Tag: Texas Hill Country mystery

Why They’re Favorites…? On Rereading

BY HELEN CURRIE FOSTER

What’s your favorite place to read? A certain chair? The one with a lamp that shines on your book, not in your eyes? Perhaps a ferryboat seat, where you glance up at the horizon, then down at your book? On a plane, or train?

When I was young our house had an elm tree in the back yard which was not only climbable, but offered two branches that stuck out at the perfect angle for a lounging pre-adolescent. Even better—the lounger was invisible from the house. I could scramble up, arrange myself, open my book—and be left unfound, undisturbed, for some time.

A later joy was climbing on the New Haven RR in Boston after final exams (Chaucer, Shakespeare), armed with the latest James Bond and the very biggest Hershey bar with almonds, and being rocked south for miles along the coastline. Uninterrupted.

And I confess to rereading books. I further confess to rereading children’s books. Maybe a more accurate word is: revisiting. At least every two years, I pick up Kipling’s Kim, finding my way to the part where Kim guides his Tibetan lama, who seeks a sacred river, on a pilgrimage into the high deodar forests of the Himalayas. I can almost smell the trees. There Kim steals the Russian spies’ notes––his own initiation into the Great Game. Even more satisfying? The long afternoon where, exhausted, he is “taken apart” by Eastern massage and finally stumbles out, recovered, to find his lama at the brink of—well, no spoilers.

Why this gravitational pull of favorite children’s books?

Maybe because the best children’s books feature enterprise, surprise, disguise. And—most important––the discovery of identity.

Consider The Sword in the Stone, where Merlin transforms Wart into various animals (badger, owl, fish) who teach him survival techniques (“put your back into it!”). And magic! Giants! Griffins! The Queen of Air and Darkness! (See volume below–griffin looming behind tree.) One favorite moment? When Merlin transforms Wart to a raptor—a small merlin––who must sit for desperate minutes during his formal initiation, near the maddened and perilous Peregrine. Why does Wart need Merlin’s special tutelage? Because of his identity, which he and we will finally discover.

Others I still pull off the shelf: The Wind in the Willows, especially Mole’s tearful return home, where he recognizes his true self.

Also Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising. Maurice Sendak’s Nutshell Library – memorizing all the poems. I sneak back to Harry Potter—a feast of enterprise, surprise, disguise, and Harry’s search for his own identity. Occasionally I return to Lord of the Rings––especially the battle for Gondor. You’ll note I missed out on Jack London and many others. But there’s always The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe—remember that wondrous moment when Lucy slips through the back of the wardrobe, past all the mothballed coats…into magic? Into the snowy landscape where she meets Mr. Tumnus the faun? Into the realm where––as Lucy later discovers––she is Queen Lucy?

You have your favorites. So do our collective children and grandchildren. Bookstore shelves still offer children tales of enterprise, surprise, disguise—and characters discovering their own identities.

And fortunately, children’s books needn’t follow the 1930 Detection Club’s 10 Rules for Writing a Mystery. Rule #2: “All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.” Following Rule #2 would let out magic, of course, and its enormous space for imagination. (If you, like me, crave an occasional touch of magic for grown-ups, try Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt. amzn.to/44iIoVj)

As a mystery writer/reader I usually write about mystery. But thinking lately about the bibliophile’s favorites—favorite reading spots, favorite chairs, favorite characters––has sent me down a different path. Why reread? Wait––why revisit?

What is it about the end of Kim, or the plight of Frodo and Samwise in Shelob’s lair, or Harry Potter’s first moment on his broom, learning how good he is at Quidditch––that whispers, “read it again!”

I reread mysteries too. Have you reread a Dorothy Sayers, a Ngaio Marsh, a Sherlock Holmes? Or John le Carré? How many times have you read Tinker, Tailer, Soldier, Spy, or Smiley’s People? (Come on, spy thrillers are part of the mystery-thriller-spy novel genre.) And why do we reread le Carré? One character in particular: George Smiley.

Smiley first appears on page 1 of chapter 1, titled “A Brief History of George Smiley,” in Call for the Dead, le Carré’s first book, published in 1961. Smiley’s marriage to the aristocratic Lady Ann Sercomb has ended when she abandoned him, and he’s described as follows: “Short, fat and of a quiet disposition, he appeared to spend a lot of money on really bad clothes, which hung about his squat frame like skin on a shrunken toad.”

