Weather or Not, Here it Comes

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Way, way back in the mid-1980s, I visited southern California for the first time. First during winter break, to meet Ross’s father, then to spend time with Ross during his summer internship at a Crystal City law firm, and later for New Year’s at his dad’s place in Laguna Niguel. Ross would be graduating from law school in less than six months, and the firm had tendered him a position as an associate. 

We weren’t engaged - not yet - but we were at the point in our relationship where neither of us would make a serious life decision without consulting the other. So as we leaned on the rail of his father’s balcony, watching the fireworks reflect in the Pacific Ocean, we talked about the job offer. “I love it here,” I said, “but the weather never, ever changes. What do people even talk about?”

Well. It was 35 years ago.

In the summer of 2021, the Pacific northwest is on its second life-threatening heat wave, caused by a once-rare, now increasingly common “heat dome.” In the eastern seaboard, we’re just drying out from the torrential record-breaking rain of Tropical Storm Elsa. We got six inches at my place, and there was water leaking through my 200-year-old stone foundation, a very unusual occurrence (fortunately, I have a true New England celler, with a dirt floor that absorbs almost everything.)

Meanwhile, Jenn has been living under an extreme heat warning for the past several days. The weather is nice in northern California where Rhys is, but twice in the past four years, her community has been threatened by wildfires and choking smoke. 

The climate is changing - it already has changed, and one of the signal markers of “the new normal” is the increase in extreme weather events. As this graphic from Climate Central shows, the change in the average day-to-day weather isn’t very noticeable - but the shift to a warmer planet gives a big boost to the extreme edge of the spectrum. 

 

Out west, it means killer heat and drought. In the east, it’s moisture-drenched storms and polar vortexes. For all of us, it means (among many other things) learning to cope with “once in a century” weather coming once every ten or five or three years.

Reds, what’s the extreme weather event you worry about most where you live? And what do you do to prepare for and get through it?

LUCY BURDETTE: It’s hurricanes for us of course, both in Key West and Connecticut. Both of our beloved places were in the path of the recent Elsa--and this isn’t the first time it’s happened. After two wicked hurricanes hit CT in 2010 and 2011 (Irene and Sandy), we finally invested in a generator. Because after the storm passes through, there can be a long stretch of time without electricity, and that means ruined food and reading by candlelight and hot, muggy nights. We also worry about fires--so scary--on the west coast, and tornadoes in the middle.

I just said to John the other night, doesn’t it seem like a few people have warned us about climate change for decades, and now suddenly it’s devastating the world? It’s pretty darn discouraging…

HALLIE EPHRON: Climate change is truly scary. I have a friend who’s house hunting in this brutal sellers’ market, and the first thing she looks at is “flood factor” - not something I would have even considered when we bought our house. It eliminates a lot of otherwise perfectly acceptable properties.

Here in New England, blizzards are atop my worry list. The cold, mountains of snow, power outages. It’s nice to live in a house but it has its down side.

JENN McKINLAY: Aside from being broiled alive by the summer sun, I fear running out of water. It’s my biggest worry, because AZ has no water restriction measures set in place at all. With the 26 year drought happening, and six of our counties on the brink of being declared uninhabitable, they’re just talking about maybe restricting the water in the year 2022. We’ll see. This is a state that has 299 days of sun per year and won’t mandate that all buildings be solar. They say we’ll be out of water by 2050. Sort of feels like something we should prepare for, you know?

DEBS: Jenn, that is crazy!!!! We’ve had water restrictions here for years, and they don’t lift them even when there is lots of rain and full reservoirs. 

RHYS BOWEN: I also worry about running out of water. Marin is a small county and we rely on our own reservoirs which this year are in danger of doing up. I can’t understand why we don’t have desalinization plants!  But we always live with the threat of wildfires, power outages, poor air quality. Otherwise it’s perfect!

