Deborah Crombie's A Bitter Feast is here!

LUCY BURDETTE: Today our dear Deborah Crombie's book A BITTER FEAST is on sale everywhere! We couldn't be more excited! Rather than wax on about how much we loved this book and this author, I'll get right to questions for Deb:

I know well how hard writing is and especially writing a complicated police procedural with long running characters. But I kept thinking about how much fun you must have had with the background of the story – inventing the food and the gardens and the dogs and describing Melody’s parents’ country home. And at the lunch, the table settings, the local produce, the gin cocktails…

Do you mind starting with the lunch menu? That special luncheon was so divine! I really hoped that the murder wouldn’t ruin the meal before the guests got a chance to enjoy it. Roasted lamb with white beans and fennel, local smoked trout pate, pickled veggies with seeded flat bread—you had me absolutely drooling. Even the salad was stunning with pears, blue cheese and a drizzle of caramel. 

 But now inquiring minds need to know, did you actually cook this menu? And how did you choose it?

DEBORAH CROMBIE: I wish I had cooked all of those things! I’m hungry just reading your list.

I’ve made leg of lamb, although not in a smoker, and fennel and white beans, although not together with the lamb. And I’ve experimented quite a bit with the fermented veggies. (As for the gin cocktails, I think I can claim to be an expert!)

The main inspiration for Viv’s menu was a dinner given by a local McKinney chef, Robert Lyford.  It was my first trip to the Round Top Antiques week down in Brenham, Texas, and Robert was the featured chef for an outdoor dinner at a place called Rancho Pillow.  The guests were seated at one long table, set much like the tables in the book. We were served pickled vegetables and spicy pimento cheese with crispbread, then Robert’s main course was “pork and beans” served in camping tins.  And the deserts were in little jars, as are Viv’s in the book. All the food was amazing. So that part of the menu is totally down to Rob, except that I switched pork to lamb because the Cotswolds is sheep country. The pears and blue cheese were based on a recipe in our local foodie magazine, Edible. Yum! The smoked trout I just threw in because I love smoked trout spread, and if fit with the local foods.

LUCY: You had wonderful descriptions of your character Viv deciding she’d be a chef and then what it was like in the world of the kitchen, the sexism, the hard work, the pressure of seeking a Michelin star—even the tattoos the chefs got to celebrate. Here’s a snippet from p. 270: “It was so tenuous and indefinable, the synergy of the kitchen. When everything worked, it was an almost liquid thing—one station flowed smoothly into another and the communication on the line was seamless.” (Of course, everything is not working!)

Tell us about the research you did to get this right?

DEB: I had lots of help and advice, not just from Rob Lyford, but from my chef friend in Phoenix, Sean Currid, and chef Nik Chappell at the Slaughters Manor House in Lower Slaughter. Both Sean and Nik gave me restaurant kitchen tours and answered lots of questions. And then I read and read and read. Chefs’ bios and memoirs, books about professional cooking and about the restaurant world. I also ate a lot! Research was my excuse to go to a lot of restaurants in London and the Cotswolds that I would normally have considered out of my budget. Now I have to figure out a way to justify those meals on the next trip.

LUCY: I’ve been thinking a lot about your chef characters and remembered an interview I did on the blog with psychologist Scott Haas about his book, THE BACK OF THE HOUSE. I asked him if he ever felt like a psychologist to the chefs, and he said:

“There is a profound superficiality to the way some chefs regard the depth of their emotional lives--an avoidance, a calcification, part of why they cook instead of developing intimacy.  Cooking is much easier than working on relationships.  Certainly the chef told me extremely personal things, but this is not an introspective profession. On the contrary.”

Did you find this to be true as you were talking with chefs? I can imagine this description fitting at least one of your characters…

DEB: The chefs I spoke to seemed to make a great effort to lead balanced lives, and they guard their days off ferociously. But, yes, I think you can safely say that the chefs in my book have a hard time maintaining a work/life balance. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have much of a story!

LUCY: You make a wonderful comparison between the work of a gardener and a chef—how in both professions, people work so hard to achieve something that is fleeting, such as a wonderful meal or a perfectly weeded garden. And that brings us to gardens. We can picture the roses and the hedges and can imagine the landscape architect at work. Will you tell us about your interest in this and how your gardens compare?

DEB: This book let me indulge both my passions. I am an enthusiastic if not particularly good gardener (the same could probably be said of my cooking…) and I have an obsession with English roses. I’ve also been fascinated for as long as I can remember with English gardens, and with Arts and Crafts gardens in particular.  A wonderful book on the restoration of the Gertrude Jekyll garden at a Surrey house called Upton Grey inspired the gardens at Beck House.  I even drew diagrams of all the beds and plantings.  Although my own garden is tiny in scale compared to something like Beck House, I do use a lot of native perennials in a natural way—a very Arts and Crafts design template.

LUCY: You were spinning so many plates with your plots and subplots and it surely must’ve been difficult to decide which characters to bring forward and which new ones to introduce. With a series that has run to 18 books, can you tell us more about that process?

DEB: I’m usually thinking a book ahead about what characters will lead the next story. In A Bitter Feast, I knew I wanted all four of my main characters, Doug and Melody as well as Duncan and Gemma, to be working the same case in the same place, and the setting followed from that. But because there is such a big cast of continuing characters in the series, my biggest problem in planning a book is deciding who to leave out, rather than who to put in.  And sometimes the characters don’t cooperate.

LUCY: You’ve mentioned that you go to England most years to do research for your books. What did you do and see while planning A BITTER FEAST? (Now we’re all dying to visit the Cotswolds.) Do you know what you’re looking for before you go? And where are we headed next?

DEB: I visited the Cotswolds on my very first trip to England with my parents, in the late seventies, and I had never been back, although I had for a long time thought the area would make a great setting for a novel. I made three trips for this book. The first was sort of a fact-finding mission, trying to find the perfect village (or villages) for the story. On that visit, I decided on the Slaughters, which I’d seen all those years ago with my folks. I’m sure we even stayed at Lords of the Manor in Upper Slaughter, when it had just opened as a country house hotel.

On the second and third trips I stayed in both Lower and Upper Slaughter, and I do think I could work for the Slaughters tourist bureau! The landscape and the villages in this part of England are just breathtakingly beautiful.  I’m quite downcast now at not having an excuse to go back—but maybe I will think of one. Beck House and the Lamb are, after all, still there.

The next book, however, is set in London, in Bloomsbury and Soho, and I’ll be off for three weeks writing and researching in London right after Bouchercon! And as usual, I can’t wait!

LUCY: Readers, do you know that all 7 of the Jungle Reds will be at Bouchercon in Dallas in a couple of weeks? Two of our Reds are Guests of Honor--Debs and Hank! Don't miss the annual Jungle Red game show on Thursday the 31st at 2:30. 

And I have the honor of interviewing Debs on Thursday morning at 9:30. What questions would you like me to ask???

And most important, you can buy A BITTER FEAST wherever books are sold...