Bye, Bye, Dear Fridge...

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:  Just before I went on my mini book tour earlier this month, our refrigerator broke. It just…broke.   I came home from an event, and opened the door, and the light was off. Oh, no. The light was off. 

But, sometimes that happens, (or it has to us, at least,) and all we have to do is go to the basement and flip the breaker thing. So we flipped the breaker thing. But nothing happened

And you know how it is in old houses,  and with old refrigerators, sometimes you have to flip the breaker thing a couple of times. Since the breaker thing is probably old, too.

Which we did, but that didn’t matter. At all. It didn’t work. And it wasn’t gonna.

Luckily, we have another refrigerator, and I scooped up all of the super perishables and frozen things and lugged them upstairs (MY BOOK WAS DUE!!)  and  crammed them into the other fridge willy-nilly, knowing that as I did it, I would never be able to find anything again, not ever ever ever, but at least nothing  nothing would spoil. 

Then I called the repair guy. He came, really fast! And took stuff apart, and put it back, and shook his head.

Your fridge, he said, is 30 years old. It is dead. 

Then I called my guy at the appliance place, he’s a real gem, and said, Jimmy! We need a fridge! It has to be a certain size, and it has to fit into a certain place. Too long to describe to you, but you know what I mean.

What color do you want? he asked. White, I said.

Of course afterward, I thought do I really want white? But yes, I do. Our kitchen is white. The refrigerator should be white. Luckily for me, because that’s the only color they had. 

Anyway, the fridge arrives, and the old one is taken away. 

So I thanked it, as it was carted away, it had done so much for us, and I felt kind of sad about it. 

I also had to take off all of the things from the front of it, as we have discussed here, previously, and I took a picture to ensure that I could put things up exactly the same way on the new fridge. 

But I couldn’t do it. The clean white of the new fridge was so pretty. I just couldn’t invade that space with clippings and pictures and magnets and folderol. So I just magneted everything to the sides of the refrigerator so you don’t see it from the front :-)

Much of the food I took out of the old fridge is still up in the second fridge, and someday,. I will bring it down again. But it was really fun to have a snazzy new fridge with perfectly pristine shelves, where  I could absolutely start over. 

Thank you, dear fridge. We had been through a lot together, and I appreciated you every day.

Anybody have any appliance stories?

Nashville Cats?

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:

I am in Nashville! If all went as planned. And at first I thought: I can’t remember if I’ve ever been here before. Which is super scary, because, of course I have, I was guest of honor at Killer Nashville, a couple of years ago, but I could have been anywhere, you know? Since I don’t think I ever left the hotel.

(Although I could NOT have been “anywhere.” Because I was guest of honor, I was given an actual real guitar as a gift.)

Charlie Donlea was my co-guest of honor, and here we are, baffled.

I do not know how to play the guitar, but someday, maybe, if I ever decide to learn, then I will have one. All good.

Oh, and looking at my photos, sigh, I realize I was there in 2014, too. Teaching at a Sisters in Crime event, which was fantastic. This photo makes me a little teary. I do miss Laura DiSIlverio. And we HOWLED over this photo. Have you ever seen any clashier group of prints?

And so coincidental that Catriona was here on JRW yesterday!

So, Nashville. And it’s Bouchercon, the world mystery convention. (With maybe 1500 people, for better or worse.)   I will see Lucy! And lots of other friends, and… I hope to see you. Will you be there? What’s YOUR schedule?

Here’s mIne, NOT including things like the Anthoys, or opening ceremonies, or a whole list of parties! And big big meetings. BIG.

Thursday

4-4:50 PM: Panel “Behind Closed Doors”

Hank moderates, with Carter Wilson, Joshua Moehling, J.T. Ellison, Laura Benedict and David Bell

9-10:00 PM: Special Minotaur Event!

Saturday

10:30 AM Forge Booksigning and Giveaway!

1-1:50 PM: Panelist “Kickass Women”

Hank with Kate White, Charlaine Harris, Tracy Clark, Kelli Stanley and Laura Benedict

9-9:30 PM: Bouchercon Auction

Hank is auctioneer!

And SO much more–but I cannot list it all.  (I probably won't get another guitar….)

But let’s just say …IF I ventured out of the hotel. Let’s just say. Where should I go, what should I do? 

Who has some Nashville recommendations?

