Charlie's Angles

When I was interviewing Olalla writer Gregg Olsen earlier this month I positioned myself as a crime fiction gourmet, who reads a lot of mysteries that are rife with murder and deceit. I told him I could stomach all varieties of literary brutality, but cannot tolerate when a mystery writer “kills” an innocent dog. Humans are at least responsible for their deaths, even if it just the decision to be where lightning strikes.
At the time Olsen didn’t react to my little monologue, and we now know why. On p. 273 of his new locally situated serial killer novel Victim Six a doberman dies violently. The local twist comes from finding the dog in a posh McCormick Woods house.
I didn’t recognize the house, but there were plenty other landmarks described in the book that were familiar enough. The description evoked the town, and the restaurants had the same names as in real life. (except Olsen accidentally placed an Azteca restaurant in town, instead of Puerto Vallarta).
Debbie Macomber, the “other” local bestseller, take a different approach, attempting to juxtapose imagination and reality to present a vision of Port Orchard (called Cedar Cove). Even as Macomber deliberately blurs the lines between fact and fiction, locals will find that reading Victim Six is a more unsettling experience. Macomber fans are known to seek out familiar landmarks from her books, and the new management of Gino’s restaurant adopted the name of its Cedar Cove counterpart.
On the other hand, no one is going to seek out the location in Sunnyslope where the first victim was abducted, or drive out to Little Clam Bay to see where a subsequent victim was found floating in the weeds.
Halfway into Victim Six it was clear I was reading it differently than a book set in an unfamiliar locale. I don’t actually live in Port Orchard, but was taking a lot of the details very personally. Olsen’s acerbic take on some of the local quirks were accurate enough, but I wondered if some of those described would be more than just a little offended. My feeling was any offended people should just live with it, “man up,” but all doubt disappeared when the serial killer kidnapped and tortured the Fathoms O’Fun princess. If she dies, I then concluded, Olsen will not be able show his face in this town again.
She escapes. If this offends anyone who thinks I blew the story, I am doing it for Olsen’s own good. He’ll thank me later, when he’s not forced to do all of his shopping in Gorst.
Olsen and Macomber’s readerships don’t overlap, but the two best-selling New York Times authors living in our midst have some things in common: They both love their home town and are ultimately accessible. You would expect people who had sold that many books and are fussed over worldwide to be, well, jerks.
The difference is that Macomber seems to have stepped right out of her books, while Olsen leaves the true-crime/serial-killer world on the page. He bubbles with pride over his family, and shudders as he discusses the most horrific experience of his own life–when a fox got into his chicken coop and he had to clean up the blood.
Victim Six is a pretty good tale, predictable and surprising in a the right places. On the other hand, in a choice to live in share either Macomber’s or Olsen’s depiction of Port Orchard I’d take Debbie’s in a heartbeat.