Nobody Knows the Truffles I've Seen...

It’s been a while since my last review, and I’m starting to get out of practice. I can’t quite figure out how to start today’s review of Chef Maurice and a Spot of Truffle (2015) by J. A. Lang. How to describe today’s book? Imagine, if you will, a culinary mystery. Make that a culinary mystery solved by an eccentric French chef named Maurice, a chef who is extremely fond of eating. Also, make this a mystery which revolves around the world of truffles and truffle-hunting. Finally, add a couple of chapters written from the perspective of a pet pig. “Oh, boy,” you might think, “Patrick’s finally gone insane. He’s seen one too many episodes of the BBC’s Father Brown, and he’s snapped and started to read cozy mysteries. Well, maybe we can at least finally get his recipe for coffee cake.” But you’d be wrong – the recipe is my mother’s, and it is not mine to give away. You’ll just have to settle for my opinion of the book.

I first heard of this book because of an enthusiastic review on In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel. The plot involves the disappearance of Chef Maurice’s mushroom supplier, Ollie Meadows. This is a major inconvenience for the temperamental chef. So he breaks into Ollie’s home to partake of his mushrooms, fully intending to pay of course. But he discovers that he hasn’t been the only one to break into Ollie’s home, and then he finds them: exquisite white Alba truffles… yet they have a distinct aroma of English woods to them! Could they possibly be local truffles? Chef Maurice decides that if Ollie was able to find the truffles, he can too, and thus he adopts a pig named Hamilton. They go truffle-hunting, but they turn up a corpse instead. And thus, the game is afoot, and Chef Maurice’s inaugural mystery is underway!

Dead and Buried

Gervase Fen has had quite enough of life as Professor of English at Oxford University. For starters, he’s just produced a definitive edition of Langland, and that’s enough to make anyone go mad, and the only remedy for that is a complete change in occupation. Plus, no matter where Fen goes, it seems that murder follows him and people keep dropping dead. So he decides to go into politics and get himself elected as Member of Parliament in the small village of Sanford Angelorum and the fine county surrounding it. True, he’s never lived there, nor has he even visited the place before, but you can’t let minor details like that derail a promising political career.

But then again, maybe Fate has other plans for Fen. On the evening of his arrival, he spots a large naked lunatic running in the middle of the road, before the man disappears. Before long, a suspicious accident occurs, a man is murdered, a blackmailer seems to be on the loose, Fen meets a real-life poltergeist, and there’s something about a non-doing pig in there as well. Look, it’s an Edmund Crispin novel; the only thing it’s really missing is a judge who bases his verdicts on the advice received from a lunatic in a box. More specifically, all this madness occurs in the novel Buried for Pleasure.

What is Love?

"Now, did you hear anything unusual during the evening?"

"Well," said Mrs Love, after pausing, unprecedently, for reflection, "there was a weird play on the wireless, very intelligent I expect, but not the sort of thing I like, they do broadcast such extraordinary things sometimes, I dare say Andrew would have made something of it, I always felt with him that I had so much to live up to in a way it was a strain."

—An interrogation from Love Lies Bleeding

Mystery scholar extraordinaire Curt Evans has recently joined the blogosphere, creating a highly promising blog titled The Passing Tramp, which is certainly worth a look! Some attention has been paid early on to the work of Robert Bruce Montgomery, alias Edmund Crispin. Crispin authored a splendid series of comic detective stories in the Golden Age vein that starred English professor Gervase Fen. Crispin was inspired by John Dickson Carr’s The Crooked Hinge, and Fen is intended as an homage to Dr. Gideon Fell, sharing his initials and even referring to Fell as a real person in The Case of the Gilded Fly.

Earlier this year, I read Swan Song, which was an excellent book, but the publisher, Four Square Press, absolutely ruined it for me by spoiling the twist ending on the front cover and again on the back cover. (The plot summary also makes some stupid mistakes in summarising the plot.) I’ve slowly been reading the entire Gervase Fen series in order, and so, thanks to Curt’s recent posts, I decided to read Love Lies Bleeding (most of it I read on audiobook while at work—but I left off at such a tantalizing point that I read the final 30 pages myself). After my experience with Swan Song, I decided not to look at the back of my copy of the book…

A very palpable hit...

Robert Bruce Montgomery, alias Edmund Crispin, was more than just a mystery writer: he was also an influential mystery critic and (under his own name) a prolific composer. I love the story of how he decided to try his hand at mysteries: he read John Dickson Carr’s The Crooked Hinge and was so impressed, he decided to try doing something of the sort himself. And thus was born Gervase Fen, Professor of English Literature at Oxford. His name is a reference to Dr. Gideon Fell (they share the same initials) and Fen makes a remark in The Case of the Gilded Fly that establishes Fell as a real person sharing the Crispin universe with Fen. (In Swan Song, Crispin makes similar references to Mrs. Bradley, Sir Henry Merrivale, and Albert Campion.)

Swan Song is the fourth entry in the Gervase Fen series, originally written in 1947. It revolves around the mysterious death of Edwin Shortenhouse by hanging. Shortenhouse was a singer rehearsing for a production of Die Meistersinger, and was universally despised by his fellow cast-members, the musical director, etc. He was despicable, arrogant, and his presence poisoned the atmosphere in the theatre. So nobody really minded when he was found hanging… only the case for suicide doesn’t quite add up, and we’re left with an impossible murder! For the victim was alone in his dressing room, and a witness outside testifies that nobody went in or out...

Top 10 Plot Ideas

Hello, and welcome back to the scene of the crime!

You may be wondering, as an experienced mystery reader, just what kind of mysteries do I like? Do I have any particular favourites or recommendations to fellow mystery fans? Well, to answer your questions, here are my top 10 mystery plot ideas. These are not strictly in “worst-to-best” order, because they’re all fine ideas—I just get more and more enthusiastic as I approach my #1 selection. So, without further ado, let’s get started…