People ask me, sometimes politely and sometimes with an edge, why I keep setting murders in Portland.
It’s a fair question. Portland is small. Portland is leafy. Portland is the kind of city where you can run into your therapist at the farmers market and then your therapist’s ex-husband at the next stall over. Statistically, Portland is not where the murders are.
But thrillers aren’t statistics. Thrillers are feel. And Portland has a feel I have never been able to find anywhere else.
The light. From about October to April, Portland gives you a particular kind of weather I have started to think of as the secondary protagonist of the entire series. It’s not rain, exactly. It’s a low gray ceiling, persistent and intimate. It muffles. It pushes you inside. It makes the windows of your neighbors’ houses glow at four in the afternoon. It is, structurally, perfect cover for a thriller. Everyone is already inside. Everyone is already a little stir-crazy. Everyone has had one too many cups of coffee. You can see why somebody might do something they would not, in July, have done.
The neighborhoods. Portland is a city of micro-villages. You can live in the same five-block radius your whole life and run into the same people at the same coffee shop. This is the structural opposite of a New York thriller, where the threat is anonymity. In Portland, the threat is recognition. The killer is not a stranger. The killer is the person who said hi to you Tuesday morning at the dog park. Tangled Darkness exists because of this. So does the entire premise of Play Me Once (Novel number two coming soon). You cannot run from your own life in a city where everyone knows where you get your bread.
The therapy density. Portland has one of the highest per-capita rates of mental-health professionals in the country. This is a writing gift you cannot buy. Leslie Schoen practices in a city where her clients run into her colleagues. Her colleagues run into her ex-patients. The professional rumor mill has a half-life of about forty-eight hours. Plot-wise, this is gold. Confidentiality is a hard wall I refuse to break in the books. Adjacency is a thinner wall I crack open all the time.
The rituals. Saturday morning at Powell’s. Tuesday night at the food carts. Wednesday-evening grief at the meeting halls, where every fifth person you meet is processing something. Open mic at the smaller venues, where all the writers are exactly six minutes too sincere. Portland has its own liturgy of self-improvement, and it produces, in my experience, a certain kind of character: someone who is doing the work, knows they’re doing the work, and is therefore convinced they could never be the dangerous one. Reader, they so often are.
The bridges. I cannot write a book without one. I have tried. The bridges in this city are not just infrastructure. They’re thresholds. You cross the river and you cross into a different version of yourself. Every Portlander I have ever known has a story about a moment on a bridge. Lethal Loyalty is structured around three of them.
People ask me if I’d ever set a Portland Murders book somewhere else. The honest answer is: I’d be writing a different series. The city isn’t the wallpaper. The city is the second psychiatrist in the room, the one observing Leslie observe everyone else.
If you’ve been here, you already know.
xo,
Mary
