New Orleans and Sookie Stackhouse: Hadley's apartment

Sookie's main connection in the books to New Orleans happens because the death of her cousin Hadley. Hadley as it turns out had become a vampire and was romantically involved with Queen Sophie Anne at he time of her final death.

Sookie travels to New Orleans in the book, Definitely Dead to close out Hadley's apartment after she learns of her death and goes to settle the estate.

In yet another one of the many charming mistakes in the Sookie books, we get 2 different stories about Sookie's previous visits to New Orleans.

In Club Dead , Book Three: Sookie visits with family as a young girl.

The newer tourists were the ones who wanted to rub elbows with the undead; patronize a vampire bar, visit a vampire prostitute, watch a vampire sex show. This was what I'd heard; I hadn't been to New Orleans since I was little. My mother and father had taken my brother, Jason, and me. That would have been before I was seven, because that's when they died.Mama and Daddy died nearly twenty years before vampires had appeared on network television to announce the fact that they were actually present among us, an announcement that had followed on the Japanese development of synthetic blood that actually maintained a vampire's life without the necessity of drinking from humans.

In Definitely Dead, Book Six: Sookie visits in high school and says it's her first and only visit to New Orleans.

It was raining, and it was four in the morning. I wondered if there was an IHOP anywhere nearby. I'd been to one, once. It had been wonderful. That had been on my only previous trip to New Orleans, when I'd been in high school. We'd been to the aquarium and the slave museum and the church on Jackson Square, the St. Louis Cathedral. It had been wonderful to see something new, to think about all the people who had passed through the same area, what they must have looked like in the clothes of their time.

While we were recently in New Orleans, we took some walks in the French Quarter to try to find some of the locations Sookie might have visited in the books. We took some of the location descriptions from the book and just for fun tried to find something in real life that is similar.

The first thing was to find a home that was close to what Charlaine describes as Amelia and Hadley's duplex in NOLA.

From Definitely Dead

We were on a quiet residential street when the limousine pulled to a curb and stopped.
"Your cousin's apartment," Mr. Cataliades said as Diantha opened the door.

I was facing a six-foot wall with an opening for the driveway. It was hard to tell, in the uncertain glow of a streetlight, what lay within, but it seemed to be a small courtyard with a very tight circular drive. In the middle of the drive was an explosion of greenery, though I couldn't discern the individual plants. In the right front corner was a tool shed. There was a two-story building forming an L. To take advantage of the depth of the lot, the building was oriented with the L inverted. Right next door was a similar building, at least as far as I could tell. Hadley's was painted white, with dark green shutters....

There was a broad roofed gallery running below the windows and doors of the second floor, which would provide shade for people sitting inside on the ground floor.

We also believe that the apartment is located in the French Quarter as Sookie says she can hear jazz music from Bourbon Street and she say's it is located on Chloe Street.

Now the style , design and description is JUST exactly right for the more residential streets of the Quarter, the one thing that was a problem was finding a house with a courtyard big enough for a circular drive, above you'll see a photo of one of my favorite or all the homes we saw and very close to the description.

Now, there is no Chloe street in the French Quarter but there is a Conti street and matter of fact the house in this picture is located newar Conti and Burgundy street.

I'll have a few more New Orleans sites for you later this week.