Category Archives: Rex Stout

Cooking can be murder

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I’m not sure what it is about food and cooking that makes the subject such a popular one for mystery writers (and readers) but it’s probably the same factor that makes celebrity chefs and TV cooking shows so prevalent these days. The popularity of food-related entertainment doesn’t seem to have much to do with the general public’s love of cooking because, according to this article anyway, we’re cooking less and less for ourselves, but we sure seem to love watching and reading all about food, even when it’s killing people.

Probably the first mysteries I read that featured food in any memorable way were the Enid Blyton adventures of my childhood. I can’t imagine any of Blyton’s young detectives in the Famous Five or Secret Seven solving a single one of the puzzles that confronted them without the lashings of food at their midnight feasts and the packets of sandwiches and ginger buns that they always seemed to stuff into their pockets before heading off on their next adventure.

But food really came to the foreground when I went through my Nero Wolfe phase many years ago. While detecting his way through dozens of mysteries Rex Stout’s most famous character employs his own chef, Fritz, who prepares an endless array of gourmet meals for Wolfe, his sidekick Archie Goodwin and, often, guests to their New York brownstone. I’m guessing that Wolfe was the first fictional detective to generate his own cookbook (which also features fantastic photos of New York in the 1930′s and 40′s). It’s impossible to think of Nero Wolfe without imagining him mulling over a problem while breakfasting on Eggs Au Beurre Noir (from Over My Dead Body) or sitting down to an exotic supper of something like Trout Montbarry (from Immune to Murder). Early in his career (Too Many Cooks) Wolfe addresses a group of international master chefs on the topic of America’s contributions to haute cuisine but the event is soured by jealous fighting among the chefs and, ultimately, a death which Wolfe must investigate. Wolfe is inextricably linked with food in my mind.

I discovered the relatively modern phenomenon of ‘culinary cosies’ during one of my early trips to the US to visit my newly migrated brother (America has many wondrous things to offer the  traveller but for me it was the range and quantity of bookstores that I fell most in love with during those pre-online shopping years). There are now dozens of cosy series that in some way relate to food and share features such as book titles that play on food-related words and a preponderance of dead bodies in kitchens  but I’ll only mention the ones I’ve read and enjoyed:

  • Dianne Mott Davidson’s series featuring newly single mum and caterer Goldy Schulz had its first book published, Catering to Nobody, in 1990. As well as the mouth-watering food (which I could make from the included recipes but never do) I’ve always liked this series because although it’s a cosy series the topic of domestic abuse and the fallout this can have on families is sensitively and realistically handled. It’s also nice to see a terrific female friendship depicted across the whole series between Goldy and her ex husband’s other ex-wife Marla.
  • Jerrilyn Farmer’s series featuring caterer Madeline (Mad) Bean who puts on lavish feasts for the VIPs and glitterati of Los Angeles is always fun and my favourite of the seven books I’ve read is probably Immaculate Reception which sees Mad catering an event for 2000 people to welcome the Pope to the city. I was given the first book in this series because I share something slightly unusual with the main character and kept on reading the series because the books are full of interesting details about LA (a place I visit regularly) and the world of catering to the rich and famous (reading about it is as close as I’d ever want to get).
  • Peter King writes a fun series that often combines food with travel as his protagonist, un-named man known as The Gourmet Detective, is hired to track down obscure ingredients and otherwise solve culinary mysteries around the world. In the first book in the series (also titled The Gourmet Detective) the protagonist is at a prestigious event when a TV journalist dies of poisoning (reading lots of these books does tent to make you want to hire your own personal food taster).
  • Michael Bond, better known as the children’s author who created Paddington Bear, has a long-running farcical (sometimes downright surreal) series featuring a French food-inspector (and amateur detective) called Monsieur Pamplemousse. In my favourite of these books, Monsieur Pamplemousse Rests His Case a bunch of mystery writers are attempting to recreate a meal first served by Alexandre Dumas when things go horribly wrong.
  • One of my recent food-related mysterious discoveries has been Kerry Greenwood’s Corinna Chapman novels which I’ve featured here and here.  As well as Corinna’s job as baker and bread-maker for her little community in inner-city Melbourne there’s a core group of characters in the series who share an apartment building and they’re always cooking for each other and sharing large meals and good times. And the odd death or three of course. The books are light but I do enjoy them.
  • I’ve also recently read and reviewed the second of Julie Hyzy’s series featuring the executive chef at America’s White House. It’s a perfect series for me as it combines food, political trivia and murder :)

