Panhandling Part 2: Christy and Steve Discuss Murder and Mayhem On the North Florida Coast

PART 2: Real Places and Imaginary Towns

STEVE: One thing our two mystery series (The Haunted Souvenir Shop, and Panorama Beach Mysteries) have in common, other than being set in the same region of north Florida, is that they're both set in fictional cities, mine in Panorama Beach itself, and the environs of fiction Pascua County, Florida, yours in the town of Keyhole Bay, just a bit further west on the coast.

There are a lot of reasons to write a fictional place, and I wonder if the reasons we did it were the same, or very different.

For my part, I'm writing about fairly recent history, and an area with a fairly small population.  I wasn't trying to write an expose or a literal history.  My initial intent was just to see all those crazy attractions, the fake volcanoes, the concrete dinosaurs, the space-age observation towers, the amusement park midways, and create a mythology of where they came from, and where they went.  But my myth kept trending back towards the truth.  Maybe a bigger, grander, more colorful version of the truth, but real things that happened in Florida and the south back in those days, some I experienced, some I only heard about later, but all, in spirit derived from some kind of truth.

There are even times when you can be more truthful in some way, because you don't have to worry about being sued by real people.  I'm careful to remind people that while sometimes the events I write about have truth to them, the people, relationships, and circumstances are completely fictional.

So, what's your reason for creating Keyhole Bay?

CHRISTY: My reasons and experience are both the same and different.  I do agree that it's nice not to worry about being sued, especially when you have dead bodies piling up!  But I had other reasons, as well.

In many of my previous books I have used real locations, especially in my two Alias novels where I had scenes in places as remote as the Blue Desert in the Sinai, a Russian apartment building, and Deadhorse, Alaska.  My gratitude for travelers who posted reports and photos on the net is extreme.  Doing that research, however, made me realize how complicated using a real setting can be.

The Haunted Gift Shop series, along with the previous Lady Plumber series, require an intimate connection with the location.  I have to know the location of each and every business, the streets and highways, the kinds of houses and neighborhoods, the population demographics - just tons of details.  Of course, every story requires at least some of that knowledge, but these stories are very localized, and the small towns where they are set are almost another character. 

In developing the fictional city of Keyhole Bay, I have control of all those elements, but I am still constrained by the limits of probability.  For instance, I can't have snow storms, but I can have hurricanes, and summer heat.

What restrictions have you discovered in creating your fictional setting?

STEVE:  Well, I think you've hit on something when you say the location is also a character.  I feel very much that way about Panorama Beach, and I think that for a smaller locale anyway, that works better when you fictionalize the place.  With a major city like New York or Chicago or Las Vegas it's fine, because nobody knows everything about them, or expects to.  There are a million untold stories there, and even a local can easily accept that the story you're telling about the city is just one of those.  But you could study a small place like Defuniak Springs or Panama City Beach and know, if not everything, then most of the major stuff about it, and I'm sure there are people with that level of knowledge.

It's also like writing a non-fiction novel about a real person.  You never really know what their most private experiences and inner thoughts are.  You can speculate.  You can go on what they're chosen to share of themselves.  But on some level you have to speculate, just start making things up, or simply have to string the facts of their life together without really being certain how or why those things happened.  But when you make up a fictional character based on a real person, for example the character Charles Foster Kane in the movie "Citizen Kane," who is clearly based on William Randolph Hearst, then the writer can know with great precision everything about them, every secret, every private thought, every hidden failing, and act on them without hesitation.  I never have to ask myself, "was the Chief of Police in Panama City Florida in 1967 a crook or a straight-shooter?  The Chief of Police in Panorama City is a corrupt bad guy, representative of other corrupt lawmen and politicians of the period, if not in that exact place and time.

But you mentioned restrictions in making my fictional setting.  I can't think of many.  In fact, it was very liberating in many ways.  Like you said, I want to know where everything in Panorama Beach is, to the extent that the reader should eventually feel like if they were there, they could get in a car and find their way around based on my descriptions.  I have a map, which continues to be refined as I advance the series, so I can keep it all straight.

