Rob Kelley here, thinking about place detail in fiction. Dan Brown, whose book The Da Vinci Code has inspired numerous Paris tours, also changes several physical details about The Louvre to serve his plot (adding a window in the bathroom from which to escape the police, for example), and some readers have fussed over it.

But why do we care?

I was chatting with a reader recently about the city of Boston in fiction and how as a resident of Boston and its suburbs, details about the city really hit home with her. I think there are two versions of settings that really grab readers. The first is the fantastic and/or exotic. In Arkady Martine’s Hugo award winning A Memory Called Empire we see the imperial planet of Teixcalaan, the “Jewel of the World,” through the eyes of a new ambassador. All of its glory is overwhelming to the protagonist, who must navigate political intrigue in a world she does not know. One of the top contenders for my absolute favorite novel of all time, Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, uses Marco Polo as a narrator to describe to Kublai Khan cities he has seen in his travels, each more fantastic than the rest, in what almost feels like an explorer’s version of A Thousand and One Nights. Or Jules Verne’s novels such as Journey to the Center of the Earth, which stretch out the last golden years of exploration.  But by we’ve now visited all the lands of the earth, so we look to the oceans and space for more new and fascinating places to set our stories.

The second version, the one that I’m more interested in as an author, are novels set in actual places in specific times (though, yes, I have an SF story outline set in space that I’ve been fooling around with for years. Maybe more on that in another post!). My first two novels are set in Cambridge and Boston. The first is set in Boston in 1990, the second in the present day. Raven (High Frequency Press, 2025), the first novel, features long lost places in Cambridge: the Wursthaus, the Tasty, and the Manray (recently reopened at a new location after 20 years!). Obviously for me as an author, and for readers who know Cambridge and Boston, the nods to landmarks, especially those known to college and graduate students at Harvard and MIT at the time, will be fun reminders. But also relevant are the things not present. No Big Dig, just the old ugly Expressway blotting out daylight to parts of the North End for decades until it was brought down.

Robin Lubbock/WBUR

In my second novel, Critical State (High Frequency Press, 2026), we have the Boston of today, with surveillance cameras on power poles, “The Embrace” in the Boston Common, and the leaky beautiful/ugly Stata Center replacing the infamous World War 2 Building 20 between the time of my first and second book.

While there are writers currently working who do Boston just right–Dennis Lehane, Hank Phillippi Ryan, Joseph Finder, and many others–I think we all look back to Robert B. Parker, whose private eye Spenser wanders the city from the 1970’s to the 2000’s, observing Boston and its residents with a critical eye. One of the joys of reading his work is observing the evolution of our second favorite character after Spenser: Boston itself.

My third book remains in New England but comes closer to home. Set in the fictional town of Bedford, Maine, this story draws from many small Maine towns I know well, much as Stephen King’s Castle Rock or Tess Gerritsen’s Purity do. I confess, I find it more challenging to create a fictional place that seems real than to narrate a fictional narrative in a real place, making something fictional familiar.

What are some of your favorite locations in novels, places real or imagined?