Jen Estes is my guest on the blog today, I recently reviewed her new book, “Curveball”, a story of baseball set on a tropical island. I asked Jen

Baseball and the colour of a tropical paradise; what prompted you to write a series with the background of baseball, and why did you select the second one to be based in ‘Santo Domingo’ rather than a more familiar surrounding?

Here’s what she had to say:

When it comes to choosing a setting, there are three popular methods. The first is choosing a location close to your heart — maybe your hometown or current city. (Not only does this familiar route give your story the ring of truth, you’ll save oodles of time on research.) But sometimes familiarity isn’t an option, so you have to choose a setting based on your story instead. (Just because you’ve never been outside of Kansas doesn’t mean your mermaid detective has to fight crime in her underground city beneath a local water treatment plant.) Now if neither of those methods tickle your toes, you can always close your eyes, give a globe a big spin and point, then throw your characters in whatever city your finger landed. For Curveball, I chose the second route. (Mostly because my finger landed in the middle of the Pacific when I spun the globe.)

While my first book in the series, Big Leagues, was set in Las Vegas, Cat McDaniel’s career as a sportswriter kept her on the move — I was constantly creating new stadiums for her to visit and new characters for her to meet. That was a lot of fun, but in the sequel, one of her obstacles is being saddled with chaperoning the general manager’s daughter, Paige Aiken. As such, I didn’t want to give Cat a way to “escape” from Paige’s antics. Putting her in the Caribbean training camps during the offseason was my way of chaining her to Paige.

Timing also played a factor in my setting. Curveball directly follows the introduction in the series, Big Leagues, which concluded as baseball season was toward its end. By the time Curveball begins, it’s late November — which is when many Latin American players return home to train in their team’s camps and aspiring ballplayers are being scouted.

Authenticity was key too. The Dominican Republic is a baseball nation and Major League Baseball has a huge presence within the city, with real-life training facilities just like the one in my book (though Cat’s team is the fictional Buffalo Soldiers.) When I visited Santo Domingo, I fell in love with the city’s passion for baseball. There’s actually a chapter where Cat goes to a local baseball game that very much echoed my experience at a Tigres del Licey game. The atmosphere is spellbinding and I knew then that I had to get Cat down to this baseball paradise.

Though I was writing an unfamiliar setting, it helped that my main character is supposed to be unfamiliar with it. She’s a tourist. She’s not expected to know local lore or regional traditions. Though an everyday citizen might not even pay attention to Catedral Primada de América, the famous landmark leaves Cat breathless. Like me, Cat saw Santo Domingo through the romantic and strange eyes of a tourist.

I sent the following prompt to author John Worsley Simpson as part of his virtual tour with Partners In Crime Tours:

Is crime fiction keeping pace with crime, or are criminals learning a few tricks from crime writers?

Here’s what he had to say:

Crime fiction is really murder fiction. With the exception of “heist” novels, few, if any, modern crime novels don’t involve murder. Other crimes, like robbery or theft, in the main lack the punch that makes the reader either want the criminal to be caught or wants him or her to get away with it.

Given that most murders are committed by family or friends of the victim, and involve no intrigue or complications of literary interest, the murderous works of crime fiction writers hardly provide blueprints for real-life killers. Most other killings are of the random variety — muggings and the like — that are equally bereft of the qualities that a crime fiction writer would adopt in his or her efforts. In other words, crime fiction is unlikely to offer anything that might be copied in a real crime of homicide.

Heist novels, on the other hand, seem to offer the potential of suggesting methods to a would-be perpetrator of such a crime, but the reality is that the knowledge that would be required to pull off a successful, complicated robbery (the kind that would be the fodder of a heist novel–an alley stick-up and similar fall far short of the dramatic requirements for interesting fiction) is case specific. You could write a generic plot about breaking into a generic bank vault, but that would be useless to a real criminal interested in breaking into the vault of a real, specific bank. What is more likely is the reverse: crime fiction authors may use real cases as the foundation for their plots: the details of an almost got-away-with murder or a complex robbery that emerge at a trial could be the meat of a novel for a mystery writer. So, I would say the few criminals who might inspire crime fiction are far ahead of the genre’s authors, while it’s unlikely that a mystery story could be a how-to for a potential criminal.