It’s a perennial question at readings and signings: Where do you get the ideas for your books?
I usually mumble something that amounts to (phrased politely), “I pull them out of thin air.”
But when it comes to Best Be Prepared (Severn House), my most recent in a series featuring amateur sleuth Nora Best, I know the answer.
Fear.
Best Be Prepared got the kick in the butt it desperately needed while I was at the Storyknife Writers Retreat in Alaska, where the window above my writing desk provided a breathtaking view across Cook Inlet to three active volcanoes, Augustine, Redoubt and my favorite, Iliamna.
I spent a lot of time gazing at them instead of dealing with the uncooperative manuscript in front of me. My belated aha moment came when it occurred to me that this was my third residency in a natural disaster danger zone. Storyknife is on the Kenai Peninsula, whose tip—the Homer Spit—dropped six feet during the 1964 earthquake.
A year earlier found me in Naples, Italy, where Vesuvius muttered and smoked across the bay. More than half a million people live in the “red zone”—its border just blocks from my residency—to be evacuated if Vesuvius, considered one of the world’s most dangerous volcanoes, comes fully awake.
A few years before that, I spent a month at the Willapa Bay Air on Washington State’s Long Beach Peninsula. There, blue-and-white signs along the nearby beach warned to head for high ground if the tsunami sirens blared. One problem: The peninsula is basically a pancake; a local newspaper story called it “doomed” should a tsunami strike.
Three residencies. Three places so achingly beautiful I fell instantly in love. Three settings that might kill me in a heartbeat. Sort of like—wait for it—crime fiction’s classic femme fatales.
Except that in terms of sheer drama and deadliness Nature outdoes even the brassiest dame, something writers have long used to great effect.
Think floods—James Lee Burke’s The Tin Roof Blowdown; wildfire—Michael Koryta’s Those Who Wish Me Dead, and earthquake with Lee Goldberg’s The Walk. In those novels and others like them, natural disaster takes center stage.
I wanted something a little different for my book, a disaster that hadn’t happened yet.
In Best Be Prepared I used the ever-present threat of a devastating tsunami to provide a humming sense of dread that divides a town’s residents into two camps: those who said what if and fought to prepare for the worst possible scenario; the others who gambled on probably not as they proposed ever more development in an area that could be wiped out in minutes. Given the millions of dollars involved in each scenario, is it any wonder the conflict turns murderous?
That said, my book doesn’t fit neatly into categories like eco-thrillers or cli-fi. I hope somebody comes up with a catchy name soon, because whatever it is, some of my favorite books fall into it.
Environmental concerns inform nearly all of Carl Hiaasen’s Florida novels. His Squeeze Me is laugh-out-loud hilarious, at least until you fall asleep at night with visions of rib-crushing pythons in your head. Over the top? Hiaasen has said he often bases his books on current events. (Think all of those “Florida man” stories.) Fact: The largest Burmese python caught in Florida measured 19 feet.
I’ve always thought of Dana Stabenow’s thoroughly enjoyable Alaska mysteries as sneakily educational because I come away better informed about the intertwined environmental and political issues driving them. My favorite, Breakup, uses the tensions that run rampant by the end of the long Alaska winter to heighten the suspense throughout. Fact: While most places see their highest crime rates in summer, in Alaska the murder rates can spike in late spring during—you guessed it—breakup.
The Southwest still has water in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife. But after years of catastrophic drought, the region balances on a tipping point. The very real threat that entire cities will run out of water sets up credible fights to the death. This one is often touted as futuristic. It might be time to retire that description. Fact: A community outside Scottsdale, Arizona, has already hit “tap-out.”
Meanwhile, I recently sent off an application for another residency. I didn’t think about it much when I applied, but I just checked. Sure enough, it’s in a tsunami zone.
***
