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Why 1991?

One question I’ve gotten a lot is why I chose the summer of 1991 as the setting for “Rincon Point.” And the short answer is, “For several reasons.”

Though the idea for the novel was something I had been kicking around mentally for the last few years, writing didn’t begin until May 2019, much of the book was written during rather turbulent times, including the early days of a truly frightening global pandemic. The easy thing to say would be that I wanted an escape to earlier times, before all this stuff happened. Before, even, the events of September 11, 2001.

Though there are certainly dark elements to the story, what with the murders and all, it is still supposed to be entertaining. People often like to look back at their own “good ol’ days,” and for me those were the 1990s. I chose the beginning of the decade because I plan to write more books around the same cast of core characters, and I’d like to explore the decade further in those upcoming books.

So, escapism is one part of the answer.

But since these are going to be stories about crimes, and how they’re solved, I also thought it’d be good to pick a timeframe when there was actually more of them. Violent crimes reached their peak in the United States in the early ‘90s, before beginning a long and rather significant decline. People were freaking out, although, to be fair, they still are despite lower overall crime rates now. Inner cities had been allowed to decay for at least the last two decades by 1991 (and many of them for much longer), gangs were a much bigger problem than they are today, the crack cocaine epidemic was still going strong, and tensions were high among the general public.

But the main reason for the timeframe is that I wanted the challenge of writing a detective story set in a time that, while in many ways is still recognizable today, did not offer the advantages of smartphones and widespread internet access. Now, if I were writing about actual cops (primarily), this would not have been as much of a difficulty for the protagonist. Even back in the 1970s, police departments were wired into computer networks, essentially making them “online” in today’s parlance. They also made extensive use of two-way radio as an earlier form of wireless communications. But my protagonist was to be a private investigator, someone who didn’t necessarily have access to such technologies.

How we take for granted today the simple ability to call pretty much anyone we know whenever we need to. And sometimes lament it as well. Beyond that, how many times have you seen someone like Jim Rockford struggling to remember a license plate number while trying to get to a pen and notepad to write it down? If he had an iPhone, he could simply snap a pic. The episode would end up being 15 minutes long.

OK, my protagonist isn’t a cop, but he is a former journalist. And as such, he is aware of, and even able to use, information technology that wouldn’t typically be available to the average person at the time. He just has to go through other people to get that access in the days just before mailboxes would be filled with weekly deliveries of AOL CD-ROMs. He can’t just fire up his laptop 0r whip out a smartphone and look up whatever he wants. He needs to use libraries and a few bribes to gather the information. He wears a pager, so he does have some element of being connected while out and about, but it doesn’t make calls or take photographs.
I could have accomplished this by writing about the 1980s, 1970s, even earlier. But those weren’t really “my” time. As someone who came of age in the ‘90s, it just felt right, familiar enough that I could write about it accurately. And while I won’t say I scrupulously avoided romanticizing the era, I am fairly confident that I would have been much more prone to romanticizing a decade like, say, the 1940s, 1950s, or 1960s than one I actually experienced as a young adult.

So there you have it. Now you know why I chose 1991 as the year for starting the Terry Cahill series of books. I hope you enjoy looking back, and I hope you’re looking forward to what will happen in 1992.

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