Читать книгу The Narrow Cell - Ronal Kayser - Страница 6

It must be confessed that the City of San Diego, with its camouflage and aircraft plants and Market Street Police Headquarters, does exist in actuality; but the persons who are presumed to inhabit it for the purposes of this Tale are altogether the product of the writer’s invention.

As for La Jolla, the suburb hereinafter described is not the one to be found on any map; it lies closer to Baker Street than to Highway 101; it and its population are wholly fabricated for the Story’s sake.

When an author sets the stage of his Mystery in New York, Chicago, or London, it is conceded without any question that he does so because a stage must be set somewhere, and preferably among surroundings with which the writer is, and some few of his readers may be, familiar. The size of these cities lends impersonality; and no one supposes that the police officers and suspects attributed to such locales have any existence in the flesh. Smaller cities do not wear this cloak of impersonality, and it is a natural consequence that when people find such familiar scenes portrayed fictionally, they will scan the author’s pages in the expectation of finding their neighbors recognizably described therein.

Let me say at the outset that in these pages the search must prove a totally profitless exercise. No person described hereinafter has, or is intended to have, any resemblance whatsoever to any real person, living or dead; in San Diego or La Jolla, Mankato, or New Gilead, or anywhere else upon the terrestrial globe.

I have simply paid San Diego County the compliment (as I trust) of employing that locale for fictional purposes. I have borrowed the climate and some features of the scenery, and nothing else, and hope I have returned these in as good a condition as I found them.

DALE CLARK.