 

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Before this year I’d have said our biggest fear was tornadoes and blistering summer heat. Then in February, we had SNOWMAGGEDON! We are just not prepared for that extreme cold, and obviously our power grid was not, either. That week caused terrible damage in Texas. People FROZE to death in their homes! And agriculture took a huge hit. Our favorite peach orchard, for instance, lost one third of their trees, and all their early crop peaches. You would think people would get their head out of their--I mean out of the sand!

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Power outages. We have blizzards, true endless relentless blizzards (once we could not even open our back door because the snow was so high.). And massive thunderstorms. I plug in everything, obsessively.  And this year, for the first time, we had a brown-out because of the intense heat. And last year, the Boston downtown streets flooded! The harbor overflowed and cars were floating. I know the weather here has gotten--weirder. I mean--look at all of our experiences. Debs! I read about that, and it is so disturbing. Terrifying. And yes, Lucy. Real and imminent. 

 

JULIA: How about you, dear readers? What are the weather emergencies you worry about? And how do you prepare to meet them? 

How's the Weather?

Photo by Mark Reinholt

LUCY BURDETTE: A very fast storm clipped Key West last week. We were out to dinner, on a porch overlooking a dock, when the sky grew intensely dark, and then a waterspout took shape. We barely had time to grab our plates and run inside. (The photo was taken by a friend, an incredible photographer—isn’t it ominous?)

Anyway, this got me thinking about severe weather in general, and how I tried to use it to up the ante for the characters in my upcoming KILLER TAKEOUT. When I meet a long-time resident of the island, one of my first questions is: What do you do about hurricanes? Stay or go? Leaving is no picnic, because there’s only one road off the islands and the congestion can be overwhelming. Besides, how do you know where the storm’s headed next? The hard-bitten native conchs just hunker down and hope for the best. But there are lots of horror stories about staying too—Hurricane Wilma for example, didn’t do a great deal of damage, but the storm surge after was very destructive.

I haven’t lived through a hurricane in Key West and I hope to skip that experience. We have lived through Hurricanes Irene and Sandy while in Connecticut, and that was no picnic. Let’s face it, I’m a weather wienie!

Reds, what’s the worst weather you’ve experienced? Do you enjoy the pageantry of nature or would you rather skip it? How have you used weather in your writing?

HALLIE EPHRON: A waterspout? Yikes. That same night in Boston we had high winds, rain and lightning that went on booming and crashing for hours. I unplugged the computer, stuffed my ears with Kleenex and tried to sleep, because what can you do except survey the damage in the morning? Fortunately all we lost was a tree limb and it didn’t fall on the car.

Outside Hallie's House

Worst weather I’ve been through ever is last winter’s snow. In January/February 2015 we got 110 inches without a thaw. I didn’t leave the house for weeks unless I absolutely had to. Roads were narrowed to one lane and you took your live in your hands just pulling out of the driveway. The car horn got used more than the brakes. It was May before the snow was all melted in the yard, and the silver lining was an absolutely spectacular spring. EVERY spring-blooming thing burst into bloom at the same time.

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: My family and I were caught on a bus in Park Slope, Brooklyn, in a tornado! Toto, we're in Brooklyn, Not Kansas! Someone recorded it and put it on YouTube—here's the link:  It was surreal — green, murky, insane winds. We saw a hundred-year-old tree ripped right out of the ground from the bus window.

Overwash by Don McCullough

We also weathered Hurricane Sandy in Brooklyn. That was less scary, personally, because we live at a high elevation (so no flooding) and also in a sturdy Victorian brick building. Still we taped up our windows, just like the Brits did during the Blitz, and I prayed for everyone affected—and also that our oversized windows would hold. Which they did. Afterwards, gave blood, took blankets and canned food to a relief center a few blocks from us (the local YMCA). It was a crazy storm and people in the hardest-hit areas are still in recovery.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:  Massachusetts! Where there's never a dull weather moment. I've covered hurricanes on Cape Cod, certainly, where the winds are more than 90 mph, and the sand hits your face like a million straight pins. And ice storms, where the trees, and everything, are completely coated. Beautiful, and deadly.  And yes, last year the snow was so high it was over the cars--seriously, there were cars parked on the streets and you couldn't see them.  But a few days ago, I woke up to HOWLING winds. And I thought, wow, we're going to have some fallen branches. Woke up the next morning to see Jonathan standing over me. He said, "Sweetheart, we have a situation." Our back fence had blown down! Like--WHAM. Flattened.


