ON HURRICANES

Or: YOU CANNOT MAKE THIS STUFF UP

It’s a love story. A thriller. A tale of fear and friendship and family. It’s about the power of nature and the power of hard work. And of how the love of reading and writing brings us all together.


David and McKenna, off on their once in a lifetime romantic wedding adventure. Back home in Houston, their dear Murder By the Book in the path of the massive and destructive Hurricane Ike. The valiant bookstore owners, fighting nonstop and all night to save their precious inventory from rising water and howling wind. David and McKenna struggling to return, sheltered along the way by faithful friends.


And when the sun finally came up and the lights came on? All was back to–somewhat—normal.

Hank chatted with McKenna to get the whole scoop.

Hank: Start from the beginning. You had just had a lovely jetset wedding…

McKenna Jordan: Yes! David (Thompson) the assistant manager and I were on our honeymoon in Paris when we heard about the hurricane. The wedding was September 6 in Scotland –so when we left for the wedding we were worried about Hurricane Gustav. When we heard it went elsewhere, we were thrilled.

H: So you got married…


M: Yes, we got married, and went to Paris for the honeymoon. And it was there we heard on CNN that Ike was headed our way. And it was big and bad and ugly.


H: What did you do?


M: So we started getting concerned, and we were tracking its progress as often as we could. We were scheduled to fly home Friday the 12, they day it hit. We tried to switch to an earlier flight so we could get here, but hey unfortunately they wouldn’t let us to do that. Our flight was scheduled to get in 40 minutes before the airport had closed. But then they cancelled the flight altogether.


H: So were you trapped in Paris?


M: Well, David and I are friends with Alafair Burke and her husband Sean (Simpson), so I called them at 4am to see if we could switch our flights to New York so we could be in the US when the hurricane hit.
So we switched flights to New York—and they were gracious enough to put us up for 4 days! And then at we were able to get one of the first flights back into Houston on Monday.


H: Had you been in contact with everyone back home?


M: Oh, yes. We were up all night Friday, phoning home every 30 minutes to check on my mother and grandmother, and the store’s owners, Martha and Les Farrington.


H: What did they say?


M: Cell phone use for them was limited, but they said they had taped the windows and put plastic sheeting over the books and picked everything up off the floor in case of flooding. Actually Les wound up spending the night here Friday. He used towels to mop up by hand, and then he’d go out into the storm and wring them out, all by hand, all to keep the water out. With the storm, wet vacs were not an option.


Les is the one who kept the store in such great shape. As a result of his hard work, we don’t have to replace the carpet! Fortunately the front windows were all intact and no books were damaged. So we were fortunate as we could be. Of course we didn’t have electricity for 8 days! So that made sales tricky.


H: Was the store open? When?


M: On Tuesday, David and I came up and we were open for business for anyone who wanted to come in and buy books. Seventy per cent of the city didn’t have electricity, so people were trying to find generators and gasoline, more important things in this case, of course. But we were here and were able to ring people up. We had no electricity, and so no air conditioning, but the weather was dry and cool on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, and it was lovely. So we didn’t need the AC. And it was good for drying out the carpet!


It had definitely flooded, and there was no way to suck the water out. We got a generator Wednesday, at which point we could get fans on. And we got a computer up and running, which helped with people being able to call and we could look up their orders. We took an old plug in phone from 1979 and had that here so we could accept calls, and I think we did pretty well. Don Winslow actually signed on Wednesday! And we had about 30 people!


H: That’s amazing. Those are some devoted readers!


M: I think at that point, people were ready to have something to do. No one could go to work, no school, no electricity, so it was nice for our regular customers to get back into their regular routines, even a book signing.
We hadn’t adjusted the time of the event, so it was almost completely dark!

But he was a real trooper, so he appreciated the turnout. It was a fun evening—stressful! But fun. We took him out for hot dogs and hamburgers at a local restaurant—all they had was their grill.


