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breakinglight11
The Tailor of Riddling Way takes place in Fairfield, Connecticut in the year 1934. It's a real town, but I'm mostly making it up from my imagination for that story. I see it as an old, small, pretty New England town with lots of red brick buildings and trees that take on vibrant fall colors. The town has two sides to it, the working-class people, decent solid tradesmen, who live and work in town, and a small group of wealthy upper-class elite made of old money and industry barons who live in fancy manors. It is very white, most people there have never seen a person of color. In that year, when the nation was just coming out of the Depression, the upper class has eroded slightly, the hits to their businesses shaking their formerly untouchable status and power. The regular people are struggling to keep going in the wake of the crashed economy, many of them making their livings working for the downsizing rich families.
I like the idea of this town, a place where a comfortable order of things was shaken by the changes brought on by the Depression. I wonder if there could possibly be more stories told about it. It might just be a town full of family secrets and placid facades that conceal mysteries to be unraveled. I do so love mysteries. This might be worth exploring, to develop further figures in this town, to interweave the threads and make them richer.
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no subject
Date: 2013-02-10 09:12 pm (UTC)I think there were a lot of places like this. Small proto-cities where the upper crust ended up moving out of the city as businesses closed up and the shift away from the glitz and glamour of the roaring twenties and rococo moved to the pastoral charm of the open spaces evident in the 40's and 50's, and as the rise of the automobile led to a new commuting working class. Places like Brockton, Fall River, Lowell, where as the gentry moved out, they collapsed internally and struggle even now with the economic conditions.
1934 is a wonderful turning point, with the economy, with the class structure, with politics, and with what the notion of american dream encompassed. Definitely a time of internal and external social pressures that can feed into stories of desperation, debauchery, deceit, or dissonance.