Tell Me About the Weather

            Every reader has certain pet peeves — things authors do that can drive you nuts when you’re reading their books. One of mine, I’d have to say, is mystery novelists who don’t tell you what time of year the story is taking place and what the weather is like.

            I mention mystery novels in particular because most writers of literary fiction are aware of the need to create atmosphere and be descriptive. But for some reason a certain number of the folks who write mysteries and thrillers seem to feel it’s not important.

            Perhaps that comes from thinking of a book as a page-turner, where the author’s job is to move the story forward and get to the next scene of violence or mayhem as quickly as possible. From that perspective, not mentioning the season or the weather makes a certain superficial type of sense. After all, a paragraph spent describing Paris in the spring might cause the reader to set the book aside before getting to the shootout at the Louvre.

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night

            Count me among the unconvinced. Granted, a book written in the aforementioned style keeps the reader moving forward, but at the end there’s a feeling of disappointment, sort of like eating a big dinner then being hungry an hour later. Reading a mystery or thriller without sufficient atmosphere or character is a letdown, and while the author may have kept me turning the pages, I’m not likely to return.

            In days gone by, establishing a sense of atmosphere by describing the setting and the weather was so obligatory as to be universal. No nineteenth century author would have had a group of weary travelers seeking refuge at a Transylvanian castle without mentioning that it was a dark and stormy night and going into considerable detail about both the darkness and storminess. For the reader, that alone established that something was up at the castle.

            Or consider, on the less ominous side, the way Wilkie Collins got the ball rolling in his classic The Woman in White:

            “It was the last day of July. The long hot summer was drawing to a close; and we, the weary pilgrims of the London pavement, were beginning to think of the cloud-shadows on the corn-fields and the autumn breezes on the sea shores.”

You Notice It on Vacation

            In my first mystery novel, The McHenry Inheritance,my leading character is on a fishing vacation in the High Sierra at the tail end of summer, and I tried to capture the shifting nature of the mountain weather at that time of year and weave it into the story.

            That made sense, I felt, because when you’re on vacation, you tend to be outside more and be paying more attention to the weather. Certain trips are inextricably linked in memory to the weather. I remember camping in the perishing heat of a July in Idaho in 1985 as clearly as I remember running through a drenching rainstorm in Venice to get to the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice in 2009.

            Looking back at the mysteries I’ve read in the past couple of years, it seems that some of the best literary use of weather came from Swedish writers such as Henning Mankell and the Sjowall-Wahloo team. When you think about it, why should that be surprising? They come from a country where, to drag out the old joke, there’s nine months of winter and three months of bad skiing. Of course they’re going to pay attention to the weather.

The Crime Wave in Sweden

            I read a Swedish mystery novel (is there any other kind these days?) this past weekend, in this case The Glass Devil by Helene Tursten. It tells the everyday story of a country pastor and his son, who are gunned down in their homes, apparently by Satanists, though if you’re a mystery fan, you have probably figured out already that there is more to it than that.

            The plucky female detective, Irene Huss, follows the trail to the bitter end, doggedly pursuing a path that puts her into contact with Mad Cow Disease, child pornography, African relief efforts, and the decline of the church in Sweden, not to mention her own issues with her husband and teenage daughters.

            Over the past year I’ve been reading a number of Swedish detective novels, beginning with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, the continuing on to the works of Henning Mankell, Hakan Nesser and Sjowall and Wahloo. Swedish crime lit is definitely a hot item these days.

Stockholm Was No Mayberry

            Why Sweden? Why, for that matter, England between the wars, where the classic detective novel came of age? There seems to be something about a civilized, well-ordered society (especially one where appearances count for a lot) that generates a burst of crime fiction.

            Looking at England when Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and others were writing their best work, you would have seen an exceptionally law-abiding and non-violent nation. Probably more murders were committed in fiction there in any one year than took place in the entire first half of the Twentieth Century.

            Similarly, Americans who go to Sweden often remark about how clean, orderly and safe the country seems to us. There is far less gun violence and random violence than here, yet to read most of the authors previously mentioned would be to gain an impression that it’s a nation of psychopaths, and particularly sadistic ones at that.

            Reading one of the Sjowall-Wahloo books, I got a bit of a jolt at a passage in which their detective, Kurt Wallander, reflects about how prevalent crime and drug use have become and how it wasn’t always that way. The passage was written during a time when, in New York, you couldn’t go into Central Park at night, and a female district attorney had her purse snatched at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Stockholm was surely better than that, yet a variation of the Mayberry syndrome, in which the past, and the people in it, were believed to be better than they really were, apparently infects Sweden as well.

Just the Facts, Ma’am

            My Swedish being nonexistent, I have of course been reading these books in translation, but they all sound like variations of a teleplay Jack Webb would have written for Dragnet. Very spare, very direct, not much humor, and keep the story moving forward with lots of terse dialogue.

            And while there’s not much in the way of description or digression, one thing common to all the authors is an awareness of the weather. It’s so seldom good in Sweden that people always notice it and appreciate the good spells. Jonathan Franzen, in an introduction to The Laughing Policeman, pointed out how relentlessly dreadful the weather was and with how much care and loving detail it was described. (The story takes place from mid-November to March.) The wintry souls of the killers in these books are mirrored in the bleak climate and landscapes they describe so well.

            Which got me to thinking that since February is the month when winter doesn’t let go (even in California), I’m going to make a point of reading an Italian mystery this month.