Santa Teresa has been used by several authors as the name of an invented city.

Ross Macdonald

Santa Teresa was created by

Ross Macdonald Ross Macdonald was the main pseudonym used by the American-Canadian writer of crime fiction Kenneth Millar (; December 13, 1915 – July 11, 1983). He is best known for his series of hardboiled novels set in Southern California and featur ...

as a fictionalised version of

Santa Barbara, California Santa Barbara ( es, Santa Bárbara, meaning "Saint Barbara") is a coastal city in Santa Barbara County, California, of which it is also the county seat. Situated on a south-facing section of coastline, the longest such section on the West Coas ...

, in his mystery ''

The Moving Target ''The Moving Target'' is a detective novel by writer Ross Macdonald, first published by Alfred A. Knopf in April 1949. The novel ''The Moving Target'' introduces the detective Lew Archer, who was eventually to figure in a further seventeen nove ...

'' (1949). He used it again in several others of his works, including ''

The Galton Case ''The Galton Case'' is the eighth novel in the Lew Archer series by Ross Macdonald. It was published in the US in 1959 by Alfred A. Knopf, Knopf and in 1960 by Cassell (publisher), Cassel & Co in the UK. The book has been widely translated, altho ...

'' (1959), ''The Instant Enemy'' (1968), and ''The Underground Man'' (1971).

Sue Grafton

In the 1980s, the writer

Sue Grafton Sue Taylor Grafton (April 24, 1940 – December 28, 2017) was an American author of detective novels. She is best known as the author of the "alphabet series" (''"A" Is for Alibi'', etc.) featuring private investigator Kinsey Millhone in the fic ...

began using a fictional Santa Teresa as the setting for her novels featuring her lead character

Kinsey Millhone Kinsey Millhone is a fictional character created by the American author Sue Grafton (1940–2017) for her "alphabet mysteries" series of 25 best-selling novels which debuted in 1982. Millhone, a former police officer turned private investigator, a ...

, a fictional female private investigator. Millhone is the protagonist of Grafton's "alphabet mysteries" series of novels. Grafton chose the setting as a tribute to Macdonald, an acknowledged influence. In the Kinsey Millhone version, the town has a population of 85,000 and has a small airport. Nearby, Grafton describes a fictional “luxury residential development” laid out on a sprawling expanse of land called Horton Ravine (Hope Ranch in Santa Barbara), which “once belonged to one family, but is now divided into million-dollar parcels”. Although the fictional private investigator

acknowledges that “rich is rich”, she contrasts “‘new’ money” Horton Ravine to the “‘old’ money” graciousness of nearby Montebello, a thinly-disguised tribute to real-life

Montecito, California Montecito (Spanish for "Little mountain") is an unincorporated town and census-designated place in Santa Barbara County, California.McCormack, Don (1999). ''McCormack's Guides Santa Barbara and Ventura 2000''. Mccormacks Guides. p. 58. . Located ...

. Some significant locations in Santa Barbara (for example the police station, courthouse and marina) remain in the same location in 'Santa Teresa'. Most street names and some localities are given different but often very similar names. The table below gives a correspondence between named locations in 'Santa Teresa' and their actual names in Santa Barbara, drawn from a reading of the detailed descriptions the narrator

gives of her movements around Santa Teresa.

Roberto Bolaño

Roberto Bolaño Roberto Bolaño Ávalos (; 28 April 1953 – 15 July 2003) was a Chilean novelist, short-story writer, poet and essayist. In 1999, Bolaño won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize for his novel ''Los detectives salvajes'' (''The Savage Detectives' ...

set his novel ''

2666 ''2666'' is the last novel by Roberto Bolaño. It was released in 2004, a year after Bolaño's death. It is over 1100 pages long in Spanish, and almost 900 in its English translation, it is divided into five parts. An English-language translat ...

'' (2004) primarily in a northern Mexican city called Santa Teresa. The novel features female homicides as central theme, inspired largely by

female homicides in Ciudad Juárez Female (symbol: ♀) is the sex of an organism that produces the large non-motile ova (egg cells), the type of gamete (sex cell) that fuses with the male gamete during sexual reproduction. A female has larger gametes than a male. Females a ...

. This fictional city had already appeared in his earlier novel ''

The Savage Detectives ''The Savage Detectives'' (Spanish: ''Los Detectives Salvajes'') is a novel by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño published in 1998. Natasha Wimmer's English translation was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2007. The novel tells the st ...

''.

Notes and references

{{DEFAULTSORT:Santa Teresa (Fictional City) Fictional populated places in California