Another mystery that feels right at home

Linda Barnes sets her crime stories in Boston. (Lynn wayne)

In the massive bibliography of fiction set in Boston that Suffolk University professor Gerald Richman is compiling, there are only about 200 labeled as mysteries and thrillers.

The novels go back into the early 1800s with James Fenimore Cooper's "Lionel Lincoln" and Catharine Maria Sedgwick's "Hope Leslie," and some historical poetry even earlier. But it is not until the 1930s that George Harmon Coxe appears as the first major writer of Boston-based crime fiction with his books featuring a pair of photographers and other sleuths.

Fast forward to the 1970s, and up to the present, when Boston becomes the chosen setting for crime writers, prominent among them George V. Higgins and Robert B. Parker, Dennis Lehane and William Martin. And not the least, Linda Barnes, whose "Lie Down With the Devil" is her 12th mystery novel set in Boston.

For all of those writers, the phrase "set in Boston" means a strong sense of place, sometimes as specifically local as Lehane's Dorchester, sometimes traveling seemingly nonstop around the city as does Barnes's cab-driving Carlotta Carlyle.

Readers who have been following Barnes since her first novel, 1987's "A Trouble of Fools," will find the familiar themes: Carlotta's wise-cracking manner, her somewhat unsettled love life, and her backup cast of former police colleagues and rescued young women.

Here, there's a client who turns out to be not who she presents herself to be, and who quickly turns up dead. To give the story a solid public policy backdrop, there's a dispute involving the approval of an Indian casino on Cape Cod, which gets Carlotta out of the city and down to a fictionalized Nausett, which "sits on a scraggy peninsula" between Mashpee and Cotuit.

But it's Boston that gives "Lie Down With the Devil" its real grounding. Barnes's description of Charles River Park will give a sneaking pleasure to anyone who isn't "home now" because they don't live there.

"In the summer of 1960," she writes, "Boston's West End was bulldozed to rubble. Some called it urban renewal and some called it slum clearance, but when the dust cleared, there was Charles River Park, an eight-building complex that would have looked great in Miami Beach." And then, she sticks the knife in. "The tall, pale buildings had no ties to New England, so to grab some local flavor, they named the towers after Hawthorne, Whittier, Emerson, Lowell and Longfellow. I like to imagine the old dead white guys rolling in their graves, not to mention stogie-smoking Amy Lowell."

Then there are the clearly tracked routes that Carlotta follows through the city, complete to the appropriate on- and off-ramps for the Big Dig - that underground project providing the title and setting for Barnes's 2002 novel. There are even places that will send all but a handful of Barnes's readers to their city atlases. When Carlotta parks her car, a "rented junker," on Guilford Street, "it fit into the landscape like a piece of a child's puzzle."

With all that site-specific writing, a reader who is not a mystery fan is left with several things to puzzle over. What would happen if you took out the specific references and substituted generic place names? You'd still have a good plot, but it's Charles River Park and Guilford Street that tell you it's a story of a particular place.

And just what is Boston's attraction, not just for Barnes, but for Higgins, Parker, Lehane and others? Kate Mattes, who has read them all as proprietor of Kate's Mystery Books, suggests that the city became so popular a setting "because people could identify with Boston because they had visited here."

The best-selling popularity of Barnes and her colleagues suggests that the city's tourist industry is doing just fine.

Michael Kenney is a freelance writer living in Cambridge.