Would Sherlock Be Sherlock?

There’s a movement afoot in my part of the world to rename things. It started with the city of El Segundo renaming its portion of Sepulveda Blvd to Pacific Coast Highway.

Let me orient you a bit. Sepulveda is a very long, generally North/South street that runs for miles and miles. The portion I’m going to talk about starts just south of LAX. From there it runs through the cities of El Segundo, Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach and Redondo Beach, in that order.

For as long as I’ve lived in the area, the street has been named Sepulveda until it reaches Hermosa where it becomes PCH. Everyone’s used to that. Then El Segundo decided to change its portion (about 2 miles) to PCH as well. That means as you travel south from LAX you go from Sepulveda Blvd to PCH back to Sepulveda and finally to PCH again. For us locals it’s not an issue. It’s the same street we’ve always known. But I would think that could be very confusing for visitors to the area.

As far as I can tell the reason for the change is El Segundo felt they weren’t getting enough credit for being a beach city so they thought the name change would signal to everyone far and wide that they were a city along the coast.

Now a realtor in Manhattan Beach has started a campaign to rename the portion of the city east of Sepulveda (that darn street again!) from East Manhattan to Manhattan Knolls. The portions of the city west of that darn street have cute names like the Sand Section, the Hill Section and the Tree Section. These aren’t official designations, just convenient names used by residents and real estate agents to tell someone approximately where a house is located.

Doesn’t make a darn bit of difference to me what these places are called. It doesn’t change how I view them. I’m not that sure it’ll make much difference other people either.

But all of this kerfuffle did get me to thinking about characters and their names. Would Sherlock Holmes be the same character if he had a more ordinary name like John Smith or Ben Rogers? (I pulled those names out of the air; no offense to anyone with those names.) Would Sir Arthur Conan Doyle have given Sherlock the same personality if he’d given him a different name? I have no idea which came first for him, the name or the personality traits of the character, or if they arrived at the same time. I suspect, though, that he knew his character’s personality traits fairly early on.

I know a character doesn’t truly come alive for me until I give him/her at least a first name. But, before that, I generally have some idea of the character’s personality. I do try to pick a name that goes along with them.

For my first book, Fatal Brushstroke, I named the murder victim that my main character finds in her garden, Hester Bouquet. This was a bit of an homage to Hyacinth Bucket, the main character in the British TV show, Keeping Up Appearances. Hester has some of the same personality traits as Hyacinth—she’s always worried about appearances and what people think of her and her family. If you remember, Hyacinth Bucket insisted on having her name pronounced “Bouquet”.

Probably the only character I’ve created in my books where the personality didn’t come first was my main character, Aurora Anderson. I just love the name Aurora so I wanted to use it and Aurora Amelia Anderson had a nice ring to it.

So here are a couple questions for all of you writers out there. Does it matter what you name your characters? Does the name influence the personality traits you give them or is it the other way around?

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In other news, the phantom seems to have left my car. (Knock on wood!) No more mysteriously opened windows. It was pretty hot when the “peculiarities” happened so I figure the phantom didn’t want to be left in the car with the windows rolled up. Now that it’s cooler, it’s happier. That’s what I’m going with, anyway.