By Friday it was hot! And we were thankful for the fans being on. It was really uncomfortable again, no electricity. We were all dreading Saturday. But then--the electricity was on again! And we all let out a sigh of relief.


H: What books did you sell during the storm?


M: Interred With Their Bones, just came out in paperback. That was a big book for us last year. The other one’s The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. It’s not a mystery but an excellent book.


(David? What else did we sell?) Oh yes, the new George Pelecanos. We love that.

It has been a long three and a half weeks. We just got electricity back in our home this past Thursday, a few days after the storm. We’ve been living out of our luggage since Tuesday! Also we had David Handler here for a signing and he was scheduled to stay with us...so we were hoping to have electricity for that! And it came just in time.


H: Is your house okay?


M: Our house is fine, we had a tree lean—fall—on the corner of the garage. Now it’s been cut down, and there’s a tarp over the hole.


H: So. You go off for a glamorous wedding and honeymoon. Talk about unpredictable…


M: Yes, we’ll never forget it—it’s definitely a trial by fire on this whole marriage thing. And we came through with flying colors!


Here’s the other interesting element. The store owners retired in December, and they were trying to get through the year without any drama. And then this! I’m the one buying the store, and I’m hoping we don’t have another hurricane under my watch. But now at least we have the experience.


H: Any words to your fans and friends?


M: We were swamped with trying to catch up…overwhelmed with all the work, but what was a constant pleasure daily was getting the emails of support from customers and authors, people checking in on us. We even had an author offer to help, offered to fly in from Florida! Everyone has been wonderful. Customers have brought us food, and anything we needed, even gasoline for our generator. It’s been such a nice show of support for the store and everyone concerned.


H: So—does the wedding fade into the background?


M: David and I were pretty surprised. Some customers came in, and the first thing they said was Congratulations! And we’re like--for what?

H: We’re glad you’re home and happy—and we’ll all come visit when we can! Meanwhile—check out Murder By the Book on their website. (Since 1980, where a good crime is had by all!)


(MURDER BY THE BOOK is one of the nation's oldest & largest mystery specialty bookstores, established in 1980 by Martha Farrington. The store stocks over 25,000 books -- new & used, hardbacks & paperbacks, first editions, collectibles, gift items, mystery magazines, and more. They host dozens of the hottest mystery and crime authors for book signing events every year and have welcomed everyone from Dick Francis to P. D. James, Sue Grafton to Robert Crais, Michael Connelly to Patricia Cornwell, James Lee Burke to Daniel Silva.)




And watch this space for more news on bookstores we love.

ON ASSIGNMENTS

"Once upon a time, there was a Martian named Valentine Michael Smith..."

*** the first line of "Stranger in a Strange Land" by Robert Heinlein

HANK: On the way to work this morning, I said to my husband--what books did you read in college? What books did you love?

You know Jonathan. He gave me that droll look. And he said: In college, I didn't read books for pleasure.

That's no doubt why he powered through law school, and my college career was spotty. At best.

I practically majored in a field the college did not know it was offering: listening to records and reading the books I wanted to.

Yes, I did devour some of the books that were assigned. Hemingway. Fitzgerald. Dickens. Austen. Tolkien's Ring books and CS Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet Trilogy were part of one course I took in my oh-so-liberal college. I think the class was called "Exploring Allegory." I also took the invitation-only "Seminar in Alice in Wonderland" which my mother still can't believe was an actual college course.

I was still devoted to Sherlock Holmes, of course. And all the Agatha Christie novels. But they weren't cool for school. So I was a closet mystery reader.

Was Catcher in the Rye college? I started talking and thinking like Holden the moment I met him--although my own language was carefully censored, I remember. (And I still think about him, every time I'm on the subway. Carrying the fencing equipment.) I forget who told me recently--the intial copies ofcatcher came out with the famously shy Salinger's photo on the back. He apparently freaked, and demanded all the copies be destroyed.

Stranger in a Strange Land. I just read something about that, how in revisionist criticism it's almost reviled as a screed against women, a pedantic rant. I don't remember that part. I remember "groking" and how that was one of them most evocative and descriptive made up words I'd ever heard. I still say--sometimes--yes, I grok that. And sometimes, people understand me.

