Naming the Characters in My Mysteries

My college roommate Earl Shreckengast and I are still friends fifty years after we attended Penn State University – Earl in political science, I in English.

does a fictional character reside in these eyes? Portrait detail of Charles William Bell (1798), by Sir Thomas Lawrence, Musée de Beaux-arts de Valence, photographed by Quentin Verwaerde, flickr.com

Earl grew up on a farm in a small valley about 30 miles east of the school. I was a faculty brat whose dad taught biology and mycology at Penn State. Earl once told me (and I don’t think he was pulling my leg) how he got his first and middle names. His father, Noah, was driving Earl’s mother, Henrietta, to the hospital while she was in labor. Their car passed some roadside mailboxes with their owners’ names. One said Earl So-and-So, another was Kenneth Such-and-Such, so Noah called his son Earl Kenneth Shreckengast.

I’m a bit more purposeful in naming the characters in my mysteries. Names can reflect an era in history and a local or regional culture. They can provide insight into temperament and personal nature. Or they can just be for fun.

I wanted the main character in my 1830s mysteries to be Pennsylvania German (Pennsylvania Dutch) and thus an outsider in the clannish Scotch-Irish community where he serves as sheriff. I picked Stoltz, which means “pride” in German. For my protagonist’s given name I chose Gideon, since it has a 19th-century ring to it. Later I learned it means “feller” or “hewer” in Hebrew, as in one who cuts down his enemies: a strong man with a capacity for action, even violence when needed. Suitable indeed for a sheriff trying to uphold the law in what is essentially a frontier jurisdiction in tumultuous Jacksonian America.

Gideon is married to a woman named True Burns. True is an unusual first name, but some people (both male and female) bear it. Burns is Scotch-Irish. For me, her name suggests someone who is outspoken, determined, spirited, and honest. True is the only girl child in her family; her four brothers, who work in the local ironmaking industry, all have names beginning with the letter J. She calls them the Jaybirds, and they’re a rough-edged lot. Her brother Jesse is a tease, and not a kind one. To get a rise out of her, he tells True that if she’d been a boy, their parents would have given her another J name: Jehoshaphat, or Fatty for short.

In my first mystery, A Stranger Here Below, I bestowed the name Adonijah Thompson on a powerful, cruel ironmaster. Adonijah (the third syllable gets the accent) is an Old Testament name, and Thompson is a Scotch-Irish surname common in the county where I grew up, on which my fictional Colerain County is modeled. Another key character is Gideon’s friend and mentor, Judge Hiram Biddle. I got Hiram (Thompson, too) from our family doctor when I was a boy, Hiram Thompson Dale. Biddle is a well-known early Pennsylvania name.

I whimsically chose Horatio Foote for a quirky schoolmaster, also something of an outsider, who advises Gideon on local history and customs. Foote is my mother’s maiden name; it’s English. My character Horatio Foote hails originally from New England, Connecticut in particular, where my mother’s ancestors settled in the 1600s. Gideon’s deputy is Alonzo Bell, another of those curious 1800s names in which a relatively common last name is gussied up with a Latinate first name.

Among my other characters are William Jewell Jarrett, Gulliver “Gullie” Luck, and Liza Brodie (all villainous). There’s Peter Nolf, Jonas and Maria Trautmann, and Rebecca Kreidler (Pennsylvania Dutch, living in a valley being settled by folks in that cultural group, modeled somewhat on Sugar Valley, the narrow, mountain-locked valley my old roommate Earl came from). Gaither Brown, Hack Latimer, Chalmers Smythe, Melchior Dorfman, Ike Fye, Alvin Fish, Thaddeus Kirkwood, and Arabella McCracken Burns (True’s beloved witchy grandmother).

I think all these names are distinctive, with good recognition on the page to help the reader keep the characters straight.

An important character in the third mystery, Lay This Body Down, is a thirteen-year-old African American boy who fled from a plantation in Virginia. His original last name, Waller, matches that of his white enslaver, Tazewell Waller, who shows up in Colerain County in pursuit. The young man shuns any association with the name Waller, both to keep from being caught and because he hates his former “master.” Here’s a passage from the book:

He decided he needed a new name: Otis. Otis Johnson. His mama had called him Leo, after her own pa, a grandpa he had never met, but from now on he would be Otis. He liked how the name slipped off his tongue. The hiss at the end of it, like water running away over stones.