Santa Teresa (fictional city)

Santa Teresa has been used by several authors as the name of an invented city.

For the neighborhood in southern San Jose, California, USA, see Santa Teresa, San Jose, California.

Ross Macdonald

Santa Teresa was created by Ross Macdonald as a fictionalised version of Santa Barbara, California, in his mystery The Moving Target (1949).[1] He used it again in several others of his works, including The Galton Case (1959), The Instant Enemy (1968), and The Underground Man (1971).

Sue Grafton

In the 1980s, the writer Sue Grafton began using a fictional Santa Teresa as the setting for her novels featuring her lead character Kinsey Millhone, a fictional female private investigator.[2] Millhone is the protagonist of Grafton's "alphabet mysteries" series of novels.[3][4] Grafton chose the setting as a tribute to Macdonald, an acknowledged influence.[5] In the Kinsey Millhone version, the town has a population of 85,000 and has a small airport.

Nearby, Grafton describes a fictional “luxury residential development” laid out on a sprawling expanse of land called Horton Ravine, which “once belonged to one family, but is now divided into million-dollar parcels”. Although the fictional private investigator Kinsey Millhone acknowledges that “rich is rich”, she contrasts “‘new’ money” Horton Ravine to the “‘old’ money” graciousness of nearby Montebello, a thinly-disguised tribute to real-life Montecito, California.[6]

Roberto Bolaño

Roberto Bolaño set his novel 2666 (2004) primarily in a northern Mexican city called Santa Teresa.[7] The novel features female homicides as central theme, inspired largely by female homicides in Ciudad Juárez. This fictional city had already appeared in his earlier novel The Savage Detectives.[8]

Notes and references
  1. Priestman, Martin (2003). The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction. Cambridge University Press.
  2. Everett, Todd (1991-05-23). "Mystery Town: Whodunit author Sue Grafton lives in Santa Barbara and sets her tales in Santa Teresa". Los Angeles Times. p. J15.
  3. Hawkes, Ellen (1990-02-18). "G IS FOR GRAFTON Instead of Killing Her Ex-Husband, Sue Grafton Created a Smart-Mouthed, Hard-Boiled (and Incidentally Female) Detective Named Kinsey Millhone". Los Angeles Times Magazine. p. 20.
  4. Natalie Hevener Kaufman, Carol McGinnis Kay (1997). "G" Is for Grafton: The World of Kinsey Millhone (Hardcover ed.). Henry Holt and Company. ISBN 0-8050-5446-4.
  5. Nolan, Tom. "Ross Macdonald". BookSense. Archived from the original on May 18, 2008. Retrieved August 5, 2017.
  6. Grafton, Sue (1982). “A” is for Alibi. Thorndike Press Large Print Famous Authors, 2008, in arrangement with Henry Holt & Company. p. 374-375. ISBN 9781410406811.
  7. Kirsch, Adam (November 3, 2008). "Slouching Towards Santa Teresa". Slate.
  8. Zalewski, Daniel (March 26, 2007). "Vagabonds". The New Yorker.
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