I think Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was just after college. That has stuck with me, profoundly. As a writer, the search for the understanding of quality haunts me every day. I found this copy in Amazon, as you can tell by the 'look inside' gizmos, which won't work here. But I really think my copy was pink.

I was so taken with Hallie's topic on our favorite books as kids--now I wonder, what books did you love in college?

ROBERTA: Okay, I'm drawing a blank on this one. I was busy making trouble I guess. And after wandering through biochemistry and art history, I finally settled on Romance language and literature as my major. So I was plugging through light reading such as The Stranger--in French!

HALLIE: I confess, I'm with Jonathan. College was a black hole for me as far as reading for pleasure goes. I’d read all the time through high school, but in college it was as if I’d undergone aversive conditioning… all those dense history and political science texts I ploughed through made reading painful. In four years I might have made it through “Exodus” and “Hawaii” and “Dr. Zhivago” but that’s about it.

When I finished school and could read just for the fun of it, I ploughed through all of Agatha Christie’s and Dorothy Sayers’ novels and short stories. Graduated to P. D. James’ “An Unsuitable Job for a Woman” with the delightful Cordelia Grey, and read everything else James wrote the minute it came out. Re-read all of Sherlock Holmes. Then I wallowed in the library mystery stacks and indiscriminately grabbed books, some of which I made it through.

When I got back to ‘real’ literature it was to discover Amy Tan (“The Joy Luck Club”) and Dorothy Allison (“Bastard Out of Carolina”) and Barbara Kingsolver (“The Bean Trees”) and Carolyn Chute (“The Beans of Egypt Maine”) and John Irving (“A Song for Owen Meany”). And to re-read Alice in Wonderland and my favorite Sci-Fi novels (“Stranger in a Strange Land”, “A Wrinkle in Time”). And to rediscover the poems of e. e. cummings.

It should come as no surprise that I also got hooked on food writers—Calvin Trillin (“Alice, Let’s Eat) and Laurie Colwin (“Home Cooking”) and Ruth Reichel (“Tender at the Bone”), just for example.

JAN: During college, I think I was busy validating myself as a wild thing by reading books like: The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig, On The Road by Jack Kerouac, The Electric Koolaid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe, One Flew Over the Cuckoos by Ken Kesey, and Kurt Vonnegut's short story collections.

I shifted out of my hippy theme years into a literary phase. This involved reading everything by Charles Dickens, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky,Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Thomas Hardy and Somerset Maugham.

Then for a while there, I got into reading every single book by Barbara Pym. Her novels were always set around some sort of English vicarage. There was no real theme here, I just really enjoyed her books.

RO: I was about to say that I was with Roberta...having too much..uh, fun..in college to remember what I read. Then Jan reminded me of all the hippie-type books I read. Vonnegut must be like Disney. Every generation gets to discover - and claim - him.

The cobwebs have cleared a bit and I'm probably getting the decades confused (all that sangria, I guess..)but I remember loving Small Changes by Marge Piercy, Something Happened by Joseph Heller..everything by Richard Yates.

I'll probably wake up in the middle of the night and say something like..Birdy! I loved that!! And wisely, my husband will sleep through the outburst.

HANK: I'm going to ask my interns--all attending colleges across New England--what they're reading now. After you tell us what you read during those four (okay, or so) years, or if you read at all, care to predict what the students will say?

AND COMING UP LATER THIS WEEK! A visit from current double New York Times bestselling author Charlaine Harris, whose darkly hilarious novels are getting even more fans after the HBO blockbuster True Blood made Sookie Stackhouse a household name.

And that's not all--we'll chat with the new owners of Murder by the Book, the beloved bookstore--and how they stood up to Hurricane Ike.

But wait, there's more. Come chat with Lori Andrews, whose newest mystery Immunity is just out. Her real life? Is just as exciting than any fiction.