Devilishly Delicious: Guest post by Katherine Hall Page

Katherine Hall Page is the author of twenty-three previous Faith Fairchild mysteries. The recipient of Malice Domestic’s Lifetime Achievement Award, she has received Agathas for best first mystery (The Body in the Belfry), best novel (The Body in the Snowdrift), and best short story, (“The Would-Be Widower”). She has also been nominated for the Edgar, the Mary Higgins Clark, the Macavity, and the Maine Literary Award. She lives in Massachusetts and Maine with her husband.
 
Katherine Hall Page:
Devilishly Delicious 

I have always wanted to write a country house mystery, compressing the action to only several days—a “Saturday to Monday” the British called these weekends—with the cast of characters limited to those invited. Well, perhaps a surprise uninvited guest or two. We first met Hercule Poirot at Styles and Agatha Christie set many other books in manor houses, as did so many others in the Golden Age. Many of these books revolve around a particular celebration— coming to one’s majority, a wedding anniversary, or a significant birthday.

In The Body in the Casket, Max Dane is throwing himself a 70th birthday party at Rowan House, his secluded mansion not far from my series sleuth Faith Fairchild’s hometown, Aleford, Massachusetts. Dane is a legendary Broadway producer, famed for musicals, but his last, Heaven Or Hell, was such a flop that even Joe Allen’s didn’t put the poster on the 46th Street restaurant’s notorious wall of duds. Max never produced another show. It’s twenty years later and after receiving a death threat in an extremely unusual form with the failed production’s Playbill tucked inside, Max sends out invitations to a carefully selected group of cast and crew: ______________________________________________________

Max Dane Presents 

A Birthday Party 

Mine 

Come As You Are— 

Or Be Cast 

Rowan House 

Havencrest, Massachusetts 

January 29-31 

____________________________________________________________

He also gets in touch with Faith and after giving her a tour of the sprawling house, tells her he wants her to cater the weekend more for her “sleuthing ability” than her culinary skills—fine as they are. In short, it’s Faith’s job to unmask the killer before he or she is successful and no one will be sending Max a birthday card again.

Growing up near New York City meant, growing up with theater and especially musicals. Preparing to write Casket, I had a great deal of fun going back over Playbills saved from favorites, reading biographies of producers like David Merrick and Hal Prince, listening to scores, and recalling my own brief experience trodding the boards as Emily in Our Town at Livingston High School. But what became equally enticing was researching devilishly—and heavenly—delicious food. Max suggests the birthday dinner include a few dishes referencing the musical’s title and Faith runs with it.

Devil’s Food Cake immediately came to mind—and there is a terrific mystery, Devil’s Food, by Janice Weber. So too did Angel Food Cake. A guilty treat, sinful? There seemed to be plenty of desserts referencing heaven and hell. I found Angel Frosting, a fluffy marshmallow one that Faith decides to use for one of the two chocolate cakes, leaving the Angel Food one unadorned with a mixed berry coulis on the side for those who wished. She also bakes a few dozen mini cupcakes, including red velvet ones to suggest certain fires, and decorates them with fondant halos and pitchforks.

Max wants all the food more than over the top, giving Faith an unlimited budget. This means the deviled eggs—always the first items to disappear at a party or picnic—are topped with caviar. And for a first course, the primo, the pasta Faith selects is Lobster Fra Diavolo. It is unclear where Fra Diavolo, “brother devil” style originated, but most sources place it in New York’s Little Italy on or before the 1930s. Some insist that it was brought over here from Naples. Whatever the truth, it is a blessing with just enough red pepper flakes to give the lobster a kick!

I began asking friends for suggestions and in so doing discovered a dish to include that I have also been making this fall. Andrew Palmer, a wonderful cook, told me about a German farm dish, Himmel Und Erde (Heaven and Earth), which combines potatoes, from the ground, and apples from above. It is a variation of mashed potatoes with plenty of butter. The apples should be slightly tart, and it’s delicious with pork or chicken.

Finally, I wanted a special libation and discovered the perfect one from London’s Savoy Hotel bar, a Fallen Angel Cocktail. It combines gin, fresh lime juice, white crème de menthe with a dash of Angostura bitters. Not sure whether the “fallen” part refers to one’s behavior before or after, but it packs a wallop and may send you searching for a flapper headband or top hat.

Recalling Thackeray’s apt quotation—Next to eating good dinners, a healthy man with a benevolent turn of mind, must like, I think, to read about them—I hope you will enjoy The Body in the Casket’s food as well as the crime!