If you look at a map of the Panama City/Panama City Beach area, you'll find a lot of similarities.  But for the sake of clarity, I simplified a lot of things, cleaned up coastlines, and the big change, Panama City Beach is on a spit of land that runs from the northwest diagonally to the southeast.  Just for clarity's sake, Panorama Beach in on a spit that runs east-west, with most of the major roads running the same direction, and cross streets are mostly north-south.  It saves confusion for both me and the reader.

How about Keyhole Bay.  Do you have any kind of map?  I know you've at least worked out some of the overall geography.  And it's interesting how the central body of water evolved from the inland, almost perfectly circular lake in Defuniak Springs to the keyhole shaped bay that the town is now named after.

CHRISTY:  I do have a map, although it isn't as well-developed (or attractive) as yours.  Mine is a just a pencil sketch, and you know I'm not an artist!  More important, for my stories, is to know where all the neighboring shops and things are.  A great deal of the map is devoted to laying out the main drag of Keyhole Bay, figuring out who Glory's neighbors are.  One of the other things I spent a lot of time on was the actual layout of Glory's apartment over the store.  A lot of scenes take place there, and I needed to know where everything is in her home.  The same goes for her friends' homes, and her shop.

Moving from DeFuniak Springs was an easy decision.  I still want to use DeFuniak someday as a setting for historical fiction (back to those ladies in hats!), but I also wanted a fictional town for my series, and wanted it to be reasonably close to a larger city.  I spent a lot of time looking at the map of the panhandle before I made my decision.

And while there are lots of limitations from the setting, it does allow me the freedom to create characters-some of them quite colorful-without inviting comparison to real people.


NEXT: Christy and Steve talk about the colorful characters, and where they come from.


Panorama Beach Mysteries: The Best Devil Money Can Buy
AMAZON - NOOK - SMASHWORDS (Also available through all major ebook outlets)
Panorama Beach Mysteries: A Breath Away From Dying
AMAZON - NOOK - SMASHWORDS (Also available through all major ebook outlets)
Panorama Beach Mysteries: Two Bad Days of Summer
(Print collection of both of the above, coming soon)
Panorama Beach Mysteries: The Beat of Angel's Wings
(Ebook coming soon)

Panhandling: Murder and Mayhem On the North Florida Coast

PART 1 - Southern Roots

Christy's Husband and Number 1 fan, Steve York here.  You know that Christy writes mystery, of course (thus the name of the site, duh!), but I've been writing professionally even longer than she has.  Even though my roots are in fantasy and science fiction, I've always enjoyed mystery.  Recently I've also taken to writing the stuff, with my Panorama Beach mystery series, and discovered to my surprise that I like it quite a lot.  Which brings me to today's subject...

I'd like to share with you one of those things that can only happen in a two-writer household.  Christy and I are not at all secretive about our work.  We talk about what we're doing all the time, have collaborated on several short stories and science fiction books, and even on our solo projects we often brainstorm together.  But that doesn't mean we always think about what the other person is doing in the context of what we're doing.  We just each write what we want to write, and stuff like this happens.

What this?  Well, Christy and I are now going to kind of interview each other and let you listen in...

STEVE: Seriously, I had no idea it was going on, and I can't even tell you for sure which one of us started first, but I can very distinctly remember the moment, and it was probably after I'd finished my first Panorama Beach installment and you'd finished "Murder Buys a T-Shirt," when I looked up and realized, "hey, both of us are writing mystery series set in the Florida panhandle, in fictional towns on the Gulf Coast."

In fact, if you tried to place our fictional places on a map, they'd probably only be about thirty miles apart, with Keyhole Bay being west of Panorama Beach.  Who did go first, and do you have an idea how this happened?