(And you remember that sone Nashville Cats, right?)

Good Food Wherever You Look!

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Standing ovation and rose petals and champagne! It is always such a joy and an honor when we are graced with the presence of the inimitable and fabulous Catriona McPherson.

(And I will never forget the key she offers to pronouncing her name: Her first name is  like the hurricane, and the last name rhymes with what you would call a human. A...person. Isn’t that perfect on so many levels?)

Speaking of perfect. Catriona has a new book! (Dandy number 16, incredible, and I fell in love with her at book 1.) And now I cannot wait to read THE WITCHING HOUR. 

But first: the Menu.

And then some very very serious discussions. About food. Yay.

Good Food Wherever You Look!

by Catriona McPherson

In the opening scene of THE WITCHING HOUR (Dandy Gilver #16), it’s Hugh Gilver’s sixtieth birthday and he has been allowed to choose the menu for his birthday celebration. 

That was the rule when I was wee: the birthday girl got to choose dinner. From my mum’s repertoire, that is; we knew better than to ask for steak tartare and choux-pastry swans on a tempered chocolate lake.

(In fact, we would have run a mile from steak tartare – raw mince and raw egg? Yukko – and didn’t know that the stuff eclairs were made of had a name.)

Hugh, aided and abetted by Mrs Tilling, the Gilverton cook, chooses to revisit his Victorian childhood and Edwardian youth with a dinner in the grand old style. The menu is:

Clear soup

Poached fish

Pigeon terrine

Gooseberry sorbet

Roast beef

Salad

Suet pudding

Cheese

Coffee and bon-bons

I imagined the soup to be chicken and the fish to be salmon, but toffs of the time wouldn’t go to town describing things on the menu so I didn’t either. 

My choice – one course and pudding – was more likely to be gammon steak, with a ring of pineapple as God intended, roast potatoes, peas and corn (the sweetest vegetables because, even though it was a birthday, you still had to have vegetables) and for pudding: birthday cake. Obviously.

I can’t imagine setting to on the kind of dinner menu that was typical among the upper classes at the turn of nineteenth to twentieth century.

Not that there’s anything on that menu I wouldn’t eat – in fact haven’t eaten – but more because nine courses requires you to eat hardly any of each dish. I find that exhausting. 

Modern tasting menus regularly give me a headache and sometimes give me the giggles. (Not that I’m against “fine dining”. I’d love to go to the Manoir au Quat’ Saisons once in my life, for instance.)

But, you know, when the menu item is six lines long and the dish, when it appears, is two polite mouthfuls or one normal one? Hilarity ensues. One time, I put my reading glasses on to try to find the celery that had definitely been mentioned in writing. Turned out it was the edible string holding together a posy of deep-fried thyme on top of the scallop.

(It might have been a lamb fillet. But it was the size of a scallop.) 

I think the meal that Dandy and Alec wheedle out of a shut kitchen in a pub, halfway through the book, sounds much nicer: tea in a brown china pot and freshly cut sandwiches of thick white bread, ham and pungent pickled something. If I was hungry, that’s the kind of food I’d fall on.

Speaking of scallops as we were, though, I recently hosted Leslie Karst and her wife Robin, for brunch on my porch. Neil said, when I told him, ‘You’re cooking for the woman who wrote JUSTICE IS SERVED? Are you nuts?’ I’ll admit, it did give me the collywobbles. That book’s subtitle is a tale of scallops, the law, and cooking for RBG. There’s a chapter on finding the right plates!

Leslie’s menu for Justice Ginsburg was as follows:

Salted cashews and rice crackers with wasabi peas

Seared sea scallop with ginger lime cream sauce

Roasted butternut squash soup with brown butter

Baby spinach, blood orange, red onion, dried cranberries, pine nuts and gorgonzola

Blackened ahi, wasabi mashed potatoes and snow peas

Patisserie

Perfect, right? A bit more detail than “poached fish” etc, but no novellas, and a special but sensible five courses plus the hors d’oeuvres. 

My menu for brunch on the porch was:

Mushroom and potato frittata

Courgette ladders*

Bacon

Sourdough and butter

Fruit salad and Greek yoghurt

And I wished I hadn’t remembered that episode of Modern Family where someone tries to sneer at Cameron by assuming he’ll serve frittata and he says, “Are we eating in 1998?” Gah.

