Besides having to populate a novel with characters and plots, for me to provide a strong sense of the setting means going there. My novels take place in Venice, but although I can’t go back to seventeenth-century Venice when they are set, I visit this incredible city often—at least every other year for the International Art Fair.
Art is a theme I bring into my Venice Beauties mysteries, starting with the first in the series, The Gallery of Beauties, in which a Venetian artist is commissioned by an English lord to paint the twelve most beautiful women in Venice for his estate’s portrait gallery. The idea for this story came from my own travels to the infamous Gallery of Beauties in the Nymphenburg Palace of King Ludwig I of Bavaria in Munich. In the late 1800s, Ludwig commissioned his court painter to paint the portraits of the most beautiful women in Venice to honor them. Thirty-six portraits still exist, even after the bombing of Munich, including the portrait of Lola Montez, the Irish beauty posing as Spanish who bewitched Ludwig into giving her the crown jewels (which his ministers took back, then kicked her out of the country). Of course, I bought the book about each of the portraits and their subjects, which inspired some of my characters in my novel.
Gallery of Beauties, Munich
Then, on a trip to London, I discovered two Galleries of Beauties in Hampton Court Palace. It seems collecting portraits of beautiful women for your palace’s man cave is an age-old aristocratic tradition. If you go, visit William of Orange’s gallery on the lower level and Charles II’s gallery on the upper floor, featuring his most famous mistresses.
For my latest novel in the series, The Courtesan’s Pirate, my main characters, Belladonna, a former courtesan of Venice, and her lover, Isaak, a pirate, sail off to the Caribbean, hoping to start a new life together in the New World. Unfortunately, Fate intervenes, as a hurricane strikes, separating the two, so they each sail around the Caribbean seeking the other, amid dangerous pirates and bloodthirsty Spanish. I have never been to the Caribbean, but a main setting in my story is in Curaçao, where Isaak is about to ambush French pirates. I realized I needed to know what the island looked like to determine where pirates could hide for the ambush and decided to go to Curaçao to find out.
It was good that I went, since in the story I had written about lush vegetation, while in reality the island is dry like a desert, and its vegetation is mostly cactus and thornbushes. No place, literally, to hide.
Oops, cactus not lush vegetation
I had thought to sail my pirate ships into gentle hidden coves, and on my visit, I discovered the coast is rocky, with churning water and high waves slamming into coastal indents. Another rewrite there.
The best discovery was at the Jewish synagogue of Curaçao, one of the oldest in the New World, which was established in 1650 by Jews settling the island from the Dutch West India Company. In the courtyard of the synagogue were some of the tombstones rescued from a decaying cemetery on the island. Then I saw it: a tombstone of a Jew from the early 1600s, the time period of my novel, with the pirate symbol engraved on it (skull and crossbones and hourglass). This supported my theory of Jews who joined the other pirates who took over the island after the Spanish gave up supporting their colony there. I have since done further research and discovered the other place that has a Jewish tombstone with this symbol is in Jamaica.
Pirate symbol on a tombstone
What comes first, the travel or the novel? It depends. The travel can inspire the novel, like it did for my first novel in the series, but I needed more research to understand the setting for my third novel in the Caribbean. Travel may not be necessary for every writer, but it does give you a true sense of place if you are able to go there.
Nina Wachsman is the Agatha and Silver Falchion nominated author of historical mysteries The Gallery of Beauties, The Courtesan’s Secret, and The Courtesan’s Pirate. Her recent historical short stories are “The Deadly Portrait,” featured in Feisty Deeds: Historical Fictions of Daring Women, and “Murder at the Ziegfeld Follies,” in New York State of Crime 6 (www.curatorsofcrime.com).