CHRISTY: Well, since I sold the Haunted Gift Shop series back in 2010, I think I actually started the North Florida mysteries, but it goes back a lot farther than that for both of us. I fell in love with the area the first time we went there, more than 25 years ago.

From that first time I visited North Florida I wanted to write about it.  You took me to see DeFuniak Springs, an incredibly photogenic small town which was an important part of the Chautauqua movement in Florida.  Situated on a perfectly-round lake, it is a beautiful small town, steeped in history.  I could imagine turn-of-the-century ladies in ornate hats and walking suits, being courted by gentlemen in starched collars and spats.

And you've got some deep roots in North Florida, correct?

STEVE: Well, I've always had a nostalgic connection to the place.  When I was a kid, Panama City Beach was the place to go in the summer.  It was a little bit of Disneyland, Oz, and paradise all rolled into one.  In retrospect it was all a bit tacky and cheap, but the beaches were breathtakingly beautiful, the water was warm, and I'll never forget the fun I had with my family there.

Now, I always knew there was some kind of family connection to the inland part of the Florida panhandle.  When I was young we visited a graveyard where some family was buried, extended relatives who lived back in the woods there, and an abandoned cabin where family once lived.  But none of it really sank in, and I didn't realize On a more recent visit we hit some of those places again, but the significance of it still escaped me.

It's only recently, as I've been researching the Panorama Beach Mysteries, that I've discovered how deep that connection was.  Turns out my mom's side of the family comes from Scottish settlers who arrived in the area in the 1820s.  But I've got even older roots than that.  One of the men in my line married a woman of the local Euchee (Yuchi) native tribe, who had befriended the Scots, and that area north of Panama City, along the banks of the Choctawhatchee, had been their home since well back into the 1700s.  So it's ironic that, well before figuring this out, I'd decided that my fictional Panorama Beach deputy would be from a place in the piney woods inspired by those childhood visits, and decided that he was going to have roots there going back into the 1700s.

Speaking of Florida history, you mentioned the Chautauqua circuit.  Most people probably don't know what it is.  Even being from the area, I'd never heard of it until we prowled around DeFuniak Springs together.  Care to explain?

CHRISTY: Chautauqua was an adult educational movement that started shortly after the Civil War.  They brought speakers, musicians, entertainers, and educators to rural communities across the country.  The first Chautauqua was located in New York, on the shores of Chautauqua Lake.  "Daughter" locations grew up around the country, following the pattern established in New York, and Florida was the first of those.

I was aware of the movement, though I didn't know a lot about it.  And now that you ask that question, I went searching for more information.  There's an overview of DeFuniak history at SouthernTravelNews, which includes information on the Chautauqua, and pictures of DeFuniak(such as this one of the Chautauqua Hall of Brotherhood).

You have to remember, this was at a time when many small, rural towns didn't have much in the way of entertainment - unless you count a saloon or pool hall - and there were no movie theaters, no radio, no television, no telephones.  The chance to hear a popular speaker (like William Jennings Bryan or "Fighting Bob" La Follette), see an opera singer, or listen to a traveling orchestra, was a real treat in these communities.

And DeFuniak was a popular tourist destination at the time.  It retains a lot of that 19th century charm.

But there are a lot of other places in North Florida.  You mentioned Panama City Beach, which shares a lot in common with your fictional Panorama Beach.  Care to elaborate?

STEVE: So Chautauqua was like the proto-internet, trying to bring information, education, culture to every part of the country?  Cool.

Anyway, there are a lot of reasons that what we're writing is similar, but there are just as many in which it is different.  One of the biggest differences is that what your Haunted Souvenir Shop mysteries are contemporary, and my Panorama Beach mysteries are historical (though I die a little inside every time I call something that happened in my lifetime "historical!").

