Give Me Food!

 RHYS BOWEN:  I was doing an interview the other day when the interviewer said, "I notice you include a lot of food in your books. Do you love to cook?"

The answer to this is that I love to eat, but after all these years of feeding four children, entertaining for my husband's job and having family descend on us I have had enough cooking for one lifetime. What I'd really like is to have Mrs. Patmore to make everything once I've come up with the menu.  Or better yet, to have her come up with the menu too. I'm rather tired of having to decide what to eat.

But I do love reading about food. One of my favorite book memories is the picnic on the river in the Wind in the Willows. I've always wanted a picnic like that. And I adore travel books about Tuscany and France with details of meals.  So I also like writing about food. It's a great way to eat vicariously without the calories.

It's strange that my two new books have exactly the opposite food experience: THE PARIS ASSIGNMENT takes the reader to France in WWII when people are starving. The Nazi occupiers decreed that adults could have 1200 calories per day and old people only 800. That was if food was available. When my heroine makes it to Paris after she escapes German imprisonment one of the first things she notices is there are no pigeons. They've all been eaten.

Quite the opposite experience in my upcoming THE PROOF OF THE PUDDING. The story features a new French chef for my heroine, Lady Georgiana. He comes with dubious credentials but he certainly knows how to cook. There are two banquets in the story, each filled with food items that I love: fresh crab, asparagus, duck breast, floating islands, and fruit tarts.  Of course, being a mystery novel, one of these items is not entirely what it seems...

I had to give Lady Georgie a French chef as she's been eating so poorly for much of the series and lately has had her former maid Queenie to cook for her. Queenie's cooking is not bad but is very much of the stodgy variety eaten by the working class in England to provide enough calories to keep warm in unheated houses. Lots of suet puddings, spotted dick, bubble and squeak, shepherd's pie. Hardly items one can serve to upper class friends when you live in a stately home.  So Queenie is relegated to assistant cook where she can't do any harm... or can she?

I try to visit France every year and relish all the little treats: the pain au chocolat for breakfast, the fresh strawberries from the market and, of course, the patisseries. We have nothing like the pastry shops here in America. Tiny works of art, and so inexpensive too. Okay, now I'm hungry just writing this. 

So who else enjoys reading about food in books? Do you think descriptions of meals detract from the mystery? In the case of my new book they are all vital clues!

THE PROOF OF THE PUDDING comes out on November 7. I'll be signing at the Poisoned Pen in Scottsdale on November 4 and at Murder by the Book in Houston on November 9. See you there?

Food in Crime Fiction

JULIA POMEROY: Rosemary Harris invited me to post today, so I'm going to use this forum to ask for your help. It's not a writing problem, it's a panel problem. I'm going to be on a panel in New York, in a few days, called Murder Most Fowl, about food and crime fiction. It's during the Roger Smith cookbook conference, so were not talking about casual mention of food.

I'm not going to list authors who's books are centered on food or recipes because Katherine Hall Page is on the panel and her character is a caterer and she includes recipes, so she'll know much more than I do about the lighter genre. (The character in my first two books, Abby Silvernale, worked in a restaurant - that's my connection).

 

Rosemary: Don't be so modest - you also used to OWN a restaurant, the cool one pictured here.

 

JULIA POMEROY: What I'm really interested in is what the protagonists we love eat, while they solve or commit crimes and what that food, or their attitude toward it, says about them.

Jack Reacher, all six foot  six or whatever he is, goes to diners, or places like Denny's. Perfect for Reacher. He's a big piece of machinery, doesn't care about fancy trappings, needs someplace roadside, walks a lot, fights a lot, etc. It's all about fuel and calories.

In A Dark Adapted Eye, by Ruth Rendell writing as Barbara Vine, the narrator describes a meal  for nine people prepared during rationing, meant to impress one particular man who never showed up. The meal required the slaughter of two household rabbits and the use of most of their garden vegetables. The entire group waited forever for the guest of honor to show up, and when they finally ate, everything was dried out and ruined.

 

Are there any meals your favorite protagonists or villains have eaten that help you understand them better, or that underline the scene at hand, or move the action forward in any way?

 

ROSEMARY: I was lucky enough to get an advanced readering copy of Julia's terrific new book, No Safe Ground - and she's got another for one of our commenters. It's a chilling, fast-paced story of an Afgan vet on the run in the US because of something she saw...

Visit Julia's website  www.juliapomeroy.com

to learn more about No Safe Ground AND the ereader versions of the Abby Silvernale books!