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

Captain, My Captain, a guest blog by Megan Abbott

 

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Thrillers are books involving two-fisted he-men saving the world (and a few women at the same time) right?  Well, sure, if you're Clive Cussler. Not to diss Dirk, but here on Jungle Red Writers, we like smart, subtle crime fiction that keeps us awake at night while slicing us with human insight and razor-fine writing. In other words, we like Megan Abbott.

Megan is an Edgar-Award-winning (and everything-else-nominated)  author whose fiction routinely makes it onto Best Book of the Year Lists. Whether she's writing neo-noir novels like Die A Little and Bury Me Deep, or intensely literary psychological thrillers, like The End of Everything or the upcoming Dare Me, Megan puts women's lives and their relationships with one another at the center of her work. Today, she's going to shed some personal light on the relationship between mentor and  protegee; teacher and student.

 

When I was in eighth grade, I was obsessed with the movie The Breakfast Club, which seemed to speak to my life in deep, resonant ways. I must have conveyed these feelings with great intensity to my beloved Advanced English teacher, Mrs. B, because somehow it came to pass that she spent one of her Sunday afternoons taking me to see the movie with her—a first viewing for her, a second for me. (It was rated R, so this was a particular coup).

I remember the experience powerfully, remember feeling so flattered by all of it. I guess I’ll never know what made her suggest it. It was not something I’d ever heard of any other teacher doing for a student. It stuck with me. It felt like I had been singled out, was special.

A few years later, while absorbed in all the mysteries and terrors of high school (far more harrowing than The Breakfast Club had warned), I learned that Mrs. B had died from breast cancer. It turned out she had been sick for several years, including when I was in her class, when we went to the movies that day. It seemed impossible—she was very young (my mom tells me now that she was only in her late thirties)—and unspeakably sad.

I vividly remember my parents telling me the news because it was during that same conversation that my dad confided that Mrs. B’s husband had died a few years before. “She’d been unhappy,” he said, probably trying to make me feel better, “for a long time.”

The surprise I felt was acute. Mrs. B was unhappy? I’d never really thought about teachers being unhappy. About grown women’s unhappiness. And I certainly never imagined any of their private struggles. Mrs. B was cool, lively, loved books and paid attention to me. That was all I’d cared about, apparently. What an awful feeling, to realize how self-absorbed you were, or are.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about Mrs. B. My novel, Dare Me, is in large part about the complexities of female mentor-protégée relationship and I guess I’ve been trying to figure out why that subject has always interested me so much, even as far back as age eleven, when I was enraptured by Lois Duncan’s Daughters of Eve (a book whose twisty attitudes towards feminism you could spend a lifetime unraveling), and leading up to Dare Me, which centers on a high school cheerleading squad and their charismatic new coach

All the girls in Dare Me are fascinated by Coach, especially the main character, Addy, who idolizes her. “She was the one who showed me all the dark wonders of life,” says Addy. “Did I ever feel anything at all until she showed me what feeling meant? Pushing at the corners of her cramped world with curled fists, the fists of a little girl, she showed me what it meant to live.”

To Addy, Coach, who is young and pretty but also demanding and aloof, is a mystery she wants to unlock. She wants to be like her, wants to be her. It’s a powerful yearning, almost like a crush—maybe stronger because it’s safer. You never think you’ll get your heart broken. And you never, ever really know her life.

At age 12 or 13, I was too young (at least in the ways that matter) to think of Mrs. B as anything other than this person who gave me books, who encouraged me, who took me to see The Breakfast Club that time. There’s an inherent selfishness, greediness of the protégée, which is, I guess, about being young. Everything is about you: she’s taking me to the movies, she’s interested in me, me, me. And I never thought twice about what her life might really be like, her pains and sorrows and heartache.

But these mentors, they matter so much, don’t they? It’s the way we figure out ourselves, by imagining their lives, imagining ourselves in their lives. And then, eventually, realizing that their lives are not what we pictured, that life isn’t.

