In Binghamton, a Fictional Death Becomes a Real Tradition

Every Sept. 1, readers of “Thirty-Three Cecils” gather at a neighborhood pub to remember two men who never existed — and to celebrate the strange way a novel became part of a city.

BINGHAMTON, N.Y. — On Sept. 1, people make their way to the Belmar Pub, order drinks and raise their glasses to two men who died years ago.

There is only one complication. Neither man ever existed.

They are characters from Thirty-Three Cecils, a novel by Everett De Morier whose fictional world is rooted so firmly in Binghamton and Erie, Pa., that some readers have begun treating its characters and locations almost as pieces of local history.

The annual gathering, known as Thirty-Three Cecils Day, is now entering its fifth year — an unusual literary tradition that began with a single reader and eventually earned recognition from Binghamton City Hall.

The story started in 2022, when Mike Pedley, a reader moved by the novel's final pages, went to the Belmar on Sept. 1, the date on which two of the book's central characters, Walker Roe and Riley “Dutch” Dutcher, meet their fate.

Pedley ordered three beers, echoing a moment from the novel, and quietly toasted the characters. Someone photographed him and sent the image to Mr. De Morier.

The gesture might have ended there. Instead, it grew.

Mr. De Morier and his publisher returned the following year. Other readers began joining them, transforming an individual tribute into an informal literary pilgrimage. Strangers arrived already sharing a vocabulary of characters, scenes and places.

By 2025, Mayor Jared Kraham had officially proclaimed Sept. 1 Thirty-Three Cecils Day in Binghamton.

The distinction between the fictional Binghamton and the real one had become unusually thin.

A Novel Rooted in Real Places

That may be partly because Thirty-Three Cecils does not take place in some invented town. Its characters move through recognizable streets and landmarks in Binghamton and Erie.

The Belmar is real. The roads are real. The geography is real.

For readers, those details can make the book feel less like an imagined world than a story that happened just beyond their view.

Walk past the Belmar after reading the novel and it is possible to understand the impulse to look toward the entrance and half expect Dutch to emerge.

That relationship between fiction and place has continued expanding.

Fans have named pets after characters. A local brewery created a beer inspired by the book, and a signature cocktail followed. The production company Gopher Ink took its name from the novel. Readers created artwork, and the fictional universe eventually extended into a children's book, 100 Cecils.

Mr. De Morier has encouraged the blurring of those boundaries.

In 2024, he pledged to bicycle roughly 264 miles between Binghamton and Erie, retracing the journey Dutch undertakes in the novel. The trip transformed another piece of fictional geography into something tangible: the author physically traveling through the landscape he had previously traveled only through his character.

When Readers Take Ownership

Literature has always inspired pilgrimages. Admirers visit Ernest Hemingway's Key West home, walk the streets associated with Sherlock Holmes and travel to locations made famous by beloved novels.

But Thirty-Three Cecils Day is slightly different.

It was not conceived as a tourism campaign or publishing promotion. It began with a reader who wanted to commemorate something that had affected him emotionally, even though he understood perfectly well that it had never happened.

Other readers understood the impulse. Eventually, so did the city.

That may explain why the tradition has endured. At some point, stories stop belonging entirely to the people who write them. Readers attach their own memories to them. Fictional places become associated with real ones. Imaginary characters acquire histories inside the minds of people who cared about them.

Every Sept. 1, that peculiar transformation plays out again at a neighborhood pub in Binghamton.

Walker and Dutch died on that date in Thirty-Three Cecils.

Their readers, however, refused to let that be the end of the story.