Pure Colorado – As a Fictional Setting?

By Catherine Dilts

When creating a setting for a work of fiction, some authors invent their world from scratch. Others place their characters in recognizable cities, down to the street names and businesses. Much depends on the genre.

Thrillers and spy novels demand worlds ripped from the news headlines. Cozy mystery authors typically develop their own small town or neighborhood settings. They might be based on a real place, but everything about the location is fictionalized.

Most of my fiction falls in the cozy category, set in a Colorado you won’t find on a map. The Rose Creek Mystery series is set in Oklahoma, a state I lived in for nearly a decade, but the town is pure invention. Some of my short stories are deliberately vague about their locations.

In a new series, The Ninja Grandparent Placement Mysteries, my co-author/daughter and I are going the realistic route. The story premise is ridiculous, so maybe we needed to be grounded in reality in one aspect of the novels. How realistic? We use Colorado Springs as the setting.

The main location for much of the action is the former UnionPrinter’s Home. We reimagined the renovations that are actually taking place, turning it into an idyllic senior retirement home with an atrium connecting it to a gym. But the elegant red sandstone and white limestone exterior remains the same.

Which brings me to a recent visit to the iconic Denver Restaurant Casa Bonita. For those of you unfamiliar with Casa Bonita, it is not merely a restaurant. It is an event. An adventure. The pink building is a Colorado landmark.

Generations of Colorado residents were heart-sick when the world-famous restaurant declared bankruptcy and closed in 2021, a victim of the pandemic. It’s a part of our heritage. Like the mountains to the west, it seemed to occupy a permanent place in the landscape.

No ordinary restaurateur or entrepreneur could afford to purchase the building and restore it to its former glory. Who could possibly come to the rescue? This had to be a labor of love.

Casa Bonita was featured in a 2003 episode of the animated TV show South Park. When they learned the landmark was going away, Colorado natives and South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker began the effort to purchase the restaurant in the fall of 2021.

Casa Bonita reopened in June of 2023. My family went this month to celebrate a granddaughter’s birthday. All of us had been to the restaurant years ago. We were eager to see the changes.

It looked almost exactly the same! This is a good thing. We were going for nostalgia. It would have been tragic if the South Park boys had remodeled the interior into something unfamiliar. And the exterior is the same pink, with the fountain and the bell tower on top.

One important thing changed: the food was vastly improved. The previous menu was infamous.  As my son-in-law noted, it didn’t matter what you ordered; your plate would be drowned in orange nacho cheese sauce. But you didn’t go there for the food. This time, we were seated and given menus! Our table had lighting that allowed you to see what you were eating. Always a good sign.

One other thing changed. Matt and Trey are determined to pay Casa Bonita employees a living wage. So the price was a bit daunting. But this isn’t a restaurant you pop in on for a quick lunch. It’s a special-event sort of experience. Cliff divers, puppet shows, a live mariachi band, Black Bart’s cave, and more. All those folks have to be paid!

Whether a writer uses actual locations, or invents a world from scratch, may depend on the genre. Will Casa Bonita find its way into my fiction writing? My co-author and daughter Merida Bass agrees, the Casa Bonita experience deserves to be included in a future Ninja Grandparent Placement Mysteries novel. One of our lonely grandparents in need of a family could make the hour drive and wind up at the famous Denver restaurant!

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Grandpa’s New Year’s Relocation is available now at Basecamp Books and Adventure, and in the usual places online. Grandma’s Valentine Abduction is coming February 28th! Available for pre-order now.