A deck with a view — in Sausalito. Love this town (as a mystery setting.)
Marin County's broad vistas and open spaces approach perfection. As you might expect, however, nearly all of us who populate the county can fall well short of that mark.
Having been a Marin resident for over two decades, I’ll place myself alongside the less than perfect. I'm not proud of that. But like most folks, who feel compelled to show some sense of modesty, and honesty, I'd say I'm still a work in progress.
Of the two places I resided in the county, Sausalito, and then Greenbrae, the first has the look and feel of a small town, whereas the latter has the appearance of a mid-century suburb.
Sausalito provided the more interesting cast of characters. Ranging from the gracious and welcoming to the suspicious and occasionally nasty. This relatively small town provides any writer with a rich pallet of different characters. No doubt in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, and numerous other cities, you could find the same array of people. In Sausalito, with a population of just seven thousand, odd characters are more obvious and therefore easily observed.
In the first book of my Murder in Marin mysteries, The Gossiping Gourmet, I use composites of several individuals I came to know in the decade I resided in Sausalito.
In the case of Warren Bradley—my celebrated and loathed Sausalito gossip columnist—I borrowed many of the worst traits of one particular individual. Naturally, I gave him a different name. As far as the women who make up the core of my fictional Ladies of Liberty, they all sprang from real individuals as well. I rearranged facts and personalities, to create a fictitious group of gossip-hungry, mean-spirited power brokers.
A small town, or in the case of Marin, several small towns, can provide the perfect backdrop for all sorts of mischief. All the characters play on a relatively small stage making the results of their petty tyrannies more deeply felt. The secret sauce, so to speak, is best described in two words: WHAT IF?
Silly, petty, mean spirited people, clashing with those inclined to be open, honest, and kind, created the inspiration for Anthony Trollope's, The Way We Live Now, Charles Dickens' Bleak House, William Thackeray's Vanity Fair, and Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, and countless other works, like mine, of lesser note.
Wealth and poverty, generosity and stinginess, honesty and dishonesty, lust, greed, and social status are some of the traits that supply the dry kindling awaiting a creative spark to ignite a work of fiction. I wouldn't for a moment think of myself in league with any of these masters, any more than swinging a golf club makes me Tiger Woods; or singing Strangers in the Night in the shower makes me Frank Sinatra. But all artists, regardless of their field, need some form of fuel to power their creativity.
Odd characters behaving badly certainly fires up my imagination.
The rest of the county, Tiburon, Belvedere, Mill Valley, Ross, San Anselmo, Fairfax, are also populated with the good, the nasty, the too wealthy, and the too poor.
In creating new stories for my Murder in Marin mysteries I continue to branch out to other towns in Marin. I always return to Sausalito, however, where my fictional characters—Rob Timmons, Eddie Austin, and Holly Cross—all grew up and continue to live.
Sausalito, located on the northern end of the Golden Gate Bridge, offers one other important advantage. Because it is a popular day-trip destination for countless visitors who come to the San Francisco Bay Area every year, it’s one of a small group of communities in America with a population of under ten thousand, which has been visited or is at least known, by millions of people. Other examples would include Provincetown, Massachusetts with a population of three thousand, Taos, New Mexico: six thousand, and Aspen, Colorado: seven thousand.
The Sausalito Standard, a fictional newspaper, is based on Sausalito’s historic Princess Street, where I actually worked for many years publishing a newspaper called the Sausalito Signal. It is located in the tiny downtown district that swells on summer days with visitors and is mostly deserted at night. One evening, while walking home from my office, I was stopped by a visitor who perhaps had missed the last ferry back to San Francisco. In a voice that indicated he might have had one too many cocktails, he asked: “Is this a real town, or a movie set?”
“Huh?” I responded with a shrug.
In the quiet chill of a mid-November evening, anxious to get home, I wanted to help, but I could not grasp the meaning of the gentleman’s question. Sensing my confusion, he explained.
“A few hours ago, these streets were busy with lots of people and now it looks like no one lives here.”
“Sausalito is a quiet place that grows to many times its population during the day and goes back to its natural quiet state at night. Most of the people, who actually live here are at home up in the hills sitting down to dinner about now, not shopping for souvenirs in downtown,” I explained.
“It may not be make-believe,” he said, “but it sure does feel that way.”
—Martin
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