HOT HOT HOT

DEBORAH CROMBIE: The only things happy in my garden right now are these black-eyed Susans, which glow like mini-suns in the afternoon heat. 

Here in the DFW area, we'll be telling stories about this last week for a long time. Even with air-conditioning, it was miserable. We had three consecutive days at 109 F.

Going outside in the afternoons felt like walking into a furnace. Between 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. we were on power conservation alert, thermostats set to 80, no appliance usage. We held our breaths and watched the grid. (This graph is a good day. When the two lines converge, you're in big trouble.)

Cooking was impossible, and my beautiful garden burned to a crisp. (Except for the black-eyed Susans…)

But, for once, I was glad not to be in London, where it reached 104 F before the worst of the heat broke, and no one has air conditioning! (The ceremonial guards were allowed to shelter from the sun in the hottest part of the day, thank goodness. Can you imagine standing motionless in the sun in full uniform and bearskin hats?) 

Houses in the UK are built to retain heat, and most people don't even have fans. My daughter and I were in London during the (then) record-breaking heat wave of August 2003, so we've experienced it first-hand. It reached 38 C (100 F.) Our flat had one small table fan. We spent our days trying to find anywhere with AC (department stores!) and our evenings taking turns in cool baths or showers. The tube was unbearable and buses not much better. Grocery stores lost refrigeration and even the gelato shops closed because they couldn't keep the ice cream from melting. It was certainly a trip we didn't forget!

What's your most memorable extreme weather experience, REDs?

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Oh, so awful, and I am so sorry, dear Debs! It’s “only” in the mid-90s here, but yikes, it is tropical! (Except for in the tropics there’s rain, so yeah, no, no rain here.) I lug water to the gasping tomato plants, and watch everything droop the moment the sun hits 11 AM. We have AC in the bedroom, and in my office, but otherwise we stagger around complaining.  The fans just swirl the hot air. 

Weather story? Well, lots, but  a recent one. Yesterday I heard a huge sound outside, and I looked out the window and didn't see anything and I was getting ready to interview RUTH WARE at a bookstore (!!!)  so I ignored it.  But turned out, the wind had really picked up, and there were tornado warnings, and a HUGE TREE across the street from us had blown over. I mean huge, and was so big it was blocking our entire street! 

Because it’s all about me, :-), my first thought was–I CANNOT BE LATE! MOVE THAT TREE. 

JENN McKINLAY: Well, I feel for you, Debs, but only because of your sketchy power grid. I’m in AZ, and we’ve been well above 110 for a while now, but our power is solid and AC makes it tolerable. We do spend a lot of time listening to music (today was the 80’s playlist) while floating in the pool, which is fun so you manage.

Worst weather event? Hub and I had just bought our house and I was looking outside at our back fence because a storm was brewing when boom! An entire section exploded. A microburst hit it right in the middle, sending the boards everywhere. Soon afterwards, we put in a block wall, but it was my first experience with a microburst and I’m good, totally good, forever and ever. Amen.

DEBS: Jenn, I envy you your pool! I've even missing my old inflatable hot tub, because you could at least get wet...

LUCY BURDETTE: Hank, I hope you got out in time! Debs and Jenn, so sorry for those temps! Like Hank, we are in the 90’s so I dare not complain. I have been holing up in the bedroom to write.

The weather event that comes to my mind–or was it two separate times that I’ve conflated?--was a trip to Vermont to ski with our kids and another family. It was snowing hard and the road was covered with black ice and people were sliding off left and right. I finally prevailed with John to find a motel. We got the last crummy room and I was so grateful to be alive!

DEBS: Black ice, yikes! That's the worst!

HALLIE EPHRON: Micro-bursts and tornadoes sound terrifying. And without warning!

It’s going up to 95 today, so this sounds so nice but at the time, not so much: Some years ago we had so much snow during a Nor’easter that this was the view out my office window. 

The snow was literally over my head in the driveway. In parking lots it was shoveled and piled in corners, several stories high. 

RHYS BOWEN: Commiserations to Debs and anyone else in the heat. While everyone else was sweltering I've had a perfect week on the beach in San Diego with fourteen family members. Amazing house on the water, kayaking, paddle boarding and lots of food, drink and laughter. Oh and it was 75 degrees all week!

I can’t imagine how awful it’s been in England. I was there for a heatwave a few years ago. My hotel room had no AC and I had to take a cold shower and go to bed wet. And the Tube! Black hole of Calcutta does not describe it!

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: We are sweating it out here in southern Maine, where we’ve also been on a multi-day, 90F plus stretch. No AC at all in This Old House, but the heavy timber frame and plaster walls really help keep the heat out. I’ve been doing my extreme heat routine: open all the windows as soon as the temperature outside drops below the inside temp. Every room has at least one window fan sucking air in all night long. I set my alarm for 6am, pull the fans, shut the windows AND all the curtains, and go back to bed.

So far, the highest it’s gotten in the downstairs has been 78, which makes it cool enough to use table and box fans to feel comfortable. One of my tricks: a box fan at the head of the cellar stairs to bring up some of that 60F coolness! 

