.: e u r o p o l a r :. European crime fiction in the crosshairs :. tribune

This book, re-edited in 2003 by Robert Laffont, was originally published in 1974 and again in 1992. It was a great success and was immediately translated into English and well distributed in the USA (Madame Maigret's recipes). An Italian version was published in 1977 (Le ricette della Maigret).

I stopped writing prefaces many years ago because I would have spent time on them that I needed for writing my novels and their large number would have devalued them. Would you consider accepting this letter, which is written in sincere friendship, as a preface?

I have read and admired your books for a long time. Many people, especially these last few years, have become interested in gastronomy and virtually every newspaper or magazine has its own recipe column. However, for the most part, the cuisine is one of complete fantasy that would suit plastic blow-up furniture rather than a good and solid dining room. I would like to write that you are the last to provide classic recipes if I didn't risk distancing those amateurs of originality at any price. For each dish, you have taken the time to go back to the source, often rustic, to find out why a certain ingredient has been used, why it is cooked as it is and why a particular garnish has been chosen. Also, you have often searched for and found ways to simplify the recipes to fit with the exigencies of today's tastes.

I have seen you at work. Your curiosity and your vitality always fill me with wonder. And when I find myself before a litigious case, it's to you I turn for advice.

Our friend Curnonsky was called The Gourmet Prince. You deserve to inherit this title, even if I find it a bit grand and prefer the word expert.

It is the experts who distinguish between fake and authentic paintings, cheap works of art and authentic works of art. You cook, which is also an art, if not the oldest. You know of my admiration for you. I would like, by the intermediary of this letter-preface, to share it with those, very rare amongst your readers, who do not share it as yet.

You like good restaurants?
You're keen on quality French food and wine?
You love crime novels?
You're fond of San Antonio's books?

Le Logis de Mérinville RESTAURANT
RIEUX-MINERVOIS (AUDE), FRANCE
Moderate Prices

Chef Pierre MORIN will make sure you try his specialities. He is a member of the Friends of San Antonio Association and Association 813, and will show you round the MUSEUM HE HAS DEVOTED TO SAN ANTONIO in his restaurant. This is a unique spot which contains all the author's books in several languages as well as many other items (photos, letters, discs, posters, etc.). A museum unrivalled in the world.

