One of the first decisions an author has to make when starting a book is the names of the characters. Since my mysteries take place in Italy, most of the characters are, of course, Italian. To state the obvious, they have Italian names. The average reader, on learning that I spent nine years in Italy, assumes that the names I picked were those of friends and acquaintances from that time, but that's not the case. Instead, many of them came from this book.
I grew up in Mount Vernon, New York, which at that time had a large Italian-American community, and I had a bunch of friends whose last names ended in vowels, some of them first-generation Americans. So it seemed perfectly logical that I would use their names in my books. The main secondary character in my first book, Cold Tuscan Stone, is Commissario Conti, who was named for my closest buddy in elementary school. Also in that book was Detective LoGuercio, a name borrowed from a good friend from high school who ran track and had the nickname, “the Roman Racer.” Detective DiMaio, the cop in Murder Most Unfortunate, got his moniker from my senior class president, and Caterina Scuderi from the same book was also a classmate. There are more examples, but I'll stop there.
I had some fun with other names in that first book, something you might call bilingual humor. One of the secondary characters, a rather portly murder suspect, is named Polpetto, which in Italian means meat ball. Another character in that book was a guy called Malandro, which the Italian speakers among my readers may not have caught, since it is a Portuguese word meaning crook or bad guy, which goes along with the story. (I spent seven years in Brazil and encountered a few malandros.)
Also in the third book Rick, my protagonist, meets Betta Innocenti, who becomes a regular in the series. I gave her that last name because I was always fascinated by its history. In the middle ages babies were left at the doorsteps of nunneries or foundling hospitals, like the famous one in Florence, and they were given the name Innocenti, “the innocents.” So even today, anyone you meet in Italy with that name is likely descended from one of those babies.
But what about the most important character in my books, cowboy boot-wearing protagonist Rick Montoya? As far as his last name, I wanted a good and proper New Mexico name, since that is where his father is from. I was living there at the time, so I pulled out my Albuquerque phone book – remember phone books? – and started looking. There was page upon page of Montoyas, and most of them are descended from one of the first families to come into the area from old Mexico and settle along the Rio Grande. So it was a keeper. But his first name took some more thought. I wanted a name that worked in Italian, so Rick, or Riccardo, as his Italian friends call him, worked well. Curiously the name is spelled differently in Spanish, with one c. In To Die in Tuscany, book seven, the Spanish characters, family and associates of the murder victim, play an important part in the plot. When Rick talks with them in Spanish (he is tri-lingual, after all), they call him Ricardo rather than Riccardo in the dialogue. Very few of my readers spotted that.
The Tease In two weeks I'll get away from the writing stuff and talk about my realization that Italians, and especially Romans, look at time and history differently from us Americans. (Or is it we Americans? Being a writer, I should know.)
I love that your character names came from Mt. Vernon, and laughed recalling the real people from high school who had those names! Thanks, David.