New York -- It's a Wonderful Town: Guest post by Katherine Hall Page

To date, award-winning Katherine Hall Page has published thirty books: twenty-three in the Faith Fairchild series with The Body in the Wardrobe (April 2016), five juvenile/YAs, a cookbook, Have Faith in Your Kitchen, and Small Plates, a Collection of Short Fiction. She is Malice Domestic 28’s Lifetime Achievement Award recipient. This essay missed being included in the New York issues of Mystery Readers Journal, but so glad it found a place here. Thanks, Katherine!

Katherine Hall Page: 
It’s a Wonderful Town

The Big Apple. Jazz musicians coined the city's familiar moniker in the Twenties. There were plenty of apples to pick from the tree, but only one "Big Apple", only one New York. If you had a gig there, you had it made. The ultimate destination. And as the title of this piece indicates, it’s impossible not to hum, or sing out loud, about it. Tony Bennett may have left his heart in San Francisco, but if he wanted to make it anywhere, he had to head East.

I set two books—The Body in the Big Apple and The Body in the Boudoir— in New York City, both of them prequels covering the time in my series character, Faith Sibley Fairchild’s life before she was married and transplanted to the more bucolic orchards of New England.

Growing up in Northern New Jersey, as teenagers my friends and I used to say we lived "just outside the city", omitting the fact that we had to cross a state line to get there—the coolest place on earth. At twelve, we had been deemed old enough to take the DeCamp bus together to Port Authority —in the day time. Armed with the small penciled maps my artist mother would draw, we'd head for Manhattan. One Saturday it would be museums. My cousin John convinced me to stand in line with him for several hours outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art to catch a sixty second glimpse of the Mona Lisa, on loan from the Louvre. It's the wait I remember best now, the mix of New Yorkers and out-of-towners, the jokes, the stories—holding places while people dashed off for a dog from the Sabrett's All Beef Kosher Franks stand with its bright yellow and blue umbrella. Another Saturday, we'd go from box office to box office on Broadway until we got tickets to a matinee (prices were much lower in the early Sixties). We saw everything from Richard Burton in Hamlet to Robert Preston in The Music Man. Sometimes we'd just wander, walking miles, entranced by the dramatic changes in the neighborhoods from one block to the next. Bialys and bagels gave way to egg rolls followed swiftly by cannolis as we moved Uptown.

No time of year was more magical than December and from the time I was a small child, there was always a special trip during the season to look at the Rockefeller Center tree and the department store windows. Other times of the year, my parents took us to the ballet, opera—the old Met with the cloth of gold curtain—, concerts, and special exhibits at the museums—the Calder mobiles like nothing anyone had seen before spiraling in the enormous spiral of the Guggenheim.

Then there were the restaurants—or rather one restaurant: Horn and Hardart's Automat. My 1964 Frommer's Guide advises: "Inquire of any passer-by, and you'll be directed to one that's usually no more than a block-or-two away." Sadly, they have all disappeared and trying to explain the concept to my son—you put nickels in the slot next to the food you wanted, lifted the little glass door, snatched it out and watched the empty space revolve, instantly producing another dish —is well nigh impossible. Fortunately there are old movies. Just as difficult is describing the food—the superb , crusty macaroni and cheese with tiny bits of tomato, the warm deep dish apple pie with vanilla sauce, the baked beans in their own little pot. Most New Yorkers of a certain age wax nostalgic about automat food—the meat loaf! And a whole meal for $1.00.

My husband is the genuine article. A native New Yorker, born and bred in the Bronx. "The Beautiful Bronx" when he was growing up and we have a book of the same name to prove it. When he meets someone else from the borough, talk immediately turns to the Grand Concourse, the "nabe", and egg creams. Where he lived is now part of the Cross Bronx Expressway, but he can still point out his elementary school as we whiz past. New Yorkers are very sentimental.

And to continue in the manner of Faith Fairchild's sweeping generalizations, New Yorkers are also very rude, very generous, very funny, very stylish, very quirky, and very fast. Genetically, they have more molecules than most other Americans. The moment I step off the train or plane from Boston, in imitation my pace quickens, gaze narrows, and senses sharpen. Forget all those New York designer fragrances. The essence is adrenaline, pure and simple.

These two books are paeans to New York City past, present, and future—always keeping in mind what the comedian, Harry Hershfield said, "New York: Where everyone mutinies but no one deserts." No matter the time—some things never change. It's a wonderful town.