THE CHARLOTTE CYCLE
Years ago-- hell, over a decade ago-- in college, I created a couple of characters to populate a detective story set in Charlotte, my home town and constant locale. An erstwhile pal of mine thought that was great. "You could create a whole Charlotte Mythos!" he declared, unaware, at the moment, that Mythos would later be a notorious grind club and that the creation of any Charlotte mythology was the sole property of the joint venture of the Charlotte City Council and the Charlotte Observer. Any unauthorized broadcast or other use, without written permission, would be rudely snubbed.
After beginning The Architect's Sketch in earnest, I set it in Charlotte by default, but with the exception of "The Day the Deal Went Queer" none of the stories are very consciously set here. The locale of Divorcee Court in "Somewhere in Virginia" is a very definite locale, very definitely in Charlotte, and the phenomenon reported there is based on very actual events, but, surely, those events could have happened almost anywhere.
These stories are based in Charlotte, and on Charlotte. The first two don't reflect it very well-- the first story takes place mainly in LA, and the second is short on descriptives-- but the subsequent stories, if they come out anywhere near the way I have them planned out in my addled brain, should reflect various aspects of the city through the seventies, eighties and nineties. Since I got bored with detective stories a long time ago, the characters here are more or less real people-- a History professor, a lawyer, a high school, middle school, and elementary school students, a family-- and the stories take place in a slice of Charlotte society just about a notch and a half wealthier than my own family was by the time I was in high school, strictly out of a love of architecture and a desire to describe the dominant features of the sociological landscape.
Not to say the poor and disenfranchised will not be heavily featured. Are you kidding? Why else does one write about the upper classes, if not to feature the plight of the lower classes? Who do you read, Marx or Wodehouse?*
Mark Doesn't Die on the Chopper
*I read both.