In the Mood

Creating mood through setting is important in crime fiction. Can you give examples from books that have inspired or moved you? Also, please share an evocative paragraph from your own work and tell us how you came to write it.

by Dietrich

My idea is to set the mood for a scene with as powerful a description as I can come up with, using the fewest words possible, and always keeping in mind that the story needs to keep moving forward.

To my mind, the master of setting mood was Cormac McCarthy. An example that illustrates this is from The Road: 

“He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief.”

Or how about this from another master of the craft, James Lee Burke. This one from The Tin Roof Blowdown:

"New Orleans: where the dead wear masks and the living wear faces.” 

Or how about this from Toni Morrison from Beloved: 

“It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. Fire and brimstone all right, but hidden in lacy groves.”

The last question asks us to share a paragraph from our own work. My new novel Crooked is scheduled to come out this fall. It’s based on the life and crimes of Alvin Karpis, a man who topped the most wanted list in America in the 30s. Writing it was an interesting process which involved considerable research and the following of actual events while peppering in fictional elements. Here’s an excerpt:

Walking past the crossbuck, he followed the railway line, curly dock and grass tufts sprouting between the rusting rails. Going the way the kid manning the pump told him, the Magnolia station about a mile behind him now, he felt the morning heat rising. Stepping between the ties, going another quarter mile before stopping to shake a stone from his shoe, thinking what the kid at the pump warned him about: a bunch of freebooters working the area, robbing passengers at gunpoint after their tour bus slipped off the shoulder, taking the driver for the fare money and relieving passengers of their rings, wallets and watches. The same gang that hijacked a cab driver two days back, binding the man to a willow outside of town, robbing his pockets and stealing his taxi. Alvin thinking these were his kind of people.