Getting under the skin of my setting - Guest post Cathy Ace

It's a great pleasure to welcome Cathy Ace to Murder Is Everywhere. I met Cathy at Crimefest where she was a guest of honor and also on a panel I moderated. The latter meant that I had the pleasure of reading a couple of her books. The intriguing plot and appealing series characters of the WISE enquiry agency, and the equally intriguing Cait Morgan mystery, The Corpse with the Opal Fingers set in Australia, made me an instant fan. The characters ring true, the mysteries are twisty, the settings fascinating. What more could you ask for? Well, yes, Cathy is also a delightful person.

Cathy was born in Swansea, Wales, then immigrated to British Columbia, Canada. She’s been shortlisted for and won the prestigious Canadian Bony Blithe Award and her work has been shortlisted for a variety of other prizes as well.

Here Cathy tells us why setting is so important to her.

Hello there folks – thanks for inviting me to visit. I suspect I’ve been asked to write about murder being "everywhere" because both mystery series I write are set in quite "different" places: my WISE Enquiries Agency Mysteries are set in Wales (where I was born and raised – I migrated to Canada when I was 40), and my Cait Morgan Mysteries are – literally – set around the world. Well, no, that’s not quite true, because there’ve only been 13 books in that series to date, so I haven’t managed to take Cait to every place in the world where she’ll have the chance to trip over a corpse…yet.

 That said, I do enjoy the fact that each book takes Cait to a new location…which means lots of travel to do the research, right? Again, not quite true. When I started writing the Cait books (the first was published in 2012) I decided to take her traveling because that’s what I’d spent most of my life doing…for business and pleasure. As I travelled, I lapped up the opportunity to find out about the places I was visiting – their history, architecture, art, and food (yes, yes…and drink, too!). And, as I came to know places well through multiple visits (I’ve only written books set in places where I’ve lived, or worked, or have visited on many occasions), I wanted to share my passion for those places with my readers.

 For example, in The Corpse with the Silver Tongue (the first Cait Morgan Mystery) the setting is Nice, on the Côte d'Azur, and the specific location is the Hotel du Belle France – a swish apartment building set on the hillside in Cimiez overlooking Vieux Nice and the Baie des Anges built in the Belle Epoque style as a grand hotel, as the name implies. This is based upon a real building I know well: two friends, who I met when I used to live in Nice for a few months each year, allowed me to use their apartment as the setting for the murder which happens on the first page of the book, but they thought the syndic wouldn’t be too pleased if I used the real name…hence a name change. That said, if you wanted to find the building’s real identity it wouldn’t be terribly difficult because it really was used during the Vichy years – I’ve even seen photographs of massive swastika banners flying from my friends’ balcony, where I’ve spent many a happy evening…which I understand might seem a strange thing to say, but it was also one of the seeds of an idea that came into play when I wrote the book.

 

"That" balcony

This also highlights another aspect of how I like to write: I don’t just want to “use” a setting as it is today. Nope. I enjoy peeling back the layers of history to maybe illuminate the motivation for a crime, or at least to add dimension to the backstories of the suspects and/or the victim/s. What do I mean? We all know places with inhabitants whose multi-generational roots are utterly intertwined with its history – they have, literally, made it what it is; then there are “newcomers” who might have “only” been there for several decades…so they’re of the place, but the blood and bones of their predecessors aren’t ground into the soil. Then there are those who have recently arrived, choosing to live there because it’s so “perfect”…then they try to change it to be “even more perfect” (from their point of view, of course). Finally, there are the true visitors – those who are coming to see, feel, and experience a place, then move on. Cait Morgan – my Welsh Canadian (like me) professor of criminal psychology and her partner in life and crime Bud Anderson – a retired homicide cop from Vancouver of Swedish heritage (not at all like my husband), are always in this latter group…“just passing through”…until they’re stopped in their tracks by the discovery of a corpse, which inevitably leads to them investigating, and the whole thing unravelling in the manner of a Christie-esque traditional puzzle-plot mystery…including the final ta-daa reveal of the killer/s. (Yes – I love the shape of those books.)

 

Cathy enjoying "That" balcony

And the place? It’s always the glue that holds the entire story together: in Cait’s first case, the Roman, Belle Epoque, and World War Two history, and the modern-day life of Nice, are all integral to the plot. Indeed, The Corpse with the Silver Tongue could not have been set anywhere else in the world; something which was, and always is, my aim. So, if you really enjoy armchair travel – with a puzzling mystery to solve too – maybe I can tempt you to travel with Cait Morgan not just to France, but also to Canada, Mexico, Las Vegas, Wales, on a Hawaiian cruise, to Amsterdam, Budapest, Jamaica, Cait’s own home in BC (yes, it’s a LOT like mine!), England, Arizona, and Australia (book 14’s location will be announced later this year)…all without needing a passport!

 

Temptation to "visit" the south of France

As an added incentive, The Corpse with the Silver Tongue will be coming to TV soon, thanks to production company Free@LastTV (Agatha Raisin), with the wonderful Eve Myles (Keeping Faith, Torchwood, We Hunt Together) portraying Cait Morgan, so get ahead of the curve now…yes, that’s a bit of shameless self promotion, but – in my defense – the invitation to be a guest blogger said I could do a bit of that – thank you.

 

Eve Myles will portray Cait Morgan on the screen

LINKS:

 Cathy Ace FB: https://www.facebook.com/Cathy-Ace-Author-318388861616661

Cathy Ace website: http://www.cathyace.com/

Cathy Ace Twitter: https://twitter.com/AceCathy

Cathy Ace Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cathyace1/

The Corpse with the Silver Tongue https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07W4LLSBP