Food In Mysteries

 RHYS BOWEN:  I was being interviewed recently when the interiewer said "You have a lot of food in your mysteries. You must love to cook."

I'd never thought about this before or consciously made sure I included food in the books. The answer is that I do not love to cook. After fifty years of having to put a meal on the table every night, thinking up the menu, shopping for it, preparing it and then washing up the dishes I have lost interest in cooking. However I do like to eat well. What I'd really like is Mrs. Pattmore, or Mrs. Bridges so that I could summon them to the morning room and ask what they recommended for dinner that night.

"Oh, I'd say we start with the quail in aspic, my lady," they'd reply. "Then the turban of sole and a nice leg of lamb and a summer pudding to finish with."  Food must have been less expensive in those days! Actually I know it was less expensive because even working class families all had a Sunday roast, all bought fish and chips and even oysters. 

But it's true I do like to read about food. I'm excited that Martin Walker has just come out with a cook book for his Perigord region of France. I think how characters approach eating reveals a lot about them. If a lone male detective snatches a hamburger on his way to the crime scene you know he's due for heart problems in the future. If my spinster sleuth invites suspects to tea and we witness the bone china, the tiny cucumber sandwiches and freshly baked scones we know the sort of meticulous lady she is. (and we enjoy that tea vicariously).

Lady Georgie in the Royal Spyness books started out by fleeing from her Scottish castle and coming to London with no money and no real life skills (she knows where to seat a bishop at a dinner table. This is hardly marketable or useful unless you know a bishop.) She struggles to survive living on beans on toast, that British staple for those with little money or students in rented rooms. And so it is food that provides the contrast, that shows us how far she has come by book 17, THE PROOF OF THE PUDDING, that came out this month.

Georgie now lives in her godfather's lovely mansion, she is married, expecting a baby, AND she has just acquired a French chef. She took a gamble with him, not having tasted his cooking but it turns out to be wonderful. She gives a dinner party. Everyone is impressed. And I... I get to write about all those exquisite dishes. Duck breast a l'orange, crab mousse, chilled asparagus soup, floating islands and berry tarts (the latter play a pivotal role in the story).

One of the things I love most about going to France, which we do once a year, is the French attitude to food. They like to buy everything fresh from the market. Local food, picked that morning. There are shops that just sell cheese, shops that just sell charcuterie and boulangeries, where baguettes are always just warm from the oven. And my favorite, the patiseries. Every tiny pastry a work of art. Last fall I celebrated my birthday on a cruise up the Seine with my daughter Jane and son in law Tom. The brought back a box of tiny pastries, each exquisite. A dozen had cost ten euros! A baguette costs one Euro. 

As I'm writing this I'm thinking when can I go back? When can I have crepes and mussels and have to make the hard choice which pastries to choose?

I started to write this about food in mysteries. Somehow I wandered into France and French food. But I'd like to hear your thoughts. Does reading about food detract from the plot of the mystery for you? Or do you love to savor meals with the characters?

Who Are you? Reds on real people

 RHYS BOWEN: The other day on Jungle Reds I wrote a piece about the new book I am writing and how I am trying to get to know the characters. Creating a character is a mysterious process. For me, once they open their mouths and speak I seem to know who they are. I get a visual image. Something to build on. But how does one ‘create’ a character? I wish I knew. It’s like a good recipe: we take a brief encounter with a woman at the bank, add a touch of Aunt Alice, something we saw on TV, stir together and hopefully a new character is born.

It's interesting to wonder how often we use real people in our books. I hear Sue Grafton started to write mysteries so she could kill her ex-husband on paper. Ian Rankin tells a funny story about his father, who was convinced that every character Ian writes is based on him.

“Is that one me?” he’d say.

Ian would answer, “No, dad. That’s a nun.”

But I suspect we do delve into our personal experience and base our characters on real people. I deliberately modeled Georgie’s grandfather in the Royal Spyness books on my own father: a kind, gentle man from a humble background. Someone you could run to and feel safe with. Exactly what I wanted in Georgie’s life. But unlike Georgie’s grandfather , my father would not have been ill-at-ease among his social betters. He chatted several times with the old Queen Mother. In fact he chatted with anyone he met.

