In my third
Quill Gordon mystery, due out next summer, one of the clues is the murder
victim’s journal for the period covering September 1970 to February 1971. I
just got through writing the first draft of the section that quotes excerpts
from that journal and found that I enjoyed the trip down memory lane.
As you
might guess from the photograph that accompanies this blog, I am old enough to
remember 1970 and remember it fairly well. But that good personal memory is
only a starting point for accurately depicting the time in a book, even a work
of fiction.
To be
convincing, that section would have to be correct in relevant details, some of
which are critical to the story itself. What I found in the course of writing
it over the past couple of weeks was that my memory told me what I needed to
look for and check, and that, in the process of checking it, I struck some gold
I wasn’t even prospecting for.
God Bless Wikipedia
I’ve said
before that there are days I love the internet and days I hate it. Looking up
stuff from the 1970s made it all the first kind of day. How did an author ever
survive without Wikipedia? Without it, I could have spent weeks trying to pin
down one little fact that was at my fingertips online.
It struck
me, for example, as I was writing the section, that the woman keeping the
journal would likely have been a fan of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” My memory
told me it was on in the early seventies, but would it have been on the air
during the window covered by the journal? Yup. In fact, I had the keeper of the
journal watching it the night of Sept. 19. 1970, and checking Wikipedia, I
found that this was the date the first episode aired. How good does it get?
Elsewhere
on the internet, I was able to quickly pin down the years in which two pieces
of legislation were passed in California, both of which were critical to the
plot. Whatever else the reviewers on Amazon might ding me for, it won’t be
getting the facts wrong about the timing of those laws.
The Serendipitous Finds
Despite what
some people think, not everything is online, and I had to get some information
the old-fashioned way. Three days of the journal describe events in San
Francisco just before Christmas, so one morning I went to the Santa Cruz public
library and looked up the San Francisco
Chronicle for late December of 1970 on microfilm.
They had
great columnists then — Herb Caen, Art Hoppe, Charles McCabe, Stanton
Delaplane, Royce Brier, William Hogan, and even that over-the-top sexist Count
Marco. A two-line item in Caen’s column became a scene described in the
character’s journal. The movie listings prevented the character from seeing “Love
Story” before it actually opened. And an ad for a long-gone department store
provided a window into what things cost in those days.
The
internet is great for looking up specific things, but it’s lousy for stumbling
across things by chance. The three issues of the Chronicle that I looked at on
microfilm provided a snapshot of San Francisco at that moment of time. As with
any picture, there was a lot of stuff that wasn’t in the frame. Still, the
details I came across will, I believe, enliven my book, and coming across them
in that way was a reminder of what we will be missing if (or when) newspapers
go the way of dinosaurs.