RHYS BOWEN: We lived in south Texas for three years where weather was always dramatic. Summer thunderstorms spawning tornadoes, hurricanes, lightning that lit up the whole sky and brought all four kids scurrying into our bed at night. I once flew into Chicago after a blizzard and the snow was taller than me beside the road. Didn't like that much, either. I'm currently in Arizona where we've had perfect temps and sunshine for weeks. My kind of weather! But I have to agree, Lucy, bad weather can enhance the drama and suspense in a novel.

Photo by Paul VanDerWerf

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Hank, I love "We have a situation." Such a calm way to introduce major property damage! I'm pretty well known for the bad weather in my books - I maintain there's nothing like nature's fury to elevate the suspense and the stakes. After all, didn't Dame Agatha trap everyone on the island with bad weather in Ten Little Indians?
Spending my teen years in upstate New York's snowbelt and my adult life here in Maine, all my bad weather is snow, ice and cold. There was the Christmas eve when we left midnight mass to discover two feet of snow had fallen and my dad had to wait for a plow to follow to get us all home. There was the time Ross and the kids and I left Hudson Falls, NY with a light scattering of flakes that turned into a blizzard as we we drove through the Green Mountains. Snowpocalype '14 - '15 was unrelievedly awful; we had something like 100 inches of snow and the coldest February since 1895. But for me, personally, the WORST weather was the ice storm of '98. Power lines down everywhere, roads impassible, walking on glare ice outside and we were without power on my street for NINE days. Nine days with no running water, no phone service (we didn't have a cell phone until '02) no electric lights, no heat except the fireplaces and woodstoves, and two kids, four and five, underfoot. The silver lining? I used an ice storm just like it is as the background for my last book, THROUGH THE EVIL DAYS.



DEBORAH CROMBIE: On the day after Christmas this year, we had nine tornadoes sighted in the DFW area. NINE! The strongest struck the town of Garland, just a few miles to the east of us, and was rated an EF4--the first EF4 since a tornado struck Lancaster, south of Dallas, in 1994. This was the first EF4 tornado reported in the United States since 2000. There were eleven fatalities and the damage was staggering. Here's a photo of just one of the tornadoes.

We live in tornado country--we know this can happen. We have go-bags and a safe spot and a plan, but, really, you're never prepared. This time, we thought the storms were coming straight for us, but at the last minute they shifted direction. I spent an anxious hour huddled in our hall bathroom with flashlight, phone, radio, and the two German shepherds. Then we spent the rest of the evening watching the terrible damage reports on the news as they came in.

I much prefer my weather in books. I think my favorite use of it was the snowstorm that traps my characters in Crystal Palace in south London in The Sound of Broken Glass.

But I think my personal "scariest weather ever" moment was about twenty years ago, when I drove halfway across England in a hurricane. I hope never, ever, to do anything like that again. 



LUCY: Yes, Julia, you are a master at using the weather to best advantage, starting with the first line of your first book! It was one hell of a night to throw away a baby.

Reds, tell about the worst weather you survived--or a book you remember using bad weather to great effect...

Terry Shames talks about the weather, Texan style, that is.

RHYS: When I first met Terry Shames at an MWA meeting she was a new writer, hoping to get published. Now I'm celebrating with her the publication of her fifth book in the best-selling Samuel Craddock series, set in a small Texan town. Terry is a Texan girl herself, although you wouldn't know it because she doesn't say y'all or howdy or anything of the things one expects Texans to say.

I spent three years in Texas when my kids were growing up and what I remember more than anything was the weather: actually an excess of dramatic weather--tornadoes and hurricanes and ice storms and sizzling heat. Texas does nothing by halves. So it made sense that Terry should choose weather for her topic.

