While doing my due diligence for a novel I want to write, I came up on something. If I know that a mail drop location is at a certain address, now, in 2015, but want to know if it was there in 1988 for example, how would you go about researching this? Even if the company exists, it might not have had the property lease in that specific year. If I were to do a more open-ended approach, and want to know where in a city like Miami there's a mail drop, anywhere will do, how do you research it? Does it even strictly matter if it's not a monument, a public library, museum, or famous local joint etc and the specific address isn't critical to the plot?
JMO, but unless it's a well-known landmark, or a neighborhood/area where this "thing" could not possibly have been, I put it wherever it works for the story. Seriously, who will know other than perhaps a handful of people who live there - and how many of them will be reading your book - and how many of them will care enough to raise a stink - and how many others will be anal enough to listen to them?
That's my thought too. But do agents and publishers double-check things like that just as matter of course, with real-life settings?
Are you talking about a single "mail drop"? Give me some more information and I'll see if there isn't a way to do it.
I wouldn't know how deeply they check into the minutiae. I would think, just from a logical POV, that they wouldn't get too concerned since it's a novel. The big stuff, as mentioned, yes, but otherwise? Doubtful.
As part of my job I sometimes have to look at land contamination issues which involves looking at past uses of a site; this includes looking at historical OS maps and previous owners/ tenants etc. In the UK I used http://www.envirocheck.co.uk/envirocheck/