They're currently set in 1967, which is the golden-age of my childhood, and pretty much the golden-age for Panama City Beach and that whole part of the coast.  The beaches were still beautiful and accessible, and the beach was experiencing a boom in the building of wild and colorful attractions to bring tourist families to town.  The first major roller-coaster in Florida was in PCB.  There were amazing miniature golf courses with folk-art concrete dragons, monsters, and dinosaurs, there was a Swiss sky-ride, there were two-different trains leading back to two-different old-west towns hidden back in the inland scrub-brush, there was a gigantic fake volcano that spit fire at night, and a knock-off of Seattle's Space Needle   To my memory, it was a shining age, and it was brief, probably only about ten years.

You go to Panama City Beach now, and almost all those attractions are gone, and so is the Gulf, screened off by a near-continuous wall of high-rise condos that blot out the view, and even the sun.  The other side of the beach road is shopping malls and tattoo parlors.  The family-vacation trade has largely been pushed out by a hard-drinking, hard partying, "Girls Gone Wild," spring-break culture.

So while Panorama Beach is a series of murder mystery stories, on the larger scale, it's my attempt to tell a mythological version of that transition on the Gulf Coast.  If you've ever read the work of Carl Hiaasen, he writes in the landscape of a corrupted and despoiled Florida.  I'm telling the story of how that corruption came to be.  It's fictional, but it's the essence of a lot of things that really happened, or at least, could have.  More than once already I've made something up out of whole cloth, and somebody, often my mom, will come along and say, "I've heard that's a lot closer to truth than you think."

NEXT: Christy and Steve talk about writing in real places vs. fictional towns.


Panorama Beach Mysteries: The Best Devil Money Can Buy
AMAZON - NOOK - SMASHWORDS (Also available through all major ebook outlets)
Panorama Beach Mysteries: A Breath Away From Dying
AMAZON - NOOK - SMASHWORDS (Also available through all major ebook outlets)
Panorama Beach Mysteries: Two Bad Days of Summer
(Print collection of both of the above, coming soon)
Panorama Beach Mysteries: The Beat of Angel's Wings
(Ebook coming soon)

Some Really Great People, and One Nasty Woman

A typical crowd of tourists, and mounted police

During our time in DC we were, admittedly, tourists.  My impression was that DC is a city used to being full of tourists; a city that has learned to adapt to the constant invasion of the species tourists horribilius, and the sub-species school trippius busloadius.  Believe me, there were plenty of both. 

For the most part, the school groups were reasonably well-behaved, though they exhibited all the faults of junior high and high school children in large groups: boisterous, high energy, clueless, and inclined to have at least one clown for every three or four students.  They talked loudly, they giggled, and they often didn't realize - as the very young so often don't - that they blocked the sidewalk, hogged the path, or disturbed their fellow travellers. 

Viet Nam Nurses Memorial

Some groups were better than others, though only one bunch were truly disrespectful - a group of younger boys who reacted inappropriately to a statue of Viet Nam combat nurses with a wounded soldier - and to be fair, several of the boys were chiding the misbehavers.  I suspect it was something they didn't know how to handle, so they acted out.  It's what kids do. 

They were children who hadn't yet learned they were not the center of the universe, small bodies packed with enough energy to power a small city, at an age where hormone floods make everyday life intense.  And they were on a grand adventure, a trip away from home, in a strange city.  Their behavior was to be expected.

What was unexpected, and delightful, was the Washingtonians themselves.  We were strangers, tourists who sometimes had no clue where we were supposed to be going.  With a single exception, people were friendly, helpful, and polite.  I'll tell you about the exception first, because bad behavior makes a good story.

We got good at spotting the signs

There was a woman we now refer to as the Elevator Nazi.  We encountered her once, and that was once too often. 

The underground train system in DC is excellent, but accessing it (Remember that scary escalator picture on the first DC post?) can be difficult for an older woman who occasionally has trouble with escalators.  After the first trip down the Scariest Escalator I Have Ever Seen, we discovered the stations had elevators, if you just seek them out. 

Mom, though she doesn't consider herself handicapped, does admit to being elderly at 81, and on the longer stretches she much preferred the elevators.  Coming back to our hotel one night, we got in line for the elevator back to street level.  We waited as one car filled, and the elevator made its slow round-trip to the street and back.  In front of us was a couple, middle-aged, well-dressed, top-dollar haircuts.  She wore good jewelry, and he spent the entire time in our presence with his attention riveted on his iPad.  They did not appear to have any handicap, they weren't toting heavy luggage, or small children, and they were likely younger than I am.  In short, then didn't appear to need the elevator, but they chose to take it, which was their right.

I wouldn't want to drag this up the escalator, either!

Behind us was a young woman with two small kids, one in a stroller.  When the elevator doors opened, the woman in front reached to hold the door open.  Mom and the woman with the stroller both stepped forward.  The younger woman waved Mom ahead of her, and Mom stepped in and to the back corner of the car.  As the rest of us waited for the young woman and her kids to get on, the older woman started yelling at my mom for crowding ahead!  She said she was holding the door "for the children," and kept it up while everyone else got on, even though the poor gal with the stroller looked like she wanted to melt into the floor.  Then another man got on, and his backpack was apparently in the plane of the door.  Miss Elevator Nazi proceeded to chew him out, repeating several times that he needed to move back, he was blocking the door, even while he was trying to do just that.

When we reached the street level, the woman and her silent companion rushed off, while the rest of us made our way out of the car, smiling apologetically at each other.  When the three of us (Mom, my sister, and me) were finally alone, Mom turned to us and said, "Well, I didn't know there were elevator police, but apparently there are."  We cracked up, and had several laughs over the rest of our stay, at her expense.

The other side of this, though, were the people who volunteered directions, offered Mom a seat when we got on the train, and helped us out whenever we asked.  Not living in big cities, we had forgotten about the traffic congestion that comes with quitting time, and the first night we found ourselves trying to catch a train at rush hour.  People were hurrying, and we were out of place.  No one was actively rude or inconsiderate, they were just in their normal routine and they wanted to get home.

Metro at rush hour.  Busy place!

Mom, feeling tired and a little unsteady, didn't want to push into the car with the crowd, and held back.  As a result, two or three trains departed with us still standing on the platform.  Worried about how long we might be stuck, I looked around and noticed a group of nice-looking, well-dressed (the DC uniform of good suits and ties) younger men a couple feet away.  Bolder than I usually am, I stepped over and asked one of them if they could do me a favor.  I explained that Mom had waited for several trains, and asked if they would help me see that she got on the next one.

Not only did they agree, the four of them formed a semi-circle behind Mom, and protected her from the crowd as she stepped onto the train.  It was a little thing, and it delayed them only a few seconds, but it made all the difference for us.

Another day, feeling like we finally had the trains figured out, we waited for an incoming train on the platform at another station.  A tall man approached and told us we needed to move down the platform because the next arrival was a "short train."   He explained that meant there were fewer cars and thus the end of the train would be ahead of where we were waiting.  As we moved to the point he indicated, he also explained how to read the arrival board to know the next time we were waiting for a "short train."

Mom in the Congressional cafe

It wasn't just the men, either.  At one point Mom and I were waiting in the Congressional cafeteria while Jeri retrieved a jacket she'd left in an office across the street.  Coming out of the office, she realized she didn't know where the above-ground entrance to the Capitol was, and it wasn't easy to find.  Frustrated, she called and told us to finish lunch, she'd just go to the trolley stop and wait for us.  Overhearing her problem, a woman approached and offered directions to the public entrance.  A few minutes later Jeri joined us and claimed her share of our lunch.

Jeri finally got her lunch!

Incidents like these happened every day, sometimes several times in a day. 
They lead me to believe that the people of Washington are among the friendliest, most gracious hosts I have ever met, proud to share their beautiful city with a flood of visitors every day. 
Washington is full of really great people.  That one nasty woman?  I figure she just doesn't belong.  Even if her address is Washington, she doesn't have the real Washingtonian spirit in her heart.

Beautiful Washington, DC!

I'm home, but I'm still thinking about my trip to Malice Domestic.  The conference was wonderful, and I'll have more to say about that as time goes on. but for now I want to write a love letter to the city of Washington, DC.  I had an amazing visit to your city, and I can't wait to come back.
The last year has been tough; probably tougher on my mother than any of the rest of us.  So when I knew I was going to visit Washington, I invited her to join me.  She'd never traveled east of Chicago, and she had talked about wanting to see our nation's capital.

As luck would have it, my sister was able to go with us.  And here we are, our first day in Washington, getting ready to leave our hotel and explore the city.  If you can't guess, that's Mom on the right, and my sister Jeri on the left in the picture below.

My mom was pretty cool the whole time we were there.  We went all over the city, took the Metro to lots of places, and walked miles and miles.  There were times we moved a little slower, or stopped more often, but it was worth every pause and every stop.

Jeri tried to get us a tour of the White House, which we didn't get, but she did get us a Capitol tour through her Congresscritter.  There was so much to see, we could have spent several more hours - or days - just on the Capitol, and not have seen it all. 

What did we see?  First, we arranged a two-day pass on the Old Town Trolley, a great way to get an overview of the city.

 We started by taking Metro from our hotel is Bethesda (the site of Malice Domestic), to downtown Washington.  That first day we hadn't figured out the elevator system on Metro, and we took the scariest escalator I have ever seen.  The ride went on forever, and Jeri said she wondered if some guy in red was going to show up with a pitchfork at the bottom.





Think I'm kidding?  Here's what it looked like from the bottom.  The picture's a little shaky, probably because I was having trouble getting the whole thing in the viewfinder!  According to Wikipedia, the escalator is 475 feet long, the second longest in the Western Hemisphere.  The longest? 508 feet, near the other end of the Metro Red Line.

 Metro took us into downtown, where we walked a few blocks and found the Trolley station.  We hopped on their Green Line (apparently color-coding is big in DC) and saw the northern loop, through Georgetown, past Embassy Row, past the National Zoo, and the National Cathedral, under Dupont Circle, and back to our starting point.

Home Again, Home Again

A quick check-in to say hello.  Just returned from Malice Domestic in Bethesda, Maryland.  The conference is amazing, and I had a wonderful time.  It was good to see the crowd of fabulous writers, and the amazing fans.  I have a few photos from the conference, which I will try to get posted over the next few days.
I went in a couple days early and stayed an extra day after, for my first real sight-seeing in Washington, DC.  Much to my delight, my mother and my sister went with me.  They got to continue their adventures around town while I was at the conference, and we saw a LOT!
I have DC pictures, too, that I'd love to share, once I get them all downloaded and labeled.  That may take a while - especially since I have to catch up from being gone a week.  But in the meantime, I am hapy to be home.

Read the first Panorama Beach mystery for FREE!

As a tie-in to Christy's visit to the Malice Domestic mystery convention this week, we're offering you the chance to read husband Steve's first "Panorama Beach" mystery. "The Best Devil Money Can Buy," for FREE through the end of May!


And look for an announcement soon from Tsunami Ridge publishing regarding "Two Bad Days of Summer," a trade-paperback omnibus which will collect the first two "Panorama Beach" ebook mysteries!

READ "THE BEST DEVIL MONEY CAN BUY"

Christy Update

Husband and #1 Fan Steve here:

Christy has turned in the manuscript on her second book in the "Haunted Souvenir Shop Mystery" series, working title (subject to change), "Murder Takes a Dive."

Also, you can read an "in-character" guest blog post from "Murder Buys a T-Shirt" star Glory Martine at the "Killer Characters" site HERE.

A reminder, Christy will appear next week at the Malice Domestic cozy mystery convention in Bethesda, MD, April 27-29th.  When she returns, she's diving right into the third book in the series, but hopefully you'll see a bit more of her here then, including some new southern-cooking posts!