However not all food-related crime is quite so cosy. In Robin Cook’s Toxin a doctor’s daughter dies due to E.coli bacteria in a fast food joint’s hamburger. In order to find out how his daughter could have been killed by something so seemingly innocuous the doctor gets a job at the factory which manufactured the burger patty that killed his child and finds some pretty disturbing facts about mass-produced food (I swear even the most ardent meat-eaters will at least consider vegetarianism after reading this).

Even Dick Francis recently got in on the act, setting his 2007 novel Dead Heat in and around a restaurant in one of the horse-racing towns that feature regularly in his books. The book’s protagonist Max Moreton is a chef whose popularity is on the rise until his restaurant is shut down due to a suspected food poisoning case and things go downhill for Moreton from that point on.

I’ve only highlighted a fraction of the food-related mysteries that have been published, so do you have a favourite that’s not on my list?

This post was prompted by the theme of an upcoming bookworms carnival, do visit the bookworms carnival blog and take a look at the array of interestingly themed carnivals to be found. Surely you’ll find something to tempt you with Rebellious Women or perhaps you’re looking for a new Comfort Read.

A Classic Crime Curriculum

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Rob Kitchin needs the assistance of crime fiction readers everywhere. He wants your suggestions for the ten classic* crime fiction books that a fan of the genre who is more familiar with contemporary fiction than the older stuff should read.

As I mentioned in my review of the Patricia Moyes book the other day I’m fairly ignorant of the classics myself but surely we all know by now that I’d never let a lack of knowledge get in the way of having an opinion.

Last year I prepared a ‘Dartmoor Dozen’ list of books in a variety of mysterious sub-genres and three of those are books I would recommend to Rob

  • Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders at the Rue Morgue (blame my mother, when she got through the poetry she started reading Poe’s murder mysteries to baby Bernadette assuming that it was tone of voice rather than content that was important)
  • Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventure of the Final Problem (actually I have a giant volume of Doyle’s collected works and if I had the power I’d make Rob read the whole thing – it’s a delight)
  • Ngaio Marsh’s The Nursing Home Murder (published in 1935 it tackled weighty political issues like pre-Israel Palestine among the murder and mayhem)

From my own reading I would only add another three to the list

  • Rex Stout’s Fer-de-Lance (it’s his first and one of the best and does a great job of introducing all the players)(plus Rob might enjoy the plot of a university professor being killed)
  • Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile (we’ve talked about this book before)
  • Erle Stanley Gardner’s The Case of the Vagabond Virgin (legal procedurals are a sub genre of crime fiction that seem to be out of favour these days but Gardner’s 85 Perry Mason books were damned good crime solving yarns)(I could have chosen any one of several books but seriously aren’t you just dying to know what the heck a vagabond virgin is?)

That’s it. I can’t come up with four more classics I’ve read that I would recommend (I have actually read a few more than this but not all old books are great) (sorry Dashiell Hammett and Arthur Upfield but …well…”ugh” on both counts).

However I’ve been preparing my own list of classics to read and I’m planning to read

  • Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (Hume was arguably Australia’s first writer of detective fiction and this 1886 novel was discussed on a local radio show last year and was said to influence the great detective writers including Arthur Conan Doyle) (though this may be hogwash, we Aussies tend to believe we’ve had more influence on the world stage than is actually the case)
  • Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (I’m pretty sure I have read this before as it’s one of a collection of 20 leather bound books I inherited from my paternal grandmother and I read them all as a teenager but I cannot recall a single detail of the Collins)(which is every sad because Collins was a protégé of one of my favourite writers ever, Mr Charles Dickens)
  • Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train (does it count that I’ve seen the film a bunch of times?)
  • Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (It’s highly unlikely I will like Chandler but stranger things have happened)
  • Something by Margery Allingham (I’ve no idea what as to be honest none of the titles immediately appeal but I feel I ought to read something)

Actually ‘planning to read’ sounds a bit more organised than I really am. So far all I’ve done is make the list. But I’m in no great rush and I’m not going to devote oodles of reading time to books that are decades old when there is so much new stuff that intrigues me. I don’t mind delving sporadically into my favourite genre’s heritage but I’m not about to devote my life to such pursuits.