Mrs. Williams in the Constable Evans books was modeled on my Welsh great aunt. A fabulous cook who constantly wanted to feed us up. Several other members of that cast were people I’d met in Wales.

I’m trying to think whether I’ve ever killed off someone in my books I would have liked to get rid of in real life? I know my old headmistress from school features in several books—any cold, spiteful, bossy teacher you see in my stories—that’s her. But I don’t think I’ve actually killed her.

I have noticed that a couple of leading males in my stories are good-looking men with Irish backgrounds and dark hair. Interesting that. My husband, with one Irish grandfather, definitely has the black Irish look. It wasn’t intentional, merely subconscious.

And I realize now that my books are peopled with real historical characters: the royal family, Noel Coward, Winston Churchill, Queen Victoria... but I was thinking more about people from our own lives. 

So Reds, where did your characters come from? Have you deliberately used real people? Killed off real people?

JENN McKINLAY: In my very first mystery I killed off the Hub’s boss. It was delightfully therapeutic for the both of us. My victims do tend to be real people who annoy me even though I may not know them personally. A certain celebrity that I find grating, a cousin that is trying, or a fellow PTO member who won’t shut up so the meeting can blessedly end, that sort of thing. 

But my protagonists are mashups of the favorite people in my life, so it will be a friend’s delightful humor added to another friend’s amazing head of hair, grounded by my mom’s intelligence. Probably, that’s why I’m so fond of them all. None of it is planned out but rather the character grows into these attributes organically or as needed. LOL.

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: I have definitely used real people in my books, usually in small roles and with great affection. Clare’s snappy secretary Lois? My mom, Lois. Investigative reporter Ben Beagle? Was an editor for the Livingston County News when I met him, and is now an editor at The Daily News  serving three western NY counties. His name really is Ben Beagle and he really does always wear Snoopy ties. My sister Barbara and brother-in-law Daniel are recurring characters (and have gotten to the point where they’re dating in the books!)

My rules, as it were, for including real people is that they have minor roles. Ben Beagle comes on stage, annoys Russ, who hates reporters just a little less than he hates lawyers, asks some pointed questions that move the plot along, and then exits. Trying to make a reality-based character grow and change within a novel is a recipe for disaster, I believe. You’ll wind up trying to stuff your organically-grown person into a real-person suit, to the detriment of both.

HALLIE EPHRON: I do not, for the most part, base my characters on real people. Though the old woman in THERE WAS AN OLD WOMAN is how I imagine myself if I persist into my 90’s. And I did kill my father off in the opening scene of NIGHT NIGHT, SLEEP TIGHT. I like to think he’d have gotten a kick out of it. And, now that I think about it, my mother inspired characters in several books as well. My next door neighbor’s dog Phoebe, an ornery ederly pooch with a grizzled muzzle who grunt-snorted about, is in NEVER TELL A LIE. In the book, Phoebe saves the main character’s life. But when they made that book into a movie, Phoebe turned into a little white french poodle. And they killed her. Which infuriated me. 

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Well, now it can be told. Charlotte McNally’s mother is precisely my mother, gorgeous and hilarious and brilliant, and whose favorite admonition to me was “I’m not criticizing, I’m just observing.”

But she was, frankly, not too happy about her portrayal at first, putting it mildly, until I convinced her to read the whole book (Face Time) after which she called me, crying, to thank me for having written “a mother-daughter love story.” So all’s well that ended well.

SInce then, however, I have to say no one is anyone. Ever. Ever.  There are a few, if I may quietly divulge, unpleasant judges who are portrayed with tiny bits of insider knowledge just to make my lawyer-husband Jonathan happy.  (And by unpleasant, I mean judges who have ruled against him.)  But they will never recognize themselves.

