The Windy (and Wonderfully Mysterious) City

You hear it so often it’s become a cliché, but writers are told to write what they know.

That’s how I ended up writing my fiction debut, Lost in the Ivy, which is set in a place that I know very well: Chicago’s Wrigleyville neighborhood. Wrigleyville’s name derives from its storied centerpiece, Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs.

During the mid-1990’s I lived in various places in and around Wrigleyville. Lost is a murder mystery inspired by that neighborhood.

Chicago has inspired many mystery writers. Eugene Izzi, Barbara D’Amato and Sara Paretsky are among the more notable names that have made Chicago come to life on the pages of mystery books.

What is it about Chicago that captured the imagination of these authors? Is it the city’s unsavory gangster past? Or its history of devious and deadly characters including the notorious likes of Leopold and Loeb and serial killers Herman Mudgett (aka Dr. Death), Richard Speck and John Wayne Gacy. Or its sleazy political corruption scandals? Or its true unsolved mysteries, including the murders of The Grimes sisters and the disappearance of candy heiress Helen Brach?

Surely Chicago’s oftentimes dark past shapes in some fashion how mystery writers view it. But I’d like to think that there’s much more to it than that.

Chicago has an air of mystery about it, and I mean that in a good way. It’s a feeling that spills out of its architecture, its majestic lakefront and its incredibly diverse and varied neighborhoods. There’s a sense that it’s holding so many secrets – secrets that you want to discover in you own, very personal, way.

Being a writer allows you to explore those mysteries and to share them with others. That’s why books inspired by Chicago feel so alive. They show what makes Chicago such a wonderfully mysterious place.