We learn of his deep love of 17th century German literature, his success at Oxford, his recruitment by MI-6, his dangerous service abroad as a spy in WWII. Not a commanding figure, no. But le Carré allows us to glimpse his sharp mind, his penetration, his ability to absorb all he hears. Smiley’s work as an intelligence officer provides him “with what he had once loved best in life: academic excursions into the mystery of human behaviour, disciplined by the practical application of his own deductions.”

Smiley appears next in A Murder of Quality (1962), where Smiley’s solution to the murder rests on a scathing critique of the snobbishness of British public schools (le Carré despised his own experience at such a school).

By the time we reach Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), Smiley has been put out to grass at MI-6 under the new regime headed by Bill Haydon, who has seduced Smiley’s wife Ann and taken over London Station after causing the bitter dismissal of Control as its head.

In Tinker, Tailor, Smiley is plucked out of retirement to interview a somewhat dubious British agent who claims the Russians may have placed a mole inside MI-6. Here’s Smiley, listening to the agent’s tale:

“He sat leaning back with his short legs bent, head forward, and plump hands linked across his generous stomach. His hooded eyes had closed behind the thick lenses. His only fidget was to polish his glasses on the silk lining of his tie, and when he did this, his eyes had a soaked, naked look that was embarrassing to those who caught him at it.”

Smiley’s investigation marches ahead. The BBC wants to make a series of Tinker, Tailor. And John le Carré has an actor in mind: Alec Guinness. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/sep/05/tinker-tailor-soldier-spy-40-years-on-alec-guinness

Le Carré’s letter to Sir Alec Guinness (3 March 1978) appears in A Private Spy / The Letters of John le Carré, at 213. He tells Sir Alec:

“Apart from plumpness, you have all the other physical qualities: a mildness of manner, stretched taut, when you wish it, by an unearthly stillness and an electrifying watchfulness. In the best sense, you are uncomfortable company, as I suspect Smiley is. An audience wishes––when you wish it––to take you into its protection. It feels responsible for you, it worries about you. I don’t know what you call that kind of empathy, but it is very rare, & Smiley and Guinness have it: when either of you gets his feet wet, I can’t help shivering.”

I love that “as I suspect Smiley is.” Does the author’s own speculation about George Smiley explain, in part, why we readers become so attached to this character? What drives us to Smiley’s side? Is it his apparent ineffectualness, his vulnerability, his stillness, his watchfulness, entwined with our certainty that he will somehow keep going?

Not until 1979 in Smiley’s People does Smiley achieve final vindication, catching the Russian master-spy who conceived the long set of steps that led to Haydon’s seduction and Control’s fall. At the climax, we (along with Smiley and his fellow spy Peter Guillam) await the possible arrival of the Russian in cold war Berlin, at the crossing point from East Germany. Will the spy make it across the bridge? Guillam asks what cover the Russian will use:

Smiley sat opposite him across the little plastic table, a cup of cold coffee at his elbow. He looked somehow very small inside his overcoat.

“’Something humble,” Smiley said. “Something that fits in. Those who cross here are mostly old-age pensioners, I gather.’ He was smoking one of Guillam’s cigarettes and it seemed to take all his attention.”

At book’s end, we are waiting with Smiley. It’s cold there by the Berlin bridge. I expect Smiley’s feet are wet. Like the author, “I can’t help shivering.” When we know a character’s vulnerabilities, we begin to perceive true identity.

For Smiley, for all the characters created by their authors with such vividness and such vulnerability that we seem to feel what they feel, for such characters–I reread. Yes, the better word is revisit: I go back just to be sure the characters are still there, still available, still waiting quietly on the shelf. And, yes, just as good as I thought they were.

I’d love to hear your favorites (reading spots, children’s books) and the favorite characters you…revisit.

FOOD AND A GATHERING PLACE

by Helen Currie Foster

A critical tool for mystery writers is creation of a gathering place. We watch desperate clients rush straight to Sherlock Holmes’s Baker Street lodgings––often the first place where we meet his client, learn what the client hopes Holmes will do, and encounter Watson, Lestrade, and various witnesses. A gathering place gives us––and the sleuth, whether amateur or professional––a place to meet characters, assess the social structure, and see investigation  in action. Sometimes it’s the crime scene itself.