If we imagine that we are asking a hypothetical Ideal Reader which literary figures he associates with the joy of food, the response will hardly surprise us: Nero Wolfe and Pepe Carvalho.
(Some might cite Maigret but, as a working police officer, and what's more married, he is not in the same category. And besides, his relationship with food has less to do with pleasure than with seeking revenge for a kind of ancestral hunger, typical of his rural origins.)
And yet we are dealing with two almost antithetical characters, so different from each other that they represent two extremes, two conflicting ways of interpreting the quest for truth .
In reality, to talk of food in relation to crime fiction is, ultimately, to associate death – the crime – with nourishment, which guarantees the continuation of life, at least from a physical standpoint. But such contradictions are certainly not going to stand in our way. On the contrary.
We will begin by pointing out that Nero Wolfe is, in fact, only one half of the investigative figure of Rex Stout's novels (or three quarters, if we're talking in weight terms): the existence of a character like Archie Goodwin is fundamental if we are to draw a comparison with Pepe Carvalho.
The only thing the two detectives have in common is the fact that they were both, at a particular point in their lives, secret agents but – even in this respect – in quite different ways. Wolfe was at the service of the Austro-Hungarian empire, on the eve of the First World War. Pepe Carvalho came to life in 1971 as the protagonist of an “experimental novel”, Yo maté a Kennedy , in which he is an ex-Communist militant, now a CIA agent, Kennedy's bodyguard and assassin. Obviously, in the “definitive” Carvalho, all that remains is the prior involvement in political militancy and some vague hints (especially in the first novels) at a collaboration with the American secret services.
Apart from the CIA involvement, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán – Carvalho's creator – has a number of things in common with his character: from a love for good cooking to the Communist militancy, which earned him eighteen months in the prisons of his homeland under Franco.
Stout, on the other hand, was nothing more than a normal writer: it appears that he was never caught up in “adventures” of any kind. Furthermore, the Nero Wolfe-Archie Goodwin duality allowed him – with a legitimate eye towards sales – to bring together the two main strands of the investigative novel: that which takes, as its central character, an English-style investigator, the kind of individualistic genius who only works his “little grey cells”, who collects and processes data like a computer; and the American one, who wanders around between drawing rooms and slums, punches and is punched, seduces and is seduced by women of every kind: in short, who “gets his hands dirty”.
And here we reach the crux of the matter.
Both Wolfe and Carvalho have a relationship with food that could be defined as “maniacal”. But we are dealing with different types of “mania”, almost opposites.
Nero Wolfe is a solitary eater, the pleasures of his palate are onanistic. He never shares the experience of food, not even when it would appear that he is doing so. His occasional table companions seem to disturb him more than anything else. His daily table companion – Archie Goodwin – is implicitly deemed incapable of appreciating the masterpieces prepared by the Swiss cook Fritz Brenner which, in fact, are rarely commented upon, except in the presence of the creator himself.
Pepe Carvalho also expresses his mania when cooking for himself, perhaps testing himself at three in the morning with dishes whose preparation is complex and the digestion of which is difficult. And often, when he is feeling guilty, he seeks out a friend with whom he can share the experience.
These two different approaches to food (to the preparation of food, in particular) find their reflection in the respective methods of investigation.
Carvalho gets his hands dirty: gutting the fish, slicing the onion, going shopping in the Boquería, Barcelona's market, where one is swept away by extraordinary perfumes and extraordinary stenches, like in all the great popular markets of the world.
We can be sure that Nero Wolfe would never personally go near so much human carnality. Wolfe, truth be told, is a bloody aristocrat. His vision of life is elitist: Beauty, Pleasure, Refinement cannot (and should not) be appreciated by all.
Ultimately, without solid traditions to refer to, Wolfe (Stout) seems to be convinced that refinement counts more than anything in the kitchen, even more than substance.
Which, all things considered, is relatively typical for a North American. Personally – and setting to one side the fact that Wolfe was born in Montenegro and arrived in the US in the 1920s, according to the contrasting versions borne out by the highly distracted Stout himself – I think that, in US fiction which is destined for a popular audience, there is a tendency to attribute characteristics and tendencies which are either negative or perceived as so being to non-American characters.
A marked propensity towards the pleasures of sex or food, for instance. The stuff of Europeans.
In the novel Alta cucina / Haute cuisine , set at a gastronomic convention, the chefs – all European: French and Italian, plus Marko Vukcic, Wolfe's long-time friend from Monte Negro – are depicted as caricatures, bizarre and capricious, pathologically envious of each other and obsessively jealous when it comes to their own recipes, the exclusivity of which, inevitably, stems from a mysterious secret ingredient.
In reality great chefs are often bizarre, sometimes even capricious, but rarely do they boast of secret ingredients or refuse to reveal their recipes.
The picture painted by Rex Stout is that which the average American has of Europeans: clever but incomprehensible, and thus unreliable. Oh yes, and so unhygienic…
Carvalho, on the other hand, gets his hands dirty, throws himself into the real world.
At times, we suspect he does not so much throw himself into the real world in order to investigate, but rather that he investigates in order to be able to plunge into the real world.
In Carvalho (and this is perhaps another point which connects him with Wolfe) curiosity is the only driving force which will win out over the quest for Pleasure.
Thus, sometimes, he finds himself eating things which he suspects will have a horrible taste, like the stale and greasy churros in the Madrid bar in Assassinio al Comitato Centrale . Carvalho knows only too well that the possibility the churros might be good is minimal, but he tries them all the same.
Not in order to do himself some harm (a concept which is alien to him) but because he considers it to be a necessary, inescapable experience during a stay in Madrid.
For Carvalho – as is the case, in this way, for Maigret – food is part of a physical contact which keeps them anchored in the real world.
Sharing food, being at the table with someone, is an integral part of the investigation for Carvalho.
For Nero Wolfe this is entirely forbidden: you don't talk work at the table, not even with the current client or with Archie Goodwin. It would be a waste of breath.
(On a personal note: if I were to meet him, I would ask him whether he considers it to have been a little bit of a failure on his part not even to have tried, in so many years together, to introduce Archie to the joys of cooking.)
Carvalho – like Vázquez Montalbán in real life, I can assure you – when he has the opportunity to sit at the table with someone he wants to “quiz” (or by whom he is willing to allow himself to be quizzed), observes the way he sits at the table, the way he approaches food, looks at it and touches it with his fork; he observes the way he pours his wine, tastes it, allows it to swill around the glass. And he forms a judgement on the basis of what he sees.
Faced with tee-totallers, people who have no appetite, and those who guzzle without tasting what they are eating, Carvalho harbours a “cultural” distrust which perhaps does not help him to solve the cases he is working on, but which gives Vázquez Montalbán the opportunity to describe characters through the way they behave with food.
As well as the chance (perhaps the last chance) to introduce us to the reality of Barcelona by talking about characters who now have nothing to share but a growing loss of identity, talking about a “common feeling” that survives only in some gastronomic habits.
In Gli Uccelli di Bangkok , Carvalho meets a successful architect, the ex-husband of a murder victim. He is a possible suspect, but his level of culture and his anti-Franco past lead the detective to think that the interrogation – were it to take place at a table in a good restaurant – could have positive consequences, or at the very least interesting ones.
“Do you like to eat well, sir?” Carvalho asks. When the man replies that he eats to live and doesn't live to eat, the detective hits back with no hesitation: “Then I'll see you for a coffee.” It would be better to sit at a table with a gourmet murderer than with an innocent man who does not appreciate food.
He can share the pleasure of a well-made sandwich with a total stranger, appreciate the culinary efforts of Biscuter, his subproletariat assistant, debate the variety of types of Spanish ham with a trusted delicatessen owner: but he can never, ever, accept indifference. Because food is not separable from life, and Carvalho (Montalbán) is curious, first and foremost, about real life.
In Stout's work, on the other hand, Wolfe's passion for good food serves only to construct a character that the author is trying hard to depict as an eccentric (as though the fact that he grows orchids were not enough, petting them as though they were human beings…). Basically a “mask”, in the most noble sense of the word, to permanently contrast with Archie Goodwin's “healthy American-ness”: like Harlequin's ancestral hunger in relation to Pantaloon's stinginess.

