What We Talk About When we Talk About Weather (and Gingerbread) a guest blog by Priscilla Paton

 JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Today's guest, Priscilla Paton, writes tough-minded novels about a pair of mismatched Twin Cities detectives. She writes about addiction, and alienation, and identity, but, like all of us who live in northern lands, she knows it's all about the weather. Where it's coming from, what it's going to do when it gets here, and how we're going to make it through.

 Fortunately, it's not all snow tires and shovels. There's also gingerbread. And this winter, at least, book events you can enjoy without having to bundle up and drive through the cold - like the launch for Priscilla's second book, Should Grace Fail, on Tuesday, December 8, at 8pm Eastern. You can register here - and be sure to leave a comment today, because one lucky person will be winning a copy of a Twin Cities Mystery!

 

Wherever you are, there’s weather, whether you like it or not. I had to get that sentence out—forgive me. Being in a Minnesota winter does something to a person. Think Fargo.

I write the Twin Cities Mystery series, and like the movie Fargo (minus the woodchipper), the books twist conventions of the genre and Midwest behavior. The weather is inevitably central not only to the setting but to character and plot.

In Minnesota, weather creates limitless opportunities for the humble-brag: “Yeah, I’m a bit stiff. Just shoveled three feet of snow off the roof.”  Moderate people turn competitive and rush to be the first to post the October blizzard on social media. Weather aids and abets passive-aggressive exchanges: “Saying inside, bummer”; “Well I have to go outside, double-bummer.” The repressed go crazy. Meaning, they ice-fish. On a frozen lake, on ice, over water, for something slimy and inhuman, like an eelpout, aka, a lingcod, mud shark, and “lawyer.” These ice fishers drive out a two-ton pickup. They unhitch a small house. They say the houses have heaters, booze, poker games, and TVs. Sure. Doesn’t change that it’s twenty below outside and your nose hairs are icicles. Then they leave the house on the lake, on ice, over water, until the state makes them haul it off, or the house falls through the ice and into spring muck. That’s somebody’s idea of fun.

All right, other places have Polar Vortexes. Wisconsin next door. Maine where I grew up, and as a shrimpy kid had my eyeglasses broken playing king-of-the-hill on monster snowbanks. I’ve been on New Hampshire’s Mount Washington, home to 200 mph winds, where I’ve felt to the bones weather weaponizing itself. At the peak, it turns in no time from sunny with a view to freezing fog with the warning that death happens. On the other hand, in the warmth of the tropics, hurricanes happen. Weather everywhere can be sublime and deadly.

 

Back to the Midwest famed for extremes of cold and hot, tornadoes and thunder snow, the weather can be contorted in fiction to do almost anything. To adapt a Norwegian saying, weather, like a potato, is useful for anything. For a mystery writer, weather can be a deus ex machina, the unexpected event that gets you out of a plot hole. Noir master Raymond Chandler said of crime writing, “when in doubt, have two guys come through the door with guns.” In Minnesota, you could have two trees, felled by the natural catastrophe of your choice, come crashing through the roof to trap the bad guys with guns. Then the good people (good people receive weather updates) can triumph.  A vehicular pursuit can be impeded by flash flooding. With ice, no one’s going anywhere—unless it’s a hockey mystery (a figure skating mystery if you’re a wuss). In June, you could have a murderer hide in the woods, only to die of hypothermia on an unseasonably cold night. Seasonable—what an unreliable concept!

Definition of Paradise: that one day in late May when you trip along outdoors without a puffy coat and rescue kit. The best part—the mosquitoes have not hatched. Yet.

The cold always cycles back. Now Minnesota and Maine are unlikely settings for an Agatha Christie murder with the social classes unnaturally mixed in the posh drawing room while Poirot reveals the murderer. But a group could be snowbound in a church, a supper club, not to mention an effing ice-house.

 Being snowbound is a good thrill for a day. More, and the real threats increase. At the least, those who remain safe yearn for warm comfort. During the worst Nor’easter of my childhood, our family dairy farm had to dump milk, had to drain the cooler and lose that paycheck, because for nearly a week the milk trucks could not get through. We made puddings, but we didn’t have chickens and eggs ran out. Then my mother pulled out a depression-era recipe, an eggless, butter-free gingerbread whose character depended on molasses. (Farms stocked bulk molasses to pour over mediocre hay for the cows.) Hoarded cream, whipped to softly drape over a serving, tempered the strong dark taste.  The gingerbread was a homey treat to have while sitting by the woodstove. It also makes a spicy accompaniment to the murder mystery of your choice. Please enjoy my family’s recipe with your holiday reading.

 

Snowbound Gingerbread

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease an 8 or 9” square pan. Ingredients:

½ C melted shortening                       2 C flour

½ C granulated sugar                          ½ tsp salt

½ C molasses                                      1 tsp baking soda

1  C hot water                                     1 tsp each cinnamon and ground ginger

 

Combine shortening, sugar, and molasses in mixing bowl. In separate bowl, blend dry ingredients. Add dry ingredients, alternating with hot water, to molasses mix. Pour into greased pan.

Bake 8” pan for 35-45 minutes

Bake 9” pan for 30-40 minutes

Cake is done when sides pull away and a skewer comes out clean.

Serve warm with whipped cream. The cake also be dusted with powdered sugar or frosted with lemon icing.

 

Should Grace Fail - Staying alive depends on knowing whom to trust and when to run.

When a man who saves lives has his own brutally taken, Greater Metro Detectives Erik Jansson and Deb Metzger have their strengths pushed to the limit. The murdered man rescued trafficked teen addicts from a vindictive crime boss, but he was also an alcoholic who left the police force under suspicion. Is his murderer a drug dealer, a pimp, a corrupt police colleague, all of the above? Or could the killer be a victim who lashed out at her savior?

You can find out more about Priscilla Paton at her website. You can discuss books with her on Goodreads, friend her on Facebook, and follow her on Twitter as @priscilla_paton.