Heat Does Not Make a Cool Mystery
A month of on and off temperatures in the nineties and my writing feels like meatloaf reheated for the third time. It was good the first time, was leftovers the second, and is just garbage on the third go around. Can I make heat work to my advantage as a writer? I believe strong settings make the best in murder mysteries. Like Agatha Christie I like the small country village where a body or two rattles the peace of the place and shakes some long-held secrets out of family trees. Even when I travel to my Florida residence for the winter, I go to a rural setting. I journey south for the reasons most do—to get away from the frigid weather here in upstate New York. I’ve spent enough winters in this place to know I could write about them without experiencing them again. It’s not as if I need a more recent reminder of how one’s nose hairs freeze together or the difficulty of getting out of the drive when the snowplow shoves all that frozen muck in front of a newly