Ronald Tierney contributes to this popular blog with a “Books You Have to Read” review of Diva by Daniel Odier.
Ronald Tierney discusses his life as a writer in an interview at Creative-Writing-Help.com
The Carly Paladino and Noah Lang Mysteries, Ronald Tierney's new San Francisco mystery series, are featured in The Nob Hill Gazette.
As I have confessed before, when I sat down to write my first mystery, an entry for the St. Martin’s “Best First Private Eye Novel” contest, I thought I was being original by setting the story somewhere other than a really big or notorious city. I chose my own hometown — the not quite international city of intrigue — Indianapolis. And I thought I was doing something extraordinarily different by creating an aging private investigator as protagonist. Neither of course was true. In retrospect, as wrong as I was about the novelty of setting and character, I was right, I think, choosing a place that I knew.
I grew up in Indianapolis at a time when it and many cities like it were transformed by urban flight and a sudden attraction to the suburbs and barbeques. I watched as the city changed. Downtown movie theaters went out of business. Local grocers, pharmacies, and hardwares couldn’t survive the bigger chain versions. The city’s distinctive department stores were taken over by conglomerates. Pizza Huts replaced local pizza parlors. Streetcar tracks were paved over. Entire neighborhoods disappeared. Indiana Avenue —and its rich Black history — was demolished. The downtown became ghostlike and inner city homes disintegrated. The mallification of the city began, and the culture of sameness proliferated.
Before I left Indianapolis, I witnessed a city clawing its way back. The homogenizing process reversed. Downtown began to thrive. People moved back into the inner city where old, historic neighborhoods saw new life. Resident and commercial activity grew along a previously neglected canal. Individually owned restaurants started to break the stranglehold of the chains. Though I was not conscious of the parallel at the time, revitalization of the city was working its way into my novels. After meeting the love of his life, Maureen, the old P.I. changed. Here was curmudgeonly Deets Shanahan, who after decades of indifference to life, found a reason to re-engage with it. Setting and character mirrored each other.
Because we are products of our DNA and, I believe, of our environment and life experience, the stories we write must, it seems, also come from these forces. At least they do for me. So, when I left Indianapolis for San Francisco, obviously the environment changed. The way I lived my life did as well. Now, having lived here off an on since 1976, and steadily for the last 14 years, I am creating new characters and embarking on a new mystery series. This new series is set in this incredibly diverse city on the western edge of the continent.
No doubt, though, I know San Francisco in a very different way than I know my hometown. And I know San Francisco in a way very different from those who have lived here all their lives. Unlike the osmosis of knowledge that occurs when you grow up in a place, as a transplant I choose to know, make an effort to know San Francisco.
What I do is a lot of wandering, disorganized walking. I take pointless routes, intuitive and arbitrary turns. I see spectacular gardens, one-of-kind stores, and homes painted in the most original ways. Hippies, yuppies, guppies, punks, Goths, rappers, suits, beats, and some very original characters walk the streets. There are hidden stairways in the hills and strange and wonderful little restaurants where you’d least expect them. There are extraordinary murals just off Valencia Street, breathtaking views from a village atop Potrero Hill, and sailboats bobbing in the Bay in the Marina. There is the old hangout of Italians in North Beach and a new area settled by Vietnamese in the tough, old Tenderloin. And the “Summer of Love” still bubbles up now and then in Haight Ashbury.
I also take public transportation. The Stockton bus is pressure packed with Chinese and their shopping bags full of strange and exotic fruits and vegetables. The Geary bus, laden with stern-faced Russian immigrants, heads out to the Avenues and eventually to the usually gray and chilly Ocean Beach. The Fillmore bus goes from high-toned Pacific Heights, through dozens of neighborhoods, including the new jazz district, the sunny, Hispanic Mission and eventually ends up in a thriving little, though still largely undiscovered, neighborhood called “Dog Patch.”
And I listen. People enjoy telling their own stories. And I enjoy hearing them. Their narratives not only provide me information about people I care for, they also provide texture about the city itself. A Salvadoran who moved to the city and after years of struggle made good. A woman who grew up in Chinatown dealing with being “American” during the day and being Chinese for her mainland Chinese family at night. The trust-fund, native-born San Franciscan who keeps track of his fellow high society and often-powerful friends. The sixties transplant, cum political activist, who experienced at ground level a San Francisco that over the years had to deal with the SLA, AIDS, earthquakes and increasing homelessness.
It is in this environment that new characters and new stories emerge for me. The city, its diverse neighborhoods and its wonderfully eccentric citizens are grist for the mill, yes, and inspiration to live more boldly. I hope that by being an immigrant of sorts in awe of this multi-faceted city and yet present long enough to see what it means to really live here gives me a certain perspective. It is, I believe, a view that is different from the native San Franciscan who may take the city’s exciting diversity as normal and expected. It is also not the same view as those who visit occasionally, people who may be too enthralled with the city’s exciting cable-car clanging surface to see both the richness and danger underneath.
Both cities, Indianapolis and San Francisco — as different as they are — provide not only the setting, but also the themes for the stories that take place there. And in no small way they provide much of the mystery that keeps me interested in writing and living.
Author Ron Tierney is interviewed for Voices in Mystery by host Nancy B. Carlson. © Ball State University, 2008.