Worldbuilding
The useful geography in a town is rarely the obvious stuff. It’s the alley behind the chip shop, the footpath that saves three minutes, the underpass everyone avoids after dark, the gap in the fence by the playing field.
That’s where crime fiction gets its shape. Not from landmarks, but from the places people use without noticing they’re using them.
A town can look ordinary on a map and still be full of routes that make a disappearance possible, a meeting private, or a body inconveniently easy to move. The real worldbuilding is often hidden in the shortcuts.
That’s where crime fiction gets its shape. Not from landmarks, but from the places people use without noticing they’re using them.
A town can look ordinary on a map and still be full of routes that make a disappearance possible, a meeting private, or a body inconveniently easy to move. The real worldbuilding is often hidden in the shortcuts.
The trouble with maps is that they make towns look tidier than they are. In a proper historical setting, the important routes are often social rather than physical: who can enter by the tradesman’s door, who is seen on which street, who knows which back passage belongs to which house. In York, half the tension lives in those small permissions. A locked gate tells you as much as an alleyway.
The map can lie by omission as much as by error. In historical fiction that matters a lot, because the road on paper is often cleaner than the one people actually took. A decent chase scene usually lives in the mud, the gate that sticks, the bridge that floods, the bit of ground nobody bothered to record properly. That’s where the story gets its teeth.