Eudora Welty
“Place…never really stops informing us, for it is forever astir, alive, changing, reflecting, like the mind of man itself. One place comprehended can make us understand other places better. Sense of place gives equilibrium; extended, it is sense of direction too."
Regarding settings or place in mysteries (and in fiction, film and in general) there are two broad types - the physical environment and the cultural environment. The physical environment can be further divided into two subsets, human created environments (rooms, urban structures, Gothic mansions, etc) and natural environments. The latter are usually of a larger scale and include such places as deserts, islands, weather and climate and all other types of natural phenomena. The cultural environment is diverse and complex and is made up of the socio-economic characteristics of places. Such environments can have enormous impacts on stories, plots and even characters. The context of places as eccentric as drawing rooms creates a very different texture for a story than the economically depressed coal towns of western Pennsylvania. Ethnicity, language, affluence, class, education and much more are readily conveyed by particular settings much more subtly and seamlessly than attempts to describe these characteristics specifically.
("Obviously the place is critical because it is the milieu or context thrown into disorder. This place must be real and must help the reader understand much of what follows in the plot and search for the perpetrator. The physical setting, type of legal system, types of people involved, the accessibility of the place of the crime, and many other characteristics are critical to the story and important in order to understand what is transpiring. Place characteristics such as climate, human culture, type of government, and much more must be explicit or implicit for the reader to fathom what is going on and to have some notion of how the system works. In film, the place - the geography- is a critical element in the story.")
-(Dartmouth.com/edu - Defining Location)
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