Querido Coleccionista Crossover: Drinking in Noir
Books, dining and wine are an inseparable combination
This is the monthly appointment
and I have with our pools of readers. It is our monthly appointment for an intra-newsletter dialogue where we jointly write here and on .Every month we will explore a theme. The articles are free for our subscribers, but you can always think of giving us a donation!
This week,
asks meQué inspector de novela de negra al que le gusta comer y beber es tu favourite?
Which crime novel inspector who likes to eat and drink is your favorite?
I have to say, my favourite character of all time, always and forever, is Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe. And it couldn’t be any other way: his Chef, Fritz, often indulges in presenting very Austrian recipes that spoke to my heart and my belly from a very young age.
I spent my teens reading Nero Wolfe novels, and I still do from time to time. My maternal grandfather was an avid reader of crime novels and we had them all: from Maigret to Poirot, from Conan Doyle to Christie, down to Poe, and Lovecraft.
Everything.
My love for Nero Wolfe and my love for cuisine grew in parallel:
Once he burned up a cookbook because it said to remove the hide from a ham end before putting it in the pot with lima beans. Which he loves most, food or words, is a tossup.
Says Nero’s left hand Archie Goodwin, in Gambit (1962) - and I always thought that sentence was fitting me too, like the enormous canary-yellow silk pyjama Wolfe uses to wear at night.
Nero is, above all, a clever mind and a fine gourmet:
I had free access to all the libraries at home, as well as the public library, where I was a frequent and disorganised customer, at all times.
To prepare for this article, therefore, I went a bit back in time and fished out one of my favourite Rex Stout novels, one of the few that do not revolve around Nero Wolfe’s brownstone house on West 35th Street in New York City.
Too Many Cooks was published in August 1938 but every time I read it, it is as fresh as a press release of the latest Michelin gala.
Only written better and with more interesting content.
See it for yourself:
Wikipedia resumes the plot efficiently:
Wolfe, a knowledgeable gourmet as well as a detective, attends a meeting of great chefs, Les Quinze Maîtres, at a resort in West Virginia, and jealousies among them soon lead to strife; then, one of the chefs is murdered. Wolfe sustains his own injury in the course of finding the culprit but also obtains the secret recipe for saucisse minuit.
Wolfe is one of the finest literary gourmets, and Rex Stout has a sharp sense of humour that is all European in its finesse:
So Wolfe is invited to the event in West Virginia and (incredibly, given his sedentary habits), he embarks on the gruelling fourteen-hour train journey to get there.
But the occasion is unique, and the all-American menu that is served is for us European readers of almost a century later, quite fascinating:
In a literary cross, I could see the oyster served to Nero as an ingredient to the musings of a real-life gourmet and brilliant American writer (MFK Fisher), and I wondered if she and Rex Stout had ever crossed paths, and what could have they talked about, perhaps sitting at the legendary table at Algonquin, with Dorothy Parker in the vicinities.
This could seriously be a luncheon my fellow writer
and our common friends like and would probably love to attend.In the novel, the five invited and ageing Chefs are tested with Sauce Printemps: they all have to say which dish was missing which different, vital ingredient. The other nine Maîtres present, and Wolfe, are challenged to taste each dish and write down the missing ingredients.
It looks like a complicated sauce:
I admit I felt a pinch of curiosity to make my own version, but I did not try yet.
Instead, I engraved in my gastronomic writing awareness the following quote - that with all the rest of the quotes in the pictures, come from the Kindle version of the book I used this time.
Quite humbling, and appropriate.
In turn, I have asked
Cuéntame tu novela negra menos favorita hasta ahora, y porque?
Tell me your least favorite crime novel so far, and why?
I was very disappointed in reading by reading the 1994 The Shape of Water, the first detective novel starring Inspector Montalbano, by Italian writer Andrea Camilleri.
Camilleri chose the name Montalbano for his protagonist in homage to the Spanish writer Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, creator of another famous investigator, Pepe Carvalho.
Of course, the two characters have in common a love for good food and good reading, and quite an unconventional manner in solving cases and dealing with women in particular, and love and affection in general.
I was not sold by the novel, and it is one of those rare cases where the television series then created on top of the novel was more pleasant for me, and that made me go back to Camilleri’s book and notice details I hadn’t when I read it first, and eventually made me like it.
Now that i think, it might well be because I cannot efficiently replicate the Sicilian accent in my head, thus diminishing drastically the pleasure I get from reading Camilleri’s Montalbano.
And what about you, dear reader? What are your most and least favourite noir novels?
I’m not very much into noir novels but there iis an author that I realy like a lot. She’s Fred Vargas, which is the pseudonym used for the french writer Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau. Her main character is the inspector Adamsberg a tortured and psicological complicated policeman. Vargas’ novels are like him.