The intention of this essay is not to set forth a particular theory but rather to highlight the characteristics of two literary figures who, even in their relationship to food, express different ways of viewing reality.
It would be foolish to suggest a neutral perspective since it is clear to even the most distracted reader that the author's sympathies lie with the character created by Montalbán.
It is more appropriate to explain the reasons behind such a preference.
If it is true, as some would claim, that, even within crime fiction there is a left and a right wing, the “right” is represented by a primarily enigmatic conception of the stories (in the style of Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, etc.). The investigation runs its course in a kind of “separate reality”, composed of people who are incalculably rich either by birth or through financial prowess, where the only workers depicted are servants: butlers, gardeners, nannies, etc. At the end, the investigator gathers everybody together in an elegant drawing room and reveals the culprit thanks to his extraordinary intellectual gift.
Carvalho, the more-than-legitimate son of investigators like Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe (should we define them as of “the left”?) prefers to come into contact with “real” people: waiters, taxi drivers, shoe-shiners, as well as lawyers, architects, musicians, be they marginalised or government-employed…
Even if he finds himself discussing the history of Mediterranean food while dining with two bewildered prostitutes (Charo, his girl, and a colleague in difficulty).
In contrast to Stout, Montalbán has known prison life, where you learn – even beyond the rhetoric of a Neapolitan singer-songwriter – that the “bad guys” and the “good guys” don't exist, but rather only people, one by one, with their stories, large and small, and there feelings, large and small. And where those who are marginalised are more sorrowful than picturesque.
Pepe Carvalho knows that “nobody is perfect, not even a perfect fool”, as Huey Lewis put it.
Everybody, once in their lives, has something important to say: a good detective has to be ready to pick up on it.
And maybe not only a detective.

The Kitchen of the Crime

Giovanni Zucca
Translation: Cristina Johnston

On the cover, a threatening revolver, and a pair of handcuffs. Inside, a triumph for gluttony, erudition, and curiosity, flying the crime fiction flag. I am referring to Manuale pratico di cucina noir & criminale / Noir & Criminal Cookbook, an elegant volume edited by a small Milan-based publishing house, Guido Tommasi Editore, that specialises in gastronomy. The author of the book – a brilliant essay with extracts from crime fiction that is also a real cook book – is Montse Clavé, who, along with Paco Camarasa, runs Negra y Criminal, the Barcelona bookshop which is a must-see for all lovers of crime fiction who find themselves in the Catalan city, and certainly well-known in Spanish publishing circles (not to mention the odd associate of 813).

