Someplace Where the Past Lives On

One winter evening as I was walking back to my hotel after dining with friends, I found myself gradually becoming mildly disoriented. Where I was was not in question; the vintage Victorians of the lower Haight left no doubt that this was San Francisco. But when I was seemed far less certain. Some of the homes I had walked past predated the 1906 earthquake and fire, and the street looked like it hadn’t changed much over the last hundred years. If the front door of one of these homes suddenly opened, who would step out into the fog? I didn’t know the answer, but somehow I felt it wouldn’t be surprising if that someone wasn’t from the 21st century.

For a city that'‘s only been around since 1848, San Francisco has managed to serve as home to a lot of memorable characters, places and events. The city doesn’t have ruins like Rome, but almost everywhere there are reminders of its past. It takes only a modest knowledge of California history to be able to recognize them when moving around in the present-day city. And such encounters only seem to beget new ones; the more I walk, the more likely I am to come across some other place whose history I do not yet know but which seems to insist that I learn about what happened there.

I don’t know; maybe this is just me. But somehow I think I’m not the only person who has experienced this San Francisco phenomenon. This is an idea that Elizabeth Mills espouses in The Montfort Prescription. And then another possibility arises: what if an unsolicited awareness of some past event is not simply a thought triggered by a random landmark? What if it is an event intended to serve some as yet unknown but specific purpose?

 Fictional Events in a Real World

  So what would a detective story set in a San Francisco saturated with the past look like? Like most mysteries, the crimes and persons in the book will be fictional, completely made up. But the physical geography, the locations where the events occur, will have to be real and accurately drawn. Were a reader to visit San Francisco, he or she should find the buildings, parks, streets, etc. exactly as described in the novel.

 (There's also a practical reason for doing this. In 2016, the year of the novel, 870,887 people lived in and 25.1 million people visited San Francisco. When so many people are already familiar with the locale, opportunities to exercise poetic license become limited.)

San Francisco’s history, including stories about the people who have lived there in the past, needs to be portrayed as accurately as possible; likewise, any present-day technology that figures in the story should also be scientifically accurate. A realistic depiction of the life of the city becomes a necessity if, as is the case in The Montfort Prescription, San Francisco itself is a major contributor to the unfolding plot. Technically, this puts the novel in the sub-genre of semi-fiction: “literature that is fiction in essence, but all background like places, circumstances, organizations, etc. is actually borrowed from the real world”. Placing made-up characters in a detailed real-world setting is also an example of literary hyperreality, where “what is real and what is fiction are seamlessly blended together so that there is no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins”.

(For those who are interested, the resources consulted to create a “real” San Francisco are listed in the bibliography.)

 Not Your Father's Detective Story (Spoiler Alert!)

A hyperrealistic semi-fictional detective novel set in San Francisco—a nice idea, but it's already been done, mostly notably by Dashiell Hammett in The Maltese Falcon. So what makes Montfort different?

Ghosts.

Ghosts? Figurative ghosts of the past, or real ghost-type ghosts? Because if they're real, then the story can't be realistic fiction and may not even be a real mystery novel--it's a fantasy novel.

Fantasy, as in a book that belongs on a shelf next to Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones? It certainly doesn't belong there. Perhaps it could find a home on whatever shelf they keep fantastic literature in which “the presence of the supernatural is perceived as problematic [and] there is a hesitation in deciding whether to attribute natural or supernatural causes to an unsettling event or in choosing rational or irrational explanations.” The other possibility is that it could be an example of magical realism. “Magical realism creates a fictional world close to reality but marked by a strong presence of the unusual and the fantastic [where] magical elements appear as part of everyday reality.”

That is, if the ghosts are real.

 But What Is Really Real?

Basically, Montfort is just a story set in a San Francisco that's filled with the usual cops and robbers, and maybe a bunch of ghosts. The police officers and wrong-doers are real(istic), while the ghosts must of necessity represent paranormal phenomena, entities beyond the scope of normal scientific understanding. In the novel, the interactions between these two groups is complicated. Some characters are distressed by what they see as supernatural occurrences, literally, “things that are above all the laws of the natural order.”

 Others see the ghosts as preternatural beings, obeying some of the laws while remaining seemingly beyond others. The problem is that my characters can't seem to agree either about the ghosts or the book's sub-genre. It's simply a friendly little tale in which a realistically depicted Robert Louis Stevenson can coexist with a fictional detective who's afraid he's trapped in a fantasy novel and has surrounded himself with characters who reside in a real city where magic is an everyday occurrence.

But it is their story after all, so who am I to argue?