A painful revelation, usually. Because it’s one of the moments you first realize how complicated life is, how hard. But we need those moments, like we need these women (and they need us, they need to see us believing in them). It’s how we become ourselves. 

Tell us about your mentor-protegee relationship, and you may be one of two lucky commenters to win an Advance Readers Copy of Dare Me!

You can find out more about Megan Abbott and read excerpts of her books at her website. She also blogs with Sara Gran at the Abbott Gran Old Tyme Medicine Show. You can friend her on Facebook and follow her on Twitter as @MeganEAbbott. 

THRILLER FEST

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Our THRILLER FORTNIGHT here at Jungle Red is leading up to ThrillerFest, a four-day celebration of thriller books, the authors who write them, and the fans who read them. ThrillerFest takes place July 11, 12, 13 and 14, 2012, in New York City, at the Grand Hyatt Hotel located in Midtown Manhattan. 

So what goes on at ThrillerFest?  If you're an aspiring writer, there are master classes with best-selling authors, and opportunities to meet with dozens of literary agents. If you're a fan, there are panels and activities aplenty where you can hear and meet some of your favorite authors. (And buy their books!)


Among this years special guests are R.L. Stine, Ken Follet, Robert Crais, Diana Gabaldon, and John Lescroart. Just a small sampling of other attendees includes our recent JR guest Jon Land, Lee Child, Steve Berry, Jan Burke, Joseph Finder, Sophie Littlefield, DP Lyle, Andrew Gross, Wendy Corsi Staub, David Hewson, Hilary Davidson, and Yrsa Sigurdardottir--and that really is a small sampling!  Check out the ThrillerFest website for a full listing of authors and panels.


Okay, I'm hooked.  I wish I were going, but sadly, not this year.  ThrillerFest is definitely on my list for next summer.  What could be more fun than hanging out in NYC with a bunch of really cool writers and fans?


So, REDS and readers, who's going?  Who's been?  If you've attended, tell us about it. 


And do check out the website. I especially like Lee Child's anecdote about meeting Libby Hellman when wearing only a small towel....


(And now, the lucky winners of Jon Land's STRONG VENGEANCE: Joan Emerson, Diane Hale, and Allison Brennan! If you three will email me at "deb at deborahcrombie dot com" with your mailing addresses, I will pass them along to Jon.)

GETTING TO THE END

DEBORAH CROMBIE: I'm going to beg your indulgence, dear REDS and readers, in the midst of our THRILLER FORTNIGHT, for a spot of personal indulgence.


This was a milestone week for me. One of many, yes, but still... On Monday night, I typed THE END on the 510th page of my 15th novel. (Like the little reverse number thingy, there?) I'd been working on this book for...well, longer than I should have.  More than a year, which is not, unfortunately, unusual for me.


Of course, most writers whoop and shout with jubilation when they finally, finally get to type, or write, those words. There are all the desperately practical reasons to be glad you've reached the end of a novel--deadline pressure, publication schedules, the absence of any sort of normal personal life for weeks--or months--as we spend our days and nights chained to the keyboard. There's just plain physical exhaustion, and the little matter of bread and butter--most of us write to eat.


So celebration is more than due, and it can make us a little giddy. But there is always, for me, buried in the relief, a twinge of sadness. Mourning, even. 

The book is not really finished--there are still what my English literature professor friend calls "the grubby details"--revision, copy edits, page proofs--so we know we'll be going back to it again and again, tweaking and fixing. But you are never IN the story, living your characters, in quite the same way.


You know how, as readers, you hate to get to the end of a book you really, really love? Even though you know you'll read it again, and you'll appreciate it in ways you didn't the first time, you hate letting go of that first total immersion in the story. That's a little like finishing a book feels to me.


The solution, of course, if obvious. Sit down and start the next one.


So, REDS, readers, is this a common experience? (If not, and I'm just dreadfully neurotic, break it to me gently...)

(P.S. I don't yet have the three winner's of Jon Land's Caitlin Strong novel, STRONG VENGEANCE, but come back on Sunday and I'll announce them.)