspect about the setting and then, if I have been fortunate enough to then visit the setting, I look it up. For example, I have found my way to the wonderful keyhole in Rome, where you can gaze across to the Vatican. I have picked restaurants based on what I have read (try the Bologna set mysteries by Tom Benjamin for good culinary inspiration). And in Scripted by Fearne Cotton, I discovered that in the Princess of Wales Conservatory in Kew Gardens, there are some Chinese Water Dragons (irritatingly described as chameleons in the book but never mind). In A St Ives Christmas Mystery by Deborah Fowler, just in passing, I learned a good deal about St Ives, from details of The Sloop pub to the variety of odd street names – and I would now like to visit. Reading The Girl Behind The Wall by Mandy Robotham took me to Café Sybille on Karl Marx Allee in what was former East Berlin where one can still ‘enjoy’ a bit of the GDR vibe.

There is a responsibility not to mislead – even if it is a work of fiction – and I therefore feel that when real places are featured they should be pretty true to life. As an author if you are tempted to dabble with a location, overlaying your own fantasies, then just do the right thing and create a fictional setting. Then you can do whatever you like with it. You can even give it a cute name like Haselbury Plucknett (oops, beware, that’s a real place, by the way, featured in Nikki May’s This Motherless Land, set in Somerset and Nigeria)

Do I want to travel to the Cotswolds in search of a ‘tiny fishing village’? No, I do not.

Tina for the TripFiction Team

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