Recent Reading

My recent reading has not been at all ambitious! I read The Chalk Pit, continuing my reading of the Ruth Galloway series by Elly Griffiths. I read The Typhoon Lover, continuing the Rei Shimura series by Sujata Massey. At the recommendation of a neighbor, who loaned me the book, I read Slow Horses, the first in author Mick Herron's series about British espionage agents. These were all fun to read but I don't have anything particular to say about them. As always, I am on the lookout for interesting references to what the detectives eat and why they eat it at that point in the story -- does it help build suspense? OR diffuse tension? Or just reveal a bit about their personalities?

The Chalk Pit by Elly Griffiths

Ruth Galloway, the amateur detective in this series, has a domestic life as the single mother of a daughter, who was born in the first book in the series, and in this one is now six years old. Ruth has a successful career as an anthropologist and consultant to the police, and has many friends and connections. However, she's neither a cook nor a gourmet, and the food in the novels is of a more ordinary sort. My favorite food mention in The Chalk Pit is from a character who runs a mothers-and-children group who says 

"There’s hell to pay if I don’t open the Jaffa cakes." (p. 90). 

If you haven't tasted Jaffa Cakes, you should -- they are very popular orange-filled cookies made by the British cookie company called McVitties. The mothers-and-children group was surprisingly important in the mystery. The amateur detective, Ruth Galloway, isn't much of a cook, but food manages to highlight various events in every novel.

The Typhoon Lover by Sujata Massey

Amateur detective Rei Shimura in this series is anything but domestic! Her adventures in The Typhoon Lover occur against a background of her love affairs with two men, one in Tokyo and one in Washington, D.C. Rei doesn't cook, but in every book she enjoys excellent meals, both Japanese and American.

There's lots of food in The Typhoon Lover! I especially liked this: "I knew that okonomiyaki, the delicious Japanese savory pancake, was as essential to the survival of Waseda’s students as pizza was to American undergraduates." (location 2943, Kindle edition) The history of this dish is very interesting -- it was invented after World War II, partly to use available ingredients in a time of scarcity. Now the dish is so standard that of course the book makes no reference to this history.

Rei's Aunt Norie Shimura, who lives in Yokohama, is a model of a good Japanese wife and great cook, as well as an expert at Japanese flower arranging. Norie impresses Rei with her skills in almost every book. In this one:

"Eight o’clock was about the right time to telephone Aunt Norie, who would have already given breakfast to her family. The Shimuras usually breakfasted together, no matter what. My aunt was the kind of cook who made miso soup and rice fresh every morning, and would present enough pickled vegetables and fish alongside it to make you think you wouldn’t need another meal that day." (Location 1473)

Slow Horses by Mick Herron 

Food in Herron's Slow Horses is a little more incidental to the action, though it definitely contributes to the atmosphere of a spy story, and maybe provides a bit of a distraction from the bodies that pile up as the novel proceeds. Among the numerous characters who work at a bureau of the official London spy agency, not one has a domestic life -- all loners or losers. In fact, they have been demoted from the central bureau of the spy agency because of a big mistake they made, or because they have been set up by rivals, and in some cases that's why they lost their more conventional family lives. Most of them are rather stereotyped, especially the Asian computer genius named Ho who can break into ANY computer ANYWHERE and get the information that's needed for the action. (I think he's a better hacker than even Elizabet Salander, the girl with the dragon tattoo.)

Though the novel starts out very slowly with around 100 pages of introduction to the huge cast of characters, it gets pretty suspenseful in the later chapters. At one point, several of the secret agents gather in a cemetery -- just the place for a stereotyped British meal? Yes. An agent named Lamb was sitting on the rail surrounding a tomb and "eating a bacon sandwich. In his other had he held a second sandwich, wrapped in greaseproof paper." And all the other spies have to go hungry, especially feeling deprived when Lamb opens the greaseproof paper and eats a warm sausage sandwich! (p. 270)

Shortly after that, the group gets a perfectly predictable breakfast for an English spy novel. "They were in a café on Old Street: long and narrow with a counter along the window, and tables against a mirrored wall. Coffee had arrived, and breakfasts been ordered." Then the inevitable for morning in an English café: "Their breakfast arrived: three platefuls of the full English; one mushroom omelette." Ho forks up the beans. The woman who ordered an omelette slices it up and eats in a picky way. The author doesn't need to detail the rest: we know what's on their plates! (p. 282-285)

I'm sorry I haven't read anything more enlightening than mystery and spy novels lately, so I don't have anything very interesting to review. 

Blog post © 2022 mae sander.