A gathering place can provide the writer an opportunity to comply with one of the key rules (or guidelines) of the original 1930 Detection Club: “The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.” https://murder-mayhem.com/the-detection-club-rules We may not always meet or learn of the criminal at a gathering place, but it can provide a useful location for the author to make that first mention.

And we’re humans, so we appreciate gathering places that involve food and drink! We learn so much there, about our protagonist and key characters.

When we first meet Bruno, chief of police in a small town in the French Dordogne, the author immediately shows us the contents of Bruno’s police van, including: “one basket containing newly laid eggs from his own hens, and another with his garden’s first spring peas…Tucked neatly to one side were a first-aid kit, a small tool chest, a blanket, and a picnic hamper with plates and glasses, salt and pepper, a head of garlic and a Laguiole pocketknife with a horn handle and a corkscrew. Tucked under the front seat was a bottle of not-quite-legal eau-de-vie from a friendly farmer. He would use this to make his private stock of vin de noix when the green walnuts were ready…” Martin Walker, Bruno, Chief of Police (Book 1 of the series). Hmm: a resourceful and picnic-prepared detective.

Bruno routinely uses a couple of gathering places involving food, first and foremost his own farm above the Vézère River, in country humans have cherished for over 30,000 years. We learn of Bruno’s garden, his hunting, and the dishes he makes for guests. In the latest book, To Kill a Troubadour, Bruno demonstrates his omelet techniques and also carries six jars of his venison pâté to a village feast. (Martin Walker now has a cookbook.) But Bruno visits other gathering places, including his favorite bakery (Fauquet’s) where he buys his morning croissants—one of which he always feeds his puppy. The garden, the venison, the eggs, the wine opener, the bakery, the puppy, the croissants—they’re part of Bruno, and key to the setting.

Inspector Jules Maigret? His setting is typically Paris, where the Brasserie Dauphine delivers late-night sandwiches and beer to his office at the Quai des Orfèvres when he interviews a defendant. He and his colleagues must eat during investigations, of course—at the office and elsewhere. In Maigret Bides His Time he dines at the Clou Doré, a luxurious restaurant owned by a man Maigret suspects of jewel thefts. The waiter: “I recommend the paella this evening… To go with it, a dry Tavel, unless you prefer a Pouilly Fumé.” During the meal, Maigret “seemed to be concerned only with the food and the deliciously fruity wine.” But we readers know otherwise: he’s absorbing atmosphere, clues, little “tells.” In each book, Maigret finds a bar, a brasserie, a restaurant, which can serve as the gathering place where he assembles information that ultimately leads to a solution. Food and drink help create this distinctively French setting.

I do feel it’s unlikely that Four Corners policewoman Bernadette Manuelito would try Bruno’s venison pâté, and I’m not sure her husband, Jim Chee, would either. So far as I recall neither has visited France. They live and work in Navajo and Hopi land, in the series begun by Tony Hillerman and continued by his daughter, Anne Hillerman. In The Wailing Wind, Jim Chee and his former boss, Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn, “got a table at the Navajo Inn, ordered coffee. Chee would eat a hamburger with fries as always.” Leaphorn says, “I always have an enchilada.” In Anne Hillerman’s Rock with Wings, “Bernie asked Chee to order her usual, a hamburger and a Coke.” She can tolerate pepperoni pizza, but abjures salad. https://www.amazon.com/Rock-Wings-Leaphorn-Manuelito-Novel/dp/0062821733/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1663609808&sr=8-2

The Hillerman setting is not the Navajo Inn, not a particular bar, not a particular bakery. It’s the entire Four Corners, a vast arena of mountains and mesas sacred to Navajo and Hopi memory, with enormous views and laconic characters, careful in their speech, who drive miles to find gas or food. A garden of tender green peas? No. When he hikes into the mountains on a case, Jim Chee packs a bologna sandwich—not venison pâté. Food is essential, food is basic, and eating is often a solitary experience, while Bernadette Manuelito or Jim Chee are out in an arroyo, tracking a killer. The landscape feels too large for a single gathering place—although Jim Chee’s trailer, Captain Largo’s or Leaphead’s offices, or Bernadette’s mother’s house see occasional gatherings.

Coke and hamburger versus venison pâté or paella (French version) and Tavel? Famous cultural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote, “Cooking is a language… through which society unconsciously reveals its structure.” Also known—by mystery readers–as setting.

