Cakes and Ale. A Guest Post by Marty Wingate

RHYS BOWEN: MY guest today has set her latest book in Bath, which is the city of my birth. A city I adore and always make time to stop over there when we are in England. What I like about it most is that so little has changed: the Georgian crescents, my grandmother's Georgian house on Landsdowne, the Roman baths where I once swam as a child and of course the restaurants and pubs... both dear to Marty's heart. So please welcome her now:

MARTY WINGATE: Give me a mystery with great characters and a compelling story, but also give me an atmosphere to make a book come alive. But by “atmosphere,” I don’t mean just tone—a gothic suspense or dark and gritty noir—but also the practicalities of setting, weather, and the food and drink. For me, these elements combine to give the story life on and off the page. That is why I made Bath, the setting for The Bodies in the Library (book one in my new First Edition Library mysteries) as alive as the places in some of my favorite books.

A sense of place is vital. On a visit to Edinburgh, and deep into Ian Rankin’s Rebus books, I walked across the Meadows toward the city center and marveled that I was following John Rebus’s footsteps. I had half a mind to walk over to Marchmont and find the building and his flat, but brought myself up short. I might’ve been reading the book in which Rebus had let the flat to some students, and so he wouldn’t be there anyway. I kept walking, but, still with the character in mind, to the Oxford Bar to have a whisky.

The Norfolk Broads, in all their flat, bleak beauty, come alive in Elly Griffiths’s Ruth Galloway series. Not just the scenery, but also the weather plays a serious role here—the rain, the icy roads in winter, the remnants of standing stones in the boggy ground, shreds of fog suspended in the air. But when she’s at home, even though surrounded by such a place, Ruth’s main concern is to cook up the quickest meal she can think of.

Certainly I want Andrea Camillieri’s Inspector Montalbano to catch whoever has carried out such a horrific murder, but also I want to know what his housekeeper has left him in the fridge for his dinner. And, I’m not sure I could make it through an entire Bruno Chief of Police book without Martin Walker’s protagonist harvesting from his garden and cooking what always sounds like a feast.

I do keep coming back to the food and drink, don’t I? In The Bodies in the Library, I wanted Bath to come alive in its Georgian splendor, Roman past, and love of all things Austen. Most importantly, I wanted it to exist as the home of the Golden Age of Mystery library, for which my main character, Hayley Burke, is curator. Of course, she is not only a curator of a collection of first editions by Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and the others, but also the practical 45-year-old single mother of a college student, daughter of an invalid mother, and ex of a man that tries her patience on a regular basis.

I enlisted the help of food and drink in this effort to create Hayley as a whole person, and I started with the Ready Meal aisle at Waitrose.

Can you love a grocery store? It’s certainly one of my favorite places to go when my husband and I spend time in Britain. We usually stay in a flat, and those fresh dinners—cottage pie, lasagne, macaroni cheese—are perfect. They’re perfect for Hayley, too, who has slacked off cooking since her daughter moved away.

But there is more to food and drink than dinner—there is tea (or coffee) and cake. These are not just something to keep the character busy; they are vital elements to the story. Without the satisfaction of nabbing the last fruit scone at the Waitrose café the day after the murder, would Hayley have had the clarity of mind to make a plan with Val?

My in-house copy editor (my husband) would not allow this post to go further without mention of pubs and ale.

I stay true to Bath as it is today—I’d like to think a reader could use The Bodies in the Library as a map to walk around the city—except on one tiny point, and that is the pub I call the Minerva. A tiny pub on Northumberland Place does exist, but its real name is the Coeur de Lion. I changed the name, you see, because I wanted that nod to the Roman history in Bath. But otherwise, it’s the same place—you could march right in there and ask for an orange squash with fizzy water and a packet of crisps as Hayley does. Although, her ulterior motive is to question a shady character.

I changed nothing about the Raven, a fabulous pub on the corner of Quiet and Queen streets and not far from the Jane Austen Centre. Eat and drink downstairs or up—Hayley prefers upstairs, where she might be able to grab the corner table by the window. Order one of their house ales (I am instructed here to tell you they are brewed by Blindmans Brewery in Frome, Somerset) and a pie, such as chicken-and-mushroom or beef-and-ale or vegetarian, sitting atop a pile of buttery mash.

Hungry? Thirsty? Join Hayley for cakes and ale as she solves a murder inspired by the Golden Age of Mystery.

Marty Wingate writes The First Edition Library mysteries, set in Bath and featuring Hayley Burke, a curator of rare and collectible books from the Golden Age of Mystery who has never read a detective story in her life. Book one – The Bodies in the Library (Berkley) – was released October 8. She leads garden tours to Britain, spending free moments deep in research. Or in pubs.