‘The Patience of the Spider’

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I love mystery novels almost as much as I love food, but most often I find the marriage of the two troubling. So-called culinary mysteries, which usually seem to involve cats and cookie recipes as much as killers, usually fail both as mysteries and as cookbooks. There is the occasional exception, where good food actually has a sensible place in a good mystery, but it’s usually an exception that proves the rule. That’s because rather than being a main focus, food is best employed as a character-building device — much like the hero’s choice of women, music or (ahem) pets.

The way John Harvey’s Nottingham detective Charlie Resnick eats sloppy sandwiches by himself, leaning over the sink, listening to John Coltrane, tells you a lot about who he is. I also love the way Donna Leon’s Venetian hero, the redoubtable Commissario Guido Brunetti, salves his troubled mind with family dinners (though I can’t help but notice that his wife, Paola, a university professor, does most of the cooking).

But nobody does food in mystery like Andrea Camilleri. His Sicilian detective, Salvo Montalbano, while an admirable crime fighter, spends what to me seems an appropriate amount of time thinking about dinner — which is quite a bit. Whether it’s his housekeeper leaving his refrigerator stocked with casseroles of squid braised in their own ink, or the out-of-the-way trattoria he just happened to stumble across, Montalbano is a heroic eater.

Consider this excerpt from “The Patience of the Spider,” the most recent of the eight Montalbano books to be published in America.

“Signora Angila Zarco, a woman of few words, blonde to the point of looking washed out, served them cavatuna [a pasta shape, according to translator Stephen Sartarelli’s helpful gloss] in tomato sauce that were eminently respectable, followed by coniglio all’agrodolce — sweet-and-sour rabbit — from the day before. Now, preparing coniglio all’agrodolce is a complicated matter, because everything depends on the right proportion of vinegar to honey and on making the pieces of rabbit blend properly with the caponata in which it must cook. Signora Zarco clearly knew how to go about this, and for good measure had thrown in a sprinkling of toasted ground almonds over the whole thing. On top of this, it is well-known that the coniglio all-agrodolce you eat the day it is made is one thing, but when eaten the next day it is something else entirely, because it gains considerably in flavor and aroma. In short, Montalbano had a feast.”

For once in a murder mystery, a genre not generally known for inspiring the appetite (at least not for food), you can’t help wishing you were there.

-- Russ Parsons