Thing is though, when I shared Neil’s supportive (not!) words with Leslie on my porch that Sunday morning, she said something both striking and true – “The thing about people who love to cook is that they’re people who love to eat and so they love it when people give them food.”

Isn’t that the truth? As long as you’re not a picky eater – and I eat everything except two-bite eyeballs – there is no downside to someone laying down a plate of lovingly cooked or swiftly assembled food in front of you.

Posh food with wasabi, peasant food with nameless pickles, curries so hot you can see the future, Wonderbread sandwiches with olive loaf and Miracle Whip (as described in the 1980s section of Jess Lourey’s THE TAKEN ONES, which I am reading now and which makes me want to find a retro deli). It’s all good. 

I think having to eat whatever my mum made while I was growing up and only getting to choose my own dinner once a year is probably a big bit of why I’m such an omnivore now, but it does take me ages to choose in a restaurant – everything sounds lovely!

What do you think? Did you have to clear your plate as a kid? Do you like when people cook for you? What would you choose if – let’s say Leslie Karst, to make it easy – was in your kitchen right now raring to go? I’m nosy as well as greedy, see? 

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Oh, that’s SO difficult!  Standing rib roast with yorkshire pudding and asparagus?  

And we had the three-bite rule. You had to take three bites of everything, and then you could eschew (!!) the rest.  

How about you, Reds and Readers?

(And I adored Leslie’s book!)

*Griddled zucchini – makes a lot of smoke in the kitchen but worth it and uses up a good bit of glut at this time of year.

Serial awards-botherer, Catriona McPherson (she/her) was born in Scotland and immigrated to the US in 2010. She writes: preposterous 1930s private-detective stories, including September 2024’s THE WITCHING HOUR; realistic 1940s amateur-sleuth stories about a medical social worker; and contemporary psychological standalones. These are all set in Scotland with a lot of Scottish weather. She also writes modern comedies about a Scot out of water in a “fictional” college town in Northern California. She is a proud lifetime member and former national president of Sisters in Crime.  www.catrionamcpherson.com 

THE WITCHING HOUR

It’s the spring of 1939 and Dandy Gilver, the mother of two grown-up sons, can’t think of anything except the deteriorating state of Europe and the threat of war. Detective work is the furthest thing from her mind. It takes a desperate cri de coeur from an old friend to persuade her to take on a case.

Daisy Esslemont’s husband Silas has vanished. It’s not the first time, but he has never embarrassed her with his absences before.

It doesn’t take Dandy and her side-kick, Alec Osborne, long to find the wandering Silas, but when they track him down to the quaint East Lothian village of Dirleton, he is dead, lying on the village green with his head bashed in, in full view of a row of alms houses, two pubs, a manse, a school and even the watchtowers of Dirleton Castle. And yet not a single one of the villagers admits to seeing a thing.

As Dandy and Alec begin to chip away at the determined silence of the Dirletonites, they cannot imagine what unites such a motley crew: schoolmistress, minister, landlord, postmaster, park-keeper, farmworkers, schoolchildren . . .

Only one person – Mither Golane, the oldest resident of the village – is loose-lipped enough to let something slip, but her quiet aside must surely be the rambling of a woman in her second childhood. Dandy and Alec know that Silas was no angel but “He’s the devil” is too outlandish a claim to help them find his killer. The detecting pair despair of ever finding answers, but are they asking the right questions?

Do YOU Read Like A Writer?

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Oh, I think about this EVERY time I read a book.

Do you?

First:

We are so honored to host the amazing Zoje Stage today!  I met her at a convention some years ago when her first book came out-–the super creepy (in an amazing way) BABY TEETH. In real life, Zoje is wonderful and charming and brilliant, and not one bit creepy. But whoa, her books are.

And she continues to have wild success. See below for more about her brand new DEAR HANNA.

And all of us here at Jungle Red, you Reds and readers, have one massive thing in common with Zoje. 

We read.

But HOW do we read?

Zoje has some tantalizing  thoughts.

Reading As a Writer

by Zoje Stage

Recently I was having lunch with a friend and he started telling me, in an animated voice, about a movie he'd watched a few days earlier. As a devotee of DVDs and VHS tapes, he has access to more obscure films than what's available on streaming, and the one that had sparked his interest was made in the 1960s. When he was about two thirds of the way into describing the film's plot, I couldn't help but jump in and tell him the rest of the story.

He knew I hadn't seen the movie. And he stared at me in shock and asked, "How did you know that?"

How did I know that? My friend has a talent for remembering the films he watches in quite a bit of detail (unlike me, who forgets everything I watch or read within forty-eight hours), so that helped me see the story in my head. And then I just knew—because there was only one logical direction for the story to take. Well, one logical direction if I guessed correctly about the film being reminiscent of an old Twilight Zone episode. And I was right.

I found myself explaining, as we finished our lunch, that as a storyteller I seem to intuitively look for a narrative's "direction." For better or worse, it's quite easy for me to spot this in genre stories, where a certain logic prevails for each kind of genre. Much of what I read are thrillers or horror, and though I'm really not an analytical person I do often find myself taking guesses about what will happen next, and even questioning some of the writer's decisions if they strike me as illogical (and no, I swear I'm not related to Mr. Spock).

Is it unfair to scrutinize a book as I read it? I didn't do this before becoming a published author, and now I periodically ask myself: Do I enjoy novels less now, as I'm so much more aware of the storytelling mechanics?

I'm happy to say the answer to that is no, even as I am more conscious of a novel's various elements. It does seem, though, that I've developed something of a "grading system":

1) If I'm too right about the direction of a book's plot—so right that nothing completely unexpected happens—it limits my overall satisfaction with the book, even if I enjoyed its beautiful writing.

2) A very happy scenario is when I correctly guess some aspects of how the novel will unfold, yet experience some surprising turns along the way. This makes me feel like a competent sleuth, while letting me marvel at the author's creative skill.

3) And I have two sub-categories for stories that are so unpredictable that they take their own narrative path:

         a) Let's be real, some of those stories are a mess, bucking conventions that work, or lacking a strong throughline or enough intriguing elements.

         b) Other times this approach can produce work of stunning genius, where everything is a surprise, yet logical within its own world. These are the kinds of stories that can make you gasp—or make you doubt your own authorial abilities (or wonder what sort of drugs the writer is taking). But in their magical unexpectedness, they are a gift.

I read novels that fall into all of these groups, and enjoy many of them. As a reader—with a writer's mind—the only thing that truly disappoints me is improbable (or lazy) setups, as they temper the effectiveness of everything that follows. But there's no question that I root for every book I pick up to be the best thing I've ever read.

HANK: SO agree! I am so hoping that every book is fabulous. And I love guessing SOME of the plot, but not all of it. ANd I am annoyed by out-of-the-blue twists.

How about you, Reds and Readers?  If you write, do you, like Zoje, enjoy novels less now, as  you are so much more aware of the storytelling mechanics? If you read, does understanding story mechanics make you read differently?

 

Zoje Stage’s newest novel, DEAR HANNA is currently number 6 in Horror/Suspense on Amazon!

Her debut novel, Baby Teeth, was a USA Today and international bestseller and was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award. Her second “mind-bending” (New York Times) novel, Wonderland, was one of Book Riot’s Best Horror Books of 2020. Getaway, a “stunning…third triumph” (Booklist, starred review), was named by LitReactor as one of the Best Books of 2021. Her following “utterly arrowing…masterful” (Criminal Element), is Mothered.

She lives in Pittsburgh with her cats. For more information visit https://zojestage.blogspot.com/.   Amazon, Bookshop,org, Barnes & Noble.

DEAR HANNA

Zoje Stage delivers another knockout with a blood-chilling follow-up to international sensation Baby Teeth, taking readers back into the unsteady world of a young sociopath who’s all grown up.

Hanna is no stranger to dark thoughts: as a young child, she tried to murder her own mother. But that was more than sixteen years ago. And extensive therapy—and writing letters to her younger brother—has since curbed those nasty tendencies.

Now twenty-four, Hanna is living an outwardly normal life of domestic content. Married to real estate agent Jacob, she’s also stepmother to his teenage daughter Joelle. They live in a beautiful home, and Hanna loves her career as a phlebotomist—a job perfectly suited to her occasional need to hurt people.

But when Joelle begins to change in ways that don’t suit Hanna’s purposes, her carefully planned existence threatens to come apart. With life slipping out of her control, Hanna reverts to old habits, determined to manipulate the events and people around her. And the only thing worse than a baby sociopath is a fully grown one.

Amazon, Bookshop,org, Barnes & Noble.