Please head over to Rob’s site and leave him your suggestions and I’ll check them out too. I am open to the idea of adding some more titles to my own ‘crime fiction to read before I die’ list.

*Rob defines classic crime as anything published before 1970. I define it as stuff published before I was born (spot the self-absorbed one). Oh and my date is 1967 (I have plenty of hang-ups but you knowing how old I am isn’t one of them).

Crime Fiction Alphabet: G is for Gambit

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The Crime Fiction Alphabet meme, hosted by Kerrie at Mysteries in Paradise is gathering new participants each week and is a great source of recommendations about a wide variety of crime fiction. Do check out letters A, B, C, D, E and F if you haven’t already done so.

I’m not nearly as well versed in classic crime fiction as other participants of this meme but I have read my share of the older stuff so this week I thought I’d talk about one of my favourite ‘golden age’ characters: Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe who appeared in more than 70 novels and stories. Published in 1962 Gambit is one of the later books of the series (which started in 1934) and so is less dated than the earlier works. As always, the book is amusingly narrated by Wolfe’s able assistant Archie Goodwin. In it Paul Jerin is a chess master simultaneously playing 12 games (blindfolded) at a private club (the Gambit Club) when he dies of poisoning via his hot chocolate. Sally Blount, who knew Jerin, engages Wolfe, a private detective, to prove that her father, Matthew, is innocent of Jerin’s murder which he has been arrested for.

In our house when I was growing up most of my cultural references were English. What little TV we watched was English (all those dreadful 70′s sitcoms like Love thy Neighbour that made me cringe even then), the magazines my mother got her recipes and knitting patterns from were English and the books we borrowed from the library were, for the most part, English (I started my mystery reading with Enid Blyton and moved to Agatha Christie and Dick Francis). When I chanced upon a Rex Stout novel with its dapper hero who lived in a lavish house in mysterious (to me) New York I was therefore intrigued.  The fact that he solved almost all of his cases without ever leaving the house was icing on the cake (perhaps even then I was anti-social) and I also liked the fact he was a larger than life character in so many ways. In the opening of Gambit for example Wolfe is burning the pages of Webster’s New International Dictionary because, among other crimes, it states that the words imply and infer are interchangeable. I adore that kind of eccentricity in fictional characters. Actually I adore that kind of eccentricity in real people just as much.

I haven’t read a Nero Wolfe book for many years and I wondered if I would still get the same enjoyment out of them now that I did as a teenager. However when I browsed a copy of Gambit at the library to reacquaint myself with the story before writing this post I found myself smiling and chuckling at the same things I used to like. I no longer have the same need to prove how different I am from the rest of my family (by reading American books instead of English ones) and think I’d tire more quickly now of Wolfe’s attitude to women (although I don’t think he’s the misogynist some people claim, I just think he’s incredibly socially awkward). However, the books do provide wonderfully complicated puzzles and they are genuinely funny. Also I think this series offers one of the first real partnerships in crime fiction as Archie Goodwin is a far more an equal partner to Wolfe than say Watson was to Holmes. Goodwin as a character is equally as well rounded as Wolfe and he is heavily involved in the investigations, in fact it’s often his contacts such as crime beat reporter Lon Cohen, who provide vital information, and he is far more than a simple foil to demonstrate Wolfe’s superiority.

I don’t seem to see Stout’s work discussed as much as that of Christie, Marsh and others but he’s hugely popular still. At the 2000 Bouchercon the Nero Wolfe corpus was nominated Best Mystery Series of the Century and Rex Stout was nominated Best Mystery Writer of the Century at the same time. Visit The Wolfe Pack for extensive information about Stout and his best known creations Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin.