Like many authors, I feel an emotional attachment to most of the characters in my books. I’m sure Kathy Reichs feels an attachment to Tempe Brennan, and Patricia Cornwell does to Kay Scarpetta. It happens with stand-alones, but I think it happens even more when you write a series. You spend a lot of time with your characters. You see them grow and change. So I wasn’t surprised that I became attached to Madison Cross and the other characters in my books.

 

One thing that did surprise me was how attached I have become to the crime scenes in my books. Although parts of each book take place in fictional locales, most of the action takes place in Philadelphia, and most of the crimes take place in real places. Whether it’s the University of Pennsylvania, St. Peter’s churchyard, the Schuylkill Expressway, or Thirtieth Street Station, I’ve been dropping bodies all over this town. With Body Trace, Blood Poison and Freezer Burn, I have three books out now, and I find that as I’m driving around the city, I’m usually not far from the scene of some horrendous death of my own invention. Maybe I’m a sick pup, but this usually makes me smile.

 

Part of the attachment to these settings is probably formed while researching the books. If you’re writing about a real place, you can’t fudge the details. If it’s a location where you’ve never been, you have to visit it and study it, and it’s exciting discovering and exploring someplace new in the city where you’ve lived all your life. Much more likely, it’s a place you’ve been to hundreds of times before, but when you write about it, you find yourself looking at it and getting to know it in a totally new way.

 

This is true to a lesser extent with the other settings in the book, as well — a chase through Northern Liberties, a funeral in Manayunk or just a quiet conversation at Silk City Diner. All of these places become a part of you when they become a part of your books.

 

But with the setting of a death scene, it’s different.

 

I thought maybe the locations were emotional surrogates for the unfortunate characters lying dead on the ground. Like I said, I get attached to most of my characters. The murder victims are usually dead before I meet them. But while I don’t get to know them like the other characters, they do have back stories and histories with plenty of details, even if that’s not usually included in the book. But then again, I do get to know some of them before killing them off late in the book. Could it be that since I know what fate awaits them, I subconsciously try not to get too attached? 

 

Nah, that’s ridiculous; some of the dead characters are among my favorites. In fact, I think there should be a subgenre of zombie books about all the dead literary characters who were too much fun to die. You could kill them all over again (it’s easy — you just have to go for the brain).

 

Maybe it’s a combination of all of these things, plus that fact that while writing can be hard work, writing crime scenes and murder and carnage never is. That’s just fun. And we all remember fondly the places where we have fun.

 

Either that or I really am a sick pup.