How I Created a Small Town Called Quiet Anchorage For My Cozy Mystery Series

The small town—its name isn’t so important—where I grew up in rural Virginia today (in 2011) hardly resembles the vital one I can remember. Indeed, the town is a scant shadow of its former self. The first big blow to its begin slow demise came when the highway department ran the four-laner as a by-pass to circumvent the town’s corporate limits.

The happier motorists no longer had to poke through its 25-m.p.h. zone. The not-so-happy merchants—service stations, antiques stall, diner, car wash, grocer, drugstore, hardware store, farmers’ co-op, and I don’t what all—saw the handwriting on the wall. Without any through-traffic, their volume of business plummeted.

I believe the antiques stall was the first place to sell off its inventory and close its doors forever. Perhaps one of the service stations closed down next. The locals still needed to fill their tanks, but the number of vehicles pulling up to the pumps dropped off. I was still riding my bicycle for transportation when the by-pass first opened. Over the next few years, the town seemed to lose its luster in my eyes.

Main Street grew less interesting and grittier. The streetlights seemed dimmer. My pals moved away. The florist boarded up her doors. Fewer trains whistled through the R/R crossing. The old timers turned ancient and died off, one by one.

This rather dismal withering on the vine isn’t the way I prefer to remember my town, at all. Who wants to say they came from a dying town? Of course, suburbanization brought the influx of more people with their houses that all but swallowed up my town. Nonetheless, I was just concerned with my town itself and its inhabitants when I wrote the setting for my debut cozy mystery.

The town I wanted to create would be patterned after the vibrant, colorful town I knew before the by-pass choked off its life force. My fictional hamlet needed a distinctive name, and I took Quiet Anchorage as its designation. There’s some back-story telling how the name Quiet Anchorage came into being.

As it would so happen, I had a pair of elderly but spry ladies to also draw on to establish my amateur sleuths. My two aunts, Alma and Isabel, both long since deceased, fit the role just fine, and writers write about what they know best, so what the heck? I had to tinker and change a few things about them.

For instance, the real Alma and Isabel devoured romances by the bushel, but the fictional ones read mysteries. The impressive library they maintained in their house follows what my real aunts actually did. I don’t think either of them could bear to give away a book after it’d been read. Both pairs of Almas and Isabels also kept a pet dog around the place.

In my first eponymous title, Alma and Isabel are forced to investigate a murder after their niece Megan is arrested and charged for the homicide of her fiancé Jake. The local sheriff is pleased over his quick, tidy resolution of Quiet Anchorage’s first murder in ages. Imagine his chagrin when he catches wind of whom Megan has on her side.

The sisters are determined to poke holes in his version of the events until he relents and agrees to release their niece. Their test of wills helps to drive the conflict. Alma and Isabel soon enlist the aid of Sammi Jo, a young lady with rough edges and a sharp mind to match her sharp tongue. Even active seventy-somethings can’t be expected to perform all the physical rigors the private eye trade demands, so Sammi Jo does it.

I now reside in a 1970s-built suburb. My neighbors are jammed in their homes on top of each other, but we never speak to each other. The lady next door asks us to fetch her mail when she goes out of town. She then returns the favor for us. But that’s it. Just the opposite is true in Quiet Anchorage. Alma and Isabel as lifelong residents know every face they pass by on the streets and in the stores. Their extensive knowledge comes into play as they sift through the likely suspects to nail the guilty culprit.

Cozy mysteries, I learned, follow certain conventions. Alma and Isabel never curse, though the salty Alma veers close a time or two of cutting loose. All the bloodshed occurs offstage. There’s no violence to speak of. Sex? Well, let’s just keep it inside the bedroom and behind closed doors. Banter and humor are okay if left tasteful.

If the real Alma and Isabel were still with us, I believe they’d get a kick out of seeing themselves in print and living in a small town called Quiet Anchorage. Or maybe they’d not even recognize themselves after the changing I did to their personalities since that’s what fiction writers do.