In Another Place and Time

Two articles about setting and crime fiction recently caught my attention. In the first, from the Scotsman, reporter Jim Gilchrist looks at how the city of Edinburgh (where Arthur Conan Doyle was born 150 years ago this month) shaped the author's life and work. The article focuses on how surgeon Joseph Bell, one of Doyle's Edinburgh University mentors, served as the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes, and how that tie will be celebrated this Friday at the Royal College of Surgeons. Speakers at the event will include historian and Holmes expert Owen Dudley Edwards and Doyle biographer Andrew Lycett.

But as Edwards points out, it was more than Edinburgh's academic life that got under Doyle's skin:

"The city exists on two levels, with a lower class or criminal world and a bourgeois world, and of course Doyle, being from an Irish Catholic background, was between the two of them; his people were respectable but with his father's drinking they suddenly became not respectable. That comes over in some of the Holmes and other stories quite a lot, switching from one class to another – take The Man With the Twisted Lip. They're set in London, but you can see he's still thinking about Edinburgh."

The second article is set some 3710 miles (5970 kilometers) away in Chicago, Illinois, where the Chicago Tribune reveals that a twist of fate had novelist Michael Connelly's protagonist Harry Bosch become an LAPD character instead of serving his fictional life with the Chicago PD, or as the article states,

"It would've been the Dan Ryan, not the 405, across which Bosch's car streaked as he pursued some murderous thug. It would've been a fussy bureaucrat in Chicago, not L.A., with whom the headstrong Bosch tangled." 

Whither the twist? After one of Connelly's journalism stories was a finalist for a Pulitzer, he received calls from the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times. But since the Times was the first to offer him a job, he headed West.

By the way, for fans of both Michael Connelly and George Pelecanos, the duo will appear together in Chicago on May 27, at 12:30 p.m., at a Borders store, and later at 7:30 p.m. at a B&N store in Skokie (details on the link above).