Welcome Terry.

TERRY SHAMES:  I’m thrilled to be visiting Jungle Red Writers today talking about (wait for it) the weather! This year people on the east coast were baffled by a balmy Christmas while those on the west coast were shivering. The fact that both of them were having 50-60 degree weather shows that people are used to their own brand of weather—or it may mean that people in California are wimps. 

But if you want to talk crazy weather, try Texas. I was in Austin visiting my family for the holidays. The day before I arrived, it was 80 degrees. The day after I arrived, it was 30, with overcast skies and icy, bone-chilling wind. By the time I left two days later it was warm again. Texas epitomes the old saw, “Don’t like the weather? Stick around for a few minutes and it will change.”

My Samuel Craddock series is set in Texas, and I make liberal use of the variables as metaphors or portents. When things are heating up in the plot, things start to get hot weather-wise as well. When I describe storm clouds, look out, things are about to get turbulent. In The Last Death of Jack Harbin, Samuel Craddock says:

“Off to the west a few puffy clouds are piling up on the horizon, as if deciding whether to collect into something more serious.” In the next scene, the book takes a serious turn.

In the novel I’m working on now someone gives Samuel Craddock an unexplained cold shoulder. Samuel observes, ”To the north the sky has darkened. We’re going to get our first ‘norther’ of the season.” A half hour later, “in the past ten minutes the temperature has dropped thirty degrees. The ’norther’ is like a wall of cold air that moves forward, sweeping away the heat.”

I love to read novels in which the weather is presented as a character. Craig Johnson (The Cold Dish) and Martha Cooley (Ice Shear) both use bitter cold to great effect in their novels. They portray a world in which the cold is a metaphor for being frozen out of life. How much more determined a detective has to be if every step involves lots of clothing and the possibility of frostbite.

Heat is just as debilitating, rendering people unable to move without great effort. Combine it with rain, and as Tim Hallinan notes in The Hot countries, “After the air-conditioning in the Expat Bar…the rain feels like a hot shower.” And, hey! Texas has that, too.

For me, a book is enhanced by references to weather. I’ve been to Scotland and I know it’s cold all year round. I want to know how that affects people who live there. In the Caribbean, I want to feel the sun beating down, feel the cool ocean breeze and the hurricane winds. In Africa, I want to experience the drought or the refreshing rain that follows.

I’m curious to know if other writers use weather intentionally, or if it creeps in without your thinking about it. How does it affect your characters and your plots? In our everyday lives weather can be motivational. Is that true in novels as well?

RHYS: So what about you, Reds and readers? Is weather important in your books? When you are reading do you like to experience heat, cold, rain?

 Terry Shames writes the best-selling Samuel Craddock series, set in small-town Texas. A Killing at Cotton Hill won the Macavity for Best First Mystery, 2013. The Last Death of Jack Harbin was a Macavity finalist for Best Mystery, 2014. Mystery People named Shames one of the top five Texas mystery writers of 2015. Her fifth Craddock mystery, The Necessary Murder of Nonie Blake launches January 12, 2016. It is a Top Pick for January in RT Bookreviews.   www.terryshames.com. 

Terry will be giving away a copy of her brand new book to her favorite comment of the day.

Thrilling Weather, a guest post by Paul Doiron

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: In the interests of full disclosure, as they say, I gave Paul Doiron's debut mystery, The Poacher's Son, an enthusiastic blurb. That was after it had gotten starred reviews from every major reviewer, but before it had been nominated for the Edgar, the Anthony, the Barry, the Macavity, etc. etc. Further disclosure: Paul and I blog together at Maine Crime Writers, which is a group of...well, the title really says it all, doesn't it? And a bit more disclosure: we've done enough library and bookstore events together to have our own little act going.

Final, fullest disclosure: I love crime fiction set in small towns and deep woods, in places where the weather can kill you if you're not careful - and sometimes even when you are. If you're like me, you're going to love Paul's upcoming thriller chiller.

