We'll Always Have Paris

Wendall -- every other Thursday

It seems to be a week when everyone is writing about “place,” so here’s an update to a blog I wrote several years ago about the spark of inspiration that starts each Cyd Redondo novel--location.

 I fell in love with palm trees while visiting Florida as a kid.

Travel has always been my passion. And as someone who writes about a travel agent, now it’s also my business.

As a kid, I traveled vicariously through books like Lost Horizons, David Copperfield, Mrs. Mike, The Three Musketeers, The Jungle Book, and my parents’ copies of Dorothy Gilmour’s Mrs. Pollifax novels. As my reading became a bit more sophisticated, I headed to China in The Good Earth, Russia in Dr. Zhivago, and Southeast Asia with Grahame Green. 

 

I loved traveling with Mrs. Pollifax when I was a kid.

Our family vacations were domestic, but still thrilling to me—Silver Springs and St. Augustine, the Smithsonian, Myrtle Beach, the Smoky Mountains. So, by the time I finished high school, I was ready to hit the road and go as far, and as often, as I could. During my college summers, I waited tables and sang in bars on Nantucket, in Estes Park, Colorado, in Berkeley, in the Florida Keys, and, once I graduated, I headed to Montreal, London, Paris, Ireland, Holland, Italy, and eventually, Australia and New Zealand. 

 

Me on an early screenplay research trip to London.

Every one of those books and all of those places moved me and influenced the way I look at the world. So, when I thought I might try writing a mystery series, I figured it would be great if the research involved travel—preferably international. When I created Cyd Redondo, a travel agent who'd never been farther than New Jersey, it let me relive the wonder and panic of everything involved in navigating a different culture in an unfamiliar place.

 

As a writing teacher I’ve always been fascinated by where my students’ stories start. Is it with a concept, with a character’s voice, with a theme, with a scene? I think it depends on the writer and the project and personally, as a screenwriter, my projects had usually started with a character or concept. This time, I had the skeleton for my “fish out of water” protagonist—but before I could really start developing her character and working out the story/mystery, I had to pick her destination.

 

I wanted the series to be an homage to films like Romancing the Stone, Charade, or Bringing Up Baby, where the characters were off-balance and completely out of their comfort zones. Since Joan Wilder had already been to South America, I needed someplace new. I thought about Cyd’s home in Brooklyn and what might be the most extreme opposite, a place she’d have the biggest learning curve. 

 

When she was growing up, Cyd uncle made her promise never to let the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge out of her sight.

 

When the books start, many of her nights are spent at her favorite Bay Ridge restaurant, Chadwick's.

 

I suddenly had an image of her in the middle of a jungle clearing, in four-inch heels. She was wearing multi-colored bracelets from her wrist to her elbow, and, when a man with a gun appeared, she disarmed him with a whack from her bangled forearm while a leopard looked on. It felt like Africa. 

I chose the Selous Game Reserve in Tanzania for Cyd's first safari.

 

And because she's the Queen of bartering, Karikoo in Dar Es Salaam as her first international market.

I started to research crimes on the continent and was shocked by the extent and horror of the endangered animal smuggling and poaching trade. Cyd, with her snakeskin shoes and tortoise shell barrettes, was not concerned about this issue—yet—so it allowed her an environmental learning curve, and let me place a Madagascan chameleon in her purse. So, once I had a location, everything in the book sprang from there. 

 

Barry from LOST LUGGAGE.

Now that the series is up and running and I have a handle on Cyd, her family, and her natural habitat, the “where” is always where I start. Until I know where she’s going, I can’t really decide on the crimes, the specific endangered species she encounters, the secondary characters, the ways her character will be challenged, or what she has in her background—and her purse—that might help her survive. Location is everything.

 

I was lucky in the Australian setting for Drowned Under—I’ve written at length about how I’ve been to and loved Tasmania, the home of the “functionally extinct” Tasmanian tiger. So, it was easy to find the “endangered” piece of the adventure. Once I decided it would be a cruise ship book, that gave me my world and inspired my secondary characters, and I was off.

 

DROWNED UNDER's Howard the Tasmanian tiger cub.

 

Cyd experiences the Salamanca Market in Tasmania, of course.

 

For my third book, Fogged Off, I got lucky again. By the time Covid hit, I’d already decided to set the book in London, where I’d been a frequent visitor over the years. I’m also married to an Englishman I met on one of my trips, so I could see, taste, smell—and discuss—the city from the desk in my bedroom. 

 

I'd been to the Savoy Hotel, where Cyd stays in FOGGED OFF, and had a drink in the American Bar there, where a few important things happen. . .

 

And to the Tower Bridge, where Cyd encounters a series of Jack the Ripper guides.

As always, the place generated the content. That book is set in the world of London Walking Tours where Cyd’s client—a Jack the Ripper expert—winds up dead. I had been lucky enough to know two RSC actors who were also London Walking Tour guides and who had often talked about the backbiting behind the scenes which informs that world. Then I researched endangered animals in the UK and, since Carl Hiassen had already taken voles, my first choice, I settled on the hilarious hazel dormouse as the animal in danger of extinction. Everything else came from there.

 

Me with my favorite London Walks guide, Emily Richard.

 

Of course, Covent Garden Market was a must for Cyd.

Since travel was still dodgy when I began Cyd’s fourth adventure, I wanted to choose a location where at least a few friends of mine had lived and visited. Because I’m lucky yet again, that happened to be Bali. When I realized the timing of the novel (the Cyd Redondo Mysteries begin in late 2006 and are now up to spring 2007) coincided with the huge popularity of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, I figured most travel agents had requests for Bali trips. 

 

 

Cyd's mother falls for the book, and goes behind her daughter's back to book a trip to Bali.

 

Cyd has an adventure in the Monkey Forest outside Ubud.

Bali Starlings are still highly endangered, but there are more now than there were when CHEAP TRILLS is set, in 2007.

And when I found out it could take at 51 hours and three or four plane changes to get there from Brooklyn, and that the Bali Starling population was down to only seven birds still in the wild in that year, I knew I had the right location for Cheap Trills.

 

Cyd meets Starling protector, Stu Capistranis, in the Denpasar Bird Market.

 

Travel is back, but when we can’t afford it or find the time, I’m glad there are books to take us to all the places we dream of.

PODCAST APPEARANCE:

I joined host Chad Sutton on his music podcast/YouTube show Aural Mess on July 10, where he and I both made a Cyd Redondo playlist. You can find the YouTube version here: https://bit.ly/3LiSOMp or listen to the podcast version here:  https://bit.ly/3S3WzJv

 

 --Wendall