Round up the fictitious Bostonians

A professor gathers Hub-based novels

"I could find the number of hits it gets, but I really don't care. I do it for me, and I figure that anyone who is doing work in this area will stumble on it." - GERALD RICHMAN (Globe Staff Photo / Michele McDonald)

When Gerald Richman took over the "Boston: A City in Fiction" course at Suffolk University going on 30 years ago, he inherited a two-page typewritten list of books suitable for outside reading, term papers, and the like.

Medieval literature was his field, he said during an interview in his book-jammed office. "But I was the newest arrival at Suffolk and the closest thing to a Boston native" - although he grew up in Brockton.

That initial list included classics like Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter" and Henry James's "The Bostonians," and of more recent vintage, Edwin O'Connor's "The Last Hurrah."

But very soon Richman started gathering other books, mainly novels, to add to the original list. "I think I mimeographed it back then," he said.

Then, as computer technology developed, Richman set up a Web page and started putting the book list online, with occasional links to other sites - even to "Fanfiction," which carries stories that fans write about their favorite characters from television shows - including some set in Boston.

By last December, Richman had amassed about 40 pages' worth of books, works he'd come across in his own reading, titles he had researched on GoogleBooks, or had spotted on WorldCat, an online catalog, or in book reviews. Some lesser-known titles have been brought to his attention by recognition-seeking authors.

This was all sort of a sideline to Richman's regular work teaching medieval literature courses on topics like Beowulf and Chaucer.

Then, last December, Richman took a sabbatical and set to work in earnest, some 10 hours a day at home in Stow or at his Suffolk office, compiling a definitive bibliography of every novel and story, even some poems and plays, that is set in Boston, at least in part.

Sometimes he heads to the Boston Public Library to verify a title's Boston connection. Recently, he spotted a book with "North End" in the title. "But there's lots of 'North Ends,' " he said. "I'll have to go and look at the book myself."

"I guess it would run to 240 or 250 pages if I ever printed it out," he said of the bibliography. "Which of course I don't have any reason to do."

The list runs the gamut from works by James Fenimore Cooper, Louisa May Alcott, and William Faulkner, to mysteries from Robert B. Parker and Jane Langton, and even romance fiction by Sidney Sheldon.

Richman has organized his list by the time when the book's action occurred, not by its date of publication. Thus, Nathaniel Hawthorne's stories about Puritan Boston written in the 1830s appear in the bibliography before William Hill Brown's "The Power of Sympathy" published in 1789, but set in the 1780s. It is considered the first American novel, and Richman's entry gives it a "Sentimental/Seduction" tag.

And the list continues to grow - a recent addition being Dennis Lehane's novel about the Boston Police strike, "The Given Day," published this fall and added after Richman spotted the Globe's review of it.

In the bibliography, Richman provides basic information on each book - author, title, publisher, date of publication. Then there's a brief plot summary that he writes or copies from the publisher's blurbs and jacket copy.

In his quest to "strengthen the usefulness," there are links to complete texts of long out-of-print books if they're available on GoogleBooks. There are links to original reviews of books published as far back as the 1800s, such as that for Lydia Maria Child's "Hobomuk, A Tale of Early Times," printed in 1824 and reviewed that year in the Boston-based United States Literary Gazette.

An inevitable question is how useful is Richman's bibliography - and who uses it?

"I could find the number of hits it gets," Richman said, "but I really don't care. I do it for me, and I figure that anyone who is doing work in this area will stumble on it."

The easiest way to "stumble" on Richman's effort is to search for "Boston in Fiction" on Wikipedia, which provides an external link to it.

"I do wonder what I've missed," said Richman, then adding, with an optimistic shrug, "It'll probably turn up."