Sometimes a novel has its beginnings in a question. Bad Little Falls began when I asked myself: What if Jack London had written a mystery novel? I was culling books from my overloaded bookshelves last year when I came across a paperback collection of London's short fiction. I flipped through the yellowed pages until I found "To Build a Fire" — one of my favorite short stories — and I started to read. Within a few paragraphs my fingers began to go numb from the killing coldness of the Yukon setting. By the end of the story, my heart felt as heavy as a block of ice.

"I want to write a book this cold," I thought. I've spent a lot of time outdoors during the winter, and my ears sometimes ache from a bad case of frostbite I suffered as a boy (I bet you didn't know there are long-term side effects from the condition). I've had low-grade hypothermia a few times (another experience I don't recommend) and been caught outside during freezing rain storms. To paraphrase Wallace Stevens, living in Maine has given me a "mind of winter," and I know what it means to "have been cold a long time."

Maine isn't the Yukon, of course, but parts of my state do get pretty damn cold. The lowest temperature ever recorded here was -50 degrees Fahrenheit, not counting the wind chill. "He knew that at fifty below spittle crackled on the snow," Jack London says of the luckless chechaquo in his story. 

My novels are about Maine game wardens who spend most of their lives outdoors. Cold weather is a condition of their employment. When a snowmobiler is late returning home after a snowy night on the trails, a warden must go looking for the missing man. When a fisherman falls through the lake ice, Maine Warden Service divers must retrieve the corpse from the murky, viscous depths. And when a murder is committed in the frozen woods, guess who gets to investigate the crime?

In Bad Little Falls the duty falls to my beleaguered young game warden, Mike Bowditch. For his sins in The Poacher's Son and Trespasser, he's been transferred to desolate Washington County, on the Canadian border. It's February, the dead of winter, and Mike is experiencing a coldness that penetrates all the way through his soul. He's living alone in a backwoods trailer, broken up from his longtime girlfriend, far from family and friends. And as Mike observes about his new posting, "when you are reassigned to the easternmost county in the United States—a place known for its epidemic drug abuse, multigenerational unemployment, and long tradition of violent poaching—it's pretty clear your career isn't on the rise."

Things end badly in "To Build a Fire" because the unnamed chechaquo doesn't appreciate the extreme danger of traveling alone through the cruel wilderness. Mike Bowditch's own wilderness has always been internal as much as it is an actual place he is charged with policing. The drug dealers and rogue hunting guides who torment him in Bad Little Falls are dangerous, but the loneliness that drives him to make bad personal decisions is an even greater threat.

 
Settings have always played important parts in my books. In The 
Poacher's Son the setting was the vanishing North Woods in an era of massive clear cutting and real estate development. In Trespasser it was the maze of muddy all-terrain vehicle trails leading from one hopeless crime scene to the next. Here it is the snow-covered heaths of Down East Maine: miserable, desolate places that are the source of the English word "heathen," since they were places of exile for society's outcasts.

Most Americans are used to living at a comfortable remove from the extremes of the natural world. But we are beginning to see the growing shadows of the future in the derechos that tore recently through the Eastern Seaboard. Heat waves are withering our midwestern corn crops and sparking wildfires that burn up our Rocky Mountain cities. Scientists predict that global climate change will usher in an age of newly wild weather, of higher highs but also lower lows. That record low Maine temperature of minus 50 occurred just three years ago. That's probably no coincidence. 

In Bad Little Falls, Mike Bowditch—struggling to solve a puzzling murder before he freezes to death— knows what Jack London's chechaquo doesn't know: that nature is indifferent to the plans and priorities of human beings.

Nature just is. And, ultimately, that's what makes it so terrifying.


If you're interested in being chilled and thrilled, hop onto the back blog and tell us about the most dangerous weather you've ever encountered. Three lucky commentors will receive  a copy of Bad Little Falls!


You can find out more about Paul Doiron and read excerpts from his Mike Bowditch series on his website. In addition to blogging at Maine Crime Writers, he also has his own blog. You can friend him on Facebook and follow him on Twitter as @PaulDoiron