Even the butter was shaped different.
When I needed to explain to my friends back east—and that’s what everyone calls it out here: “back east”—what was so different about California, that’s where I usually started.
I was accustomed to these long, slender, graceful sticks of butter. I actually never knew it came in any other shape until my kids and I temporarily relocated to the San Francisco Bay area, and I found myself confronting these short, compact, chunky sticks.
And not that it was bad—I’m not trying to fat-shame butter here.
It was just . . . different.
So was the weather. We arrived in August. Everything was hot and dry and dusty, as August is supposed to be.
Then September came. Still hot. Still dry. Even dustier. Ditto with October. Before long, I was legitimately distressed on behalf of the trees. How were they possibly still green? How were they surviving without any rain?
Or there were the bikers. In rural Virginia, where we had made our home for many years, there was only reason anyone rode a bike anywhere: Because they had gotten a DUI, and the local sheriff’s department knew they weren’t allowed to drive a car.
In Northern California, bikers were ubiquitous, and they zipped around in their garishly colored spandex outfits oblivious to the laws of traffic, as if their twenty-pound bike was surrounded by a force field that provided the same degree of protection as a two-ton car.
Speaking of fearless animals, the “wild” life also did not seem scared. In rural Virginia, the deer knew a sizeable percentage of the population viewed them as walking venison, and they acted accordingly.
In Northern California, no one had tried to hunt them in at least fifty generations, and they had lost any inhibitions about being around humans. They just stared at you from whatever front lawn they were chewing up with total equanimity.
The houses had no screens on them, because (allegedly) there were no bugs. There were hills everywhere, and most of them didn’t have roads going over them. Then there were the plants, many of which looked like they belonged on an alien planet.
Just about everything, it seemed, was at least a quarter-turn off from what I was used to.
As the great P.D. James once noted, “Nothing that happens to a writer—however happy, however tragic—is ever wasted.”
I’ve come to realize the truth of that observation and also its corollary for those of us who do this for a living: Everything that happens to a writer will eventually find its way into our manuscripts, because what else are we supposed to do for material?
When I made the move, I had been in the midst of a ghostwriting project, so I had to finish that first.
But a few months later, when I sat down to start writing my first work of fiction in Northern California, I had a lot to work through.
I felt like a complete stranger everywhere I went. So I wanted to write a character who was also coming from somewhere else, and would have that fish-out-of-water feel.
As I explored the region more, I felt myself drawn to Oakland. My first six books were all set in Newark, New Jersey; and it struck me that Oakland is to San Francisco as Newark is to New York City. It’s the gritty, chronically underinvested neighbor in the shadows that is actually exploding with character (and characters!).
The city’s port, with its iconic cranes towering high in the air, called to me in particular. All those boats, trucks, and people coming and going. It just seemed like ripe material for a crime thriller.
So I decided to use Oakland and the logistics industry as my backdrop.
The result was The Flack, my thirteenth novel, which releases in February.
It features Curt Hinton, a transplant from the Midwest (because I had to make something fictional) who comes to Northern California to take a job at BALCO, the Bay Area Logistics Company. He is hired by his best friend from college, Angel Reddish, who is BALCO’s chief operations officer.
But when Angel is murdered under questionable circumstances, Curt begins to realize that BALCO is not what it seems; and as he learned more about Angel’s death, the danger circling around him only grows.
Whenever anyone asks me for an elevator pitch, I just say: It’s The Firm with trucks.
And it’s my first book set in Northern California. But I’m already beginning to sense that it might not be my last.
This essay was originally published in Mystery Readers Journal. For the full issue, click here.