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.
