"What’s in a Place?" by Giles Blunt

The narrator of Bad Juliet announces on page one that his story takes place a hundred years ago “in a transcendentally peculiar town surrounded by the mountains in upstate New York.” Like any student of Eng. Lit. I’d long been aware of the importance of place in classic fiction, but it was only upon the completion of this latest novel that I realized how crucial settings have been in my own work. Previous books had featured a Northern Ontario police station, a New York monastery, and even an Arctic “drift station.” But none of these enthralled me the way Saranac Lake in the year 1916 did.

While on vacation in the Adirondacks I had read a richly illustrated book that told how a tuberculosis sanitarium had been founded there in the 1880s. The word “sanitarium” has always captured my attention, but the history of this one is unique. Founded and partly funded by wealthy philanthropists, it was also a research centre, and an engine of social reform. It rapidly became world famous, attracting patients from overseas as well as from all walks of life. This meant that it drew far more patients than it could take in. Remarkably, local residents stepped in to help, altering their houses to accommodate the overflow. Their patients were treated by the sanitarium doctors, and overseen by several agencies. Glassed-in porches were added to these houses, so that patients could sit out in the sun and the fresh mountain air in all weathers, including temperatures that regularly hit -30C. Photos show them lined up on porches in their “cure chairs” like passengers on a Cunard liner.

I also read that one of their patients was a young woman had survived the sinking of the Lusitania, only to be soon struck with TB. I think that was the moment I knew I’d be writing a novel set in this place and time. Why was she on the Lusitania? Why did she come to Saranac Lake and not one of the European sanitaria? What would happen to her now?

I knew little about tuberculosis but everything I now read amped up my excitement. TB had long lost its Romantic glow. Highly contagious, it was killing upward of 90,000 people a year in the States, and was known to thrive in conditions of poverty, dirt, and overcrowding. Consequently, it carried great stigma. But it killed the wealthy too. A diagnosis could mean the end of one’s employment, one’s friendships, and even one’s marriage. Imagine the fear. The isolation. 

Pulmonary tuberculosis predominantly struck down people between the ages of 16 to 34. Here they were, thrown together in close proximity—lonely, scared, and feverish—facing the spectre of an early death. If ever there was a hothouse for love and treachery, this was it.