LUCY BURDETTE: I guess I’m an outlier here, because my Key West books are chock full of real people. Some of them play smaller parts, like the cat man, and others have bigger roles such as Lorenzo, the tarot card reader, and Martha, the chef. Martha burst out in A DEADLY FEAST and plays a big part in A DISH TO DIE FOR, coming in August. She’s also in the book I’m writing (slowly) now. The only time I made an egregious error was when someone bid on a character name and I turned him into a possible child molester. That was not kind, as our daughter says to her daughter…

DEBORAH CROMBIE: In my very first novel I modeled a character I really like after my grandmother, but of course in the writing she became her own person, as characters tend to do.  Since then, I don't think I've ever used a specific person, but I'm sure that people I know creep into all of my characters because that's where we draw our experience from. I think it would be fun to use real people the way Lucy does, but my books don't seem to lend themselves to it.

Rhys: Okay, writer friends. Who has killed a real person on the page?  Used a family member? Did they recognize themselves?

What We're Writing: Rhys on House Hunting

RHYS BOWEN: I'm about halfway through a new Royal Spyness novel and finding it hard going.
Why? I know the story. I pretty much know what's going to happen. The trouble is that so much has to happen. This is the complication that ensues when the sleuth has a personal history and agenda as well as doing her job and solving mysteries.

This book will be called FOUR FUNERALS AND MAYBE A WEDDING.
The premise, of course, is that Georgie will finally be getting married. Her path to the future looks like smooth sailing, but then one thing after another starts going wrong. As you can tell from the title people start dying. Georgie finds herself in a difficult situation. Her dream house suddenly isn't.

And the biggest question of all: will she even get married?

Now I know this is a mystery novel. There is supposed to be a crime/a body. The sleuth is supposed to solve it and all is well.

But there is so much of Georgie's personal story in this book that we don't get to any sort of crime until at least a hundred pages. Then we aren't sure it was a crime. We are never sure there is any sort of crime until almost the end of the book. So I'm worried. Will my readers want that body earlier on? They will be concerned about what might be going on around Georgie. They will have suspicions that all is not right. But there will not be a body.

Is this all right, do you think?

Anyway, here is my sample from the book. It's something we've all experienced: those first house hunting attempts that don't turn out as we dreamed. Georgie and Darcy have been to see a couple of absolutely awful flats in London and then comes this third one:

We took the Tube to Swiss Cottage and walked up a pleasant, tree-lined street. My spirits began to perk up, especially when we stopped outside a big white block of flats. This was more like it. We met a very superior type of young man at his office off the foyer and he escorted us up in the lift.

            “It’s a trifle bijou, but   I’m sure we will meet your needs,” he said. “Our flat-dwellers are all most satisfied. We even had a titled lady here once. Lady Lockstone,  is the name familiar to you? It was in all the society pages.”

            Darcy glanced at me and winked. “What happened to Lady Lockstone?” he asked.

            “Unfortunately she passed away. She was ninety-three after all.”

            We disembarked on the tenth floor. “I’m afraid the lift does not go up to the eleventh,” he said and led us up a narrow stair. “As I mentioned these apartments are a trifle bijou but for a young couple like yourselves who probably won’t have too much furniture…” And he turned the key. It was essentially a room. Quite a decent sized room but  it was an attic. The ceiling sloped down on one side so that we would have to be careful not to bang our heads when we got up from sofa. Over in one corner there was a curtain around a sink and tiny stove. “The kitchen,” superior young man said, pulling back the curtain like a magician revealing a rabbit. “So well designed and compact.”

             There was a dining table, a sofa and a bathroom so tiny that we could just squeeze between the sink and the bath to reach the loo. And… “Where is the bedroom?” I asked.

            “Ah.” He waved his hand like a magic wand and tugged at a piece of paneled wall. This lowered into a bed. “Such a space saving device,” he added. “Everything you need right at your fingertips.”

            “You’ll be able to reach out of bed and put on the tea and toast,” Darcy said with a straight face.

Who hasn't gone through something like this? I remember my first flat after college. Sharing with two friends on a street that seemed quite respectable, but there was one loo for three floors and we later discovered that thee prostitutes lived in the basement! Do share your horror stories.