Objectively, I’ve had far more extreme cold weather events here, but the increasing number of degree days we’ve been experiencing worries me. I’m pretty sure I’m going to have to get some window AC units to make the place habitable in late July and August in the future.

DEBS: Cooling off at night makes all the difference. (Not happening here!)

How about you, readers? How are you faring in the heat?

Here's a little treat for everyone sweltering: the outtakes from the movie BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM, to HOT HOT HOT by Bina Mistry from the soundtrack. I cannot even think the words HOT HOT HOT without this song playing in my head.

In fact, if you've never seen the film, treat yourself to that, too. It's adorable. Catch a very young Kiera Knightly, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, and the always wonderful Parminder Nagra in her first big role.

Deborah Crombie's To Dwell in Darkness: A stunner!

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HALLIE EPHRON: FANFARE!! Our very own Deborah Crombie's new Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James novel, TO DWELL IN DARKNESS, is out today(!) and it's a stunner. I read the last page and just sat there, literally gasping for breath. And came away loaded with questions for Debs to answer.

Starting with... At the start of this book, almost every one of your returning characters is out of his (or her) element and profoundly uncomfortable or in scary new situations. Especially Duncan Kincaid. Challenging for you, having to create a whole new setting and supporting cast, but also fertile ground, yes?

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Yes, very challenging, but fun. I particularly liked getting to create a new team for Duncan at Camden’s Holborn Police Station.

HALLIE: Duncan Kincaid has a new foil, DI Jasmine Sidana — 35, single, smart, fiercely ambitious, prickly, starched, judgmental, complex… a teetotaler (do Brits use that word?)--if not the un-Duncan, certainly the un-Gemma. She is an inspired choice, so I’m wondering what inspired you to create her?

 DEBS: Ah, Jasmine. Duncan has always been a bit of a charmer. He’s used to everyone liking him. And as I wanted to throw him even more off balance, I thought why not give him a prickly female colleague who not only resents him taking what she thinks should have been her job, but just plain doesn’t like him, and see how he responds to that? And I liked the idea of a smart, ambitious female officer who didn’t fit into the “one of the blokes” mold. I don’t usually physically model my book characters on real people, but with Jasmine I was thinking of the British actress Parminder Nagra. Oh, I would love to see her play Jasmine Sidana!

HALLIE: The plot has some fantastic twists that I will not reveal, multiple narrators, and yet you manage to play fair with the reader. Do you know all the twists in advance, or do you come upon them as you write, and does that mean you have to go back and revise all the time (the way I do!)

DEBS: I did know most of the twists from the beginning, but I wasn’t sure how I could make them work. But instead of doing a lot of revising, I wrote REALLY SLOWLY, trying to figure out how to structure things.

 HALLIE: What was the hardest thing about this book to pull off… what was the easiest?

DEBS: The family scenes are always fun to write. I think there were too many difficult things to list! I had given Gemma a case with the idea that she would be able to make a parallel between the personality of the murderer in her case and the murderer in Duncan’s case, even though the crimes were quite different. And then I realized she actually had to solve what seemed an unsolvable case!

The compressed timeline was a monster, too. Most of my books take place in a fairly short time period, but I realized once I got into this book that this one was going to be very short. Everything happens over four days, which meant that every single scene had to count.  In the final revision I cut about forty pages, the most I’ve ever had to axe.

And then there was the continuing crime storyline—the one that is NOT resolved in this book—which is giving me fits as I’m working on the next book…

HALLIE: There’s a lovely subplot in the book about a cat and kittens that Duncan’s and Gemma’s children rescue. And knowing what an animal lover you are, I’m wondering if this echoes anything that happened to you in real life?

DEBS: Yes, actually, something like this happened to us in real life, but it didn’t have a happy ending. We had a female cat turn up on our front porch, literally starving. But she was very tame and very, very sweet, so we brought her in (isolated from the dogs and other cats) fed her and looked after her.

After a few days we decided we should have her checked over by our vet. He scanned her and she was chipped. The owner lived a few blocks from us. We had to surrender the cat to the vet for the owner to reclaim. We were devastated, but happy that she was back with her family. Then we learned a few weeks later that they’d let her out again and she’d been hit by a car and killed.

So I wrote a happy ending for Xena—and yes, I had named the real cat Xena.

HALLIE: I am dying to know, did you know how the novel would end when you started, and if not, where in the process of writing the book did you find it, because it’s a stunner?

DEBS: I did know from the very beginning. I knew, in fact, when I was writing the previous book how this book would end.  Sometimes I write the end of books part way through, if it comes to me. But this time, even though I knew what was going to happen, I wouldn’t let the scene play out in my head until I actually got to it. And then I wrote it almost without stopping to breathe, and I didn’t change a word.

HALLIE: Wow. I love this picture of Debs because she's got that mischievous look, like she knows something we don't. Like she's got more plot twists already up her sleeve.

So now we'll open it up for questions... Cats, kittens, continuing timelines, prickly sidekicks, and taking your characters OUT of their elements. Let 'er rip!