From Z for Emile Zola (with Thérèse Raquin) to A for Raul Argemí, an Argentine writer who is as yet unknown in Italy, following the order set by the author, we encounter a great many big names of crime and noir fiction, introduced quickly and coupled with a recipe that ties in with either the protagonist or the surroundings from which they hail: from an onion soup that chimes perfectly with Inspector Maigret, someone who would have loathed fast food, to the goulash with which Kinsey Millhone gets his strength up, precisely after having had one too many fast food lunches; from Pepe Carvalho's caldeirada (a rich, tasty fish soup) to the delicious Mexican-style steak ‘cooked' by Paco Taibo II for his hero Belascoarán. As a good European, I rejoice in the fact that the Stars and Stripes heroes have to turn to Europe (or Central and Southern America) in order to get a bite to eat between an investigation, a girl, and a punch up. See, for example, the Vera Cruz style fish associated with Ed McBain or the moussaka with which Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley celebrates his criminal success. But the author reminds us that North Americans (at the very least the literary ones) drink quite a bit more than they eat: and it does, indeed, seem ideal to see the great Sam Spade getting to grips with a single malt Talisker. Could we imagine the father of all private eyes in front of a plate of macaroni?

Just one note on the Italian edition, in which the Chester Himes' two famous police officers, Coffin Ed and Grave Digger Jones, appear with their Spanish names, Ataud and Sepultero: perhaps it would have been better to leave them with their original names, or to dust off the suggestive Italian names from the old Longanesi translations, in other words Bara (coffin) and Beccamorto (Grave-digger), terror of Harlem criminals…

But we can gladly forgive this venial oversight by an editor who, prior to this volume, had published another in which the flavour of the cuisine (and that of the crime) had an altogether different taste of reality. I am referring to Avanzi di galera – Le ricette dei poco di buono / Recipes for Good for Nothings, edited by the online magazine www.ildue.it , a website which the inmates of Milan's San Vittore prison work on. Located in the heart of the city, a five minute walk from the Sant'Ambrogio Basilica, the large and crowded prison is known in prison circles as ‘Il Due' (The Two), because of its street number and, over the years, it has housed the criminal aristocracy (the real one, not fictional), robbers and mafiosi, illustrious financiers and politicians caught with their hand in the till and eminent nobodies, but above all any number of poor devils, deprived, not only of their liberty, but also of good cuisine…

And this book takes us into the cells, to the inmates' tables, fed with that which is referred to as ‘slop', food passed by the prison authorities which, in the best case scenario is only just passable and which is frequently disgusting. Contrary to the huge canteens seen in so many American films, in Italian prisons you eat in your cell, food that has been sent by family members or bought in the prison store, cooked on precarious little cookers (situated next to the Turkish toilets for all bodily needs). Knives are banned: so how do you cut meat, for instance? By making do with makeshift utensils, extracted from empty gas canisters or cans of tinned tomatoes, safe in the knowledge that, should they be found by the guards, punishment will ensue. A grater? An empty sardine tin with holes made in it with a nail. ‘Opening the fridge' means keeping the food or drink cool by putting it under running cold water. And where the equipment is lacking, or that ingredient which proved hard to find, then the art of making do comes into play, individual creativity, combining tuna used to season pasta with little pieces of tangerine; and when you're really hungry, if a few ants end up in that much-desired pasta, well, you get rid of the ones you can take out and eat up…

Alongside the recipes, some of which really get your mouth watering, we discover instants of life behind bars, often shown with a pinch of irony behind which it is easy to guess at a degree of bitterness; a life in which food – from getting hold of it, to preparing it, to the ritual of lunch – takes on an importance that we ‘on the outside' have often lost sight of. As we read that the ‘fashion' for world cuisine has made its way into the prison, along with inmates of foreign origin, we are reminded that, between ‘us' and ‘them' there are, of course, those damn bars, the consequence of crimes, arrests, trials, etc., but that we share the same common humanity, the same right to dignity and respect from others: a banal observation, I know, but too often forgotten, in the wake of fears and ‘zero tolerance' which are ideal for an easy route to political consensus. So, separated by the bars, but joined by our stomachs, we too could doubtless appreciate ‘spaghetti for the wretched' or pasta with ‘courgettes in a sauce for lifers', us, here on ‘the outside'. In order to remember them, ‘on the inside'.

Montse Clavé, Manuale di cucina noir & criminale, Guido Tommasi Editore, 2006, 190 pages.

www.ildue.it, Avanzi di galera – le ricette dei poco di buono, Guido Tommasi Editore, 2005, 190 pages.

	European crime fiction in the crosshair

	n°6 August-September-October 2006