For her Richard Jury series Martha Grimes takes us to various venues in London and elsewhere, such as Brown’s Hotel (The Dirty Duck), and the Members Room at Borings (the club to which Jury’s friend Melrose Plant belongs) (The Old Wine Shades). She uses pub names as her titles, and the pub can serve as a gathering place, as it does in The Old Wine Shades. Another repeat gathering place is Melrose’s stately country home, Ardry End, which is subject to invasion by Agatha, his aunt-by-marriage, who greedily demolishes all the “fairy cakes” made by Melrose’s excellent cook, Martha. https://www.christinascucina.com/butterfly-cupcakes-british-butterfly-cakes/

Martha knows that when he breakfasts at Ardry End, Richard Jury lusts after her mushrooms: “Jury spooned eggs and a small pile of mushrooms onto his plate, then forked up sausages (a largish number), speared a tomato and sat down.” Shortly thereafter Martha reappears with “a steaming silver dish… ‘Mushrooms! I knew you’d be wanting more o’ my mushrooms!’” And he did. There’s something intimate about watching favorite characters have breakfast—possibly the most individually designed meal we eat. Right?

Grimes invents the Jack and Hammer Pub as the gathering place where Melrose meets his eclectic (nutty) village friends. At the Jack and Hammer we meet the cast of characters Grimes rotates through this series, and watch the friends (and Melrose) try to puzzle out the solution to the murder Richard Jury must solve. We learn the talents and deficits of these friends, their secret loves, and what they order from the bar.

Reading what characters eat and drink enriches our feeling of presence in a book. It pulls our own senses and memories into what we’re reading. We can taste the paella, taste the hamburger, remember our favorite burger joint, our favorite restaurant. We begin to participate in the mystery’s setting. Bernie bites her hamburger; Maigret takes a sip; so do we.

Our reactions to food live in our memory, linked to our senses of smell—and taste. “Smell and taste are closely linked. The taste buds of the tongue identify taste, and the nerves in the nose identify smell. Both sensations are communicated to the brain, The taste buds of the tongue identify taste, and the nerves in the nose identify smell. Both sensations are communicated to the brain, which integrates the information so that flavors can be recognized and appreciated. Some tastes—such as salty, bitter, sweet, and sour—can be recognized without the sense of smell. However, more complex flavors (such as raspberry) require both taste and smell sensations to be recognized.” https://www.merckmanuals.com/home/ear,-nose,-and-throat-disorders/symptoms-of-nose-and-throat-disorders/overview-of-smell-and-taste-disorders#:~:text=The%20taste%20buds%20of%20the,without%20the%20sense%20of%20smell.

Proust was right about food and memory: “Odors take a direct route to the limbic system, including the amygdala and the hippocampus, the regions related to emotion and memory.” https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/02/how-scent-emotion-and-memory-are-intertwined-and-exploited/#:~:text=Smells%20are%20handled%20by%20the,related%20to%20emotion%20and%20memory

And why shouldn’t this be so? At least partly, cooking defines us as human. Humans apparently mastered fire and began cooking at least 500,000 years ago; possibly our human ancestors began cooking as much as 1.8 million years ago. No wonder food and memory are entwined in our brains. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/food-for-thought-was-cooking-a-pivotal-step-in-human-evolution/;

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/foodfeatures/evolution-of-diet/#:~:text=Our%20human%20ancestors%20who%20began,more%20fuel%20for%20our%20brains;

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/121026-human-cooking-evolution-raw-food-health-science

On that note, I’ve just finished the draft of Book 8 in my Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery series, Ghosted. The central gathering place? The Beer Barn, an iconic Texas Hill Country dancehall and roadhouse. Food? Critical. Luis’s enchiladas and Conroy’s barbecue? They call!

Helen Currie Foster lives and writes in the Texas Hill Country, north of Dripping Springs, loosely supervised by three burros. She’s active with Austin Shakespeare and the Heart of Texas Chapter of Sisters in Crime, as well as Hill Country Master Naturalists (still trying to learn those native grasses). Her Ghost Daughter, Book 7 in the Series,

was named 2022 Eric Hoffer Award Grand Prize Short List, as well as Finalist, 2022 Next Generation Indie Book Awards, and 16th Annual National Indie Excellence Awards.