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Cleveland, a.k.a. "the mistake on the lake" notorious for the day its great river, the Cuyahoga, caught fire. Cleveland, butt of a thousand talk-show jokes. Cleveland! Are you kidding?
I am not. For as far as writing goes, Cleveland is where it all began for me.
Some astute readers of my works (and would that there were more!) have noticed something that, until it was pointed out had evaded me completely. "Your killers, Mr. Bayer, are always from Cleveland. Please tell us why this is so?"
Clearly if I wrote clued-puzzle mysteries, I'd be out of business. Fortunately, I write the kind in which the reader learns " whodunit" early on and then the issues become "why?" and "how're they going to nail him?" As to why I didn't notice this obvious fact myself, I plead the lack-of-awareness-of-a-subconscious-process defense. But now that it has been pointed out, I make a conscious point of exploiting it. Now, when my books have an American setting, the killer has to be from Cleveland.
But back to the question. Why are my killers nearly always from Cleveland? The answer is that Cleveland is where I am from, and, for that very reason, Cleveland is... well... just right.
In that pleasant, cultured, rust-belt metropolis, I can place my fictional villains in the years of their development. There the dark events were observed, the guilty secrets harbored, the terrible compulsions forged. And if my books are about detection - unraveling hidden patterns - then my investigators, whether cops or laymen, must travel to Cleveland to root out the transforming truths. And the understanding they find there must yield not only a hunter's sympathy for a quarry, but deeper selfknowledge on the part of the hunter, and, in a grander sense, a glimpse of what Man is.
So, you see, Cleveland, in my work, is the Heart Of Darkness, a fact which, unfortunately for me, has sometimes been misunderstood.
I was there recently on a publicity tour when I found the following headline on the book page of the Cleveland Plain Dealer: SUSPENSE MASTER PUTS CLEVELAND IN BAD LIGHT.
Well, at least the reviewer called me a "master." But what he missed (and who can blame him? The city has taken many a bad rap and feelings are justifiably raw) is that it wasn't his Cleveland I'd written about, or his readers' Cleveland, or even the true friendly, nurturing Cleveland that exists. Rather it was "Cleveland" as stand-in for every dark place where anyone ever got twisted. Cleveland as metaphor.
A confession: For years I forgot an important personal fact, that in the years 1943-47, when I was very young and our family lived together in Cleveland, my parents wrote four mystery novels jointly in their spare time. The books were successful too. The first was even made into a movie.
How strange that I had forgotten. But the fact is that I wrote and published fiction for twenty years before I even identified myself as a mystery writer. When the realization finally struck that my novels were always in some fashion about crimes, I understood my material and was reborn. I was, I discovered, not only a mystery writer, but a second-generation mystery writer to boot!
A vignette: In 1947, their marriage disintegrating and their mystery writing career nearly at its end, my parents took on their final job in the field, the editing of a book entitled Cleveland Murders, consisting of pieces by local journalists about famous real murders that had taken place in our home town.
I was eight years old when the book was published, and I no longer repress my memories of the publication party. It was a press luncheon held in a private dining room at the fine Hotel Cleveland downtown. A long table had been put together to accommodate the editors, contributors and members of the press. Copies of the book lay at each setting and there was also a corny but marvelous adornment - various instruments of murder (knife, pistol, noose, ax, poison bottle with skull and crossbones) placed along the central axis of the table
Please hold on to that image for a moment.. Do you see him - the little boy gazing in wonder at his parents as they preside over this literary luncheon? The guests, all writers, seem a jovial lot, laughing, gesticulating, their conversation a mirthful buzz. Murder weapons are in evidence, and everywhere the little boy turns he sees the same two words:
CLEVELAND MURDERS ...
CLEVELAND MURDERS ...
CLEVELAND MURDERS...
Could that little boy have grown up to be anything else but a mystery writer whose killers always come from Cleveland?
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