Spicy Reading : Foodie Sleuths: Murder She Ate : Mysteries: In case you haven’t noticed, detectives are cooking up more than plotboilers these days.

Janet Laurence’s face lit up and her eyes sparkled--practically blazed--with innocent glee. She’d just heard about a scholarly book entitled “Toxins Naturally Occurring in Foodstuffs.”

Of course; this was at the BoucherCon, a mystery writers’ convention held in Pasadena last October, and Laurence is a mystery writer. Ever since Sherlock Holmes and Dorothy Sayers, the genre has relied on suspect mushroom ragouts and coconut puddings contaminated with little-known tropical poisons. You could see the wheels spinning in her head already.

Traditionally, this is mostly how food has figured in mysteries--as a murder weapon, not as a pleasure. Sherlock Holmes regarded food as mere fuel; in the Holmes stories, mealtimes are frequently mentioned, but rarely specific foods. (This has not kept faithful Holmesians from compiling cookbooks, such as “Dining With Sherlock Holmes,” by Julia Carlson Rosenblatt and Frederic H. Sonnenschmidt.) But in recent years, food for its own sake has been playing a growing part in mysteries.

The first foodie sleuth--Rex Stout’s rather gluttonous detective-gourmet Nero Wolfe--was decades ahead of his time. The first of the 40 Wolfe novellas, “The Bitter End,” dates from 1940. Wolfe’s foodiest appearance was “Too Many Cooks,” a novel in which he actually left the gastronomic pleasures of his own dining room to attend a convention of the world’s greatest chefs (the Fifteen Masters). The Nero Wolfe stories are all crammed with references to dishes; the recipes for many of them can be found in “The Nero Wolfe Cookbook,” which has remained in print for some years.

Nero Wolfe was the only foodie in the field for quite a while, and he was a fussy eccentric, not the sort of character many male readers--let alone male movie-goers--would identify with. That changed in the ‘60s with Len Deighton’s English sleuth Harry Palmer. The first Harry Palmer film, “The Ipcress File” (1965), might also have been the first English-language film in which the leading man knew his way around a kitchen. Michael Caine (in his film debut) portrayed Palmer intently cooking an omelet and taking pains with his coffee. Deighton has gone on to write not only thrillers but at least one cookbook, “Ou Est le Garlic?”

Beginning in the ‘70s, the detective known as Spenser--whose slogan is, “When in doubt, cook something and eat it”--has combined the same sort of exacting food standards with a relaxed and decently craggy American style. The hero of Robert B. Parker’s novels knows how to revive wilted basil, and in “God Save the Child” (1974) he courted his true love by cooking her pork tenderloin en croute , dusted with thyme and dill, accompanied by green apples, carrots and onions glazed with cider and a salad of thick-sliced farm tomatoes on Boston lettuce. She once gave him a food processor, but Spenser is a culinary traditionalist and uses it only to please her.

The ‘70s also saw Nan and Ivan Lyons’s “Someone Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe,” in which American chef Natasha O’Brien had the job of making dessert at a banquet for Queen Elizabeth when chefs started getting bumped off. Partly because of the movie based on it, this has become the most famous gourmet mystery. On Dec. 7, the Boca Raton, Fla., chapter of the International Wine and Food Society will host the authors at a dinner recreating the entire menu for the Queen’s banquet (“line for line,” says president Jesse Kaye, “and including all the same wines, though of course not of the same years”).

The ‘80s saw a bumper crop of detectives who were in the food business. Virginia Rich wrote three: “The Cooking School Murders,” “The Baked Bean Supper Murders” and “The Nantucket Diet Murders,” all starring the attractive 60ish widow (and talented chef) Eugenia Potter. Michael Bond has by now produced seven frothy comic mysteries whose sleuth, Monsieur Pamplemousse, works for a Parisian restaurant guidebook.

Of course, M. Pamplemousse has somewhat retro tastes in food; the most recent novel, “Monsieur Pamplemousse Rests His Case,” is set at a meal recreating the dinners of the 19th-Century novelist and epicure Alexandre Dumas. At least Linda Barnes’ “Cities of the Dead” (1986) celebrated a more up-to-date cuisine--it was set at a pre-Mardi Gras banquet put on by the top chefs of New Orleans. (In mysteries, incidentally, chefs are well advised not to meet for any purpose at all--at least one of them is bound to get killed.)

The last two years have been particularly fruitful. They’ve seen several new foodie sleuths, including Dianne Mott Davidson’s Coloradan caterer/sleuth Goldy Bear (“Catering to Nobody”) and Katherine Hall Page’s Faith Fairchild, former proprietress of the Manhattan catering firm Have Faith (“The Body in the Belfry”).

Janet Laurence herself has published no fewer than three novels in the last two years, all starring her chef/sleuth Darina Lisle. The first of them, “A Deepe Coffyn” (1990), was set at a lovingly described Elizabethan banquet (in Elizabethan times a “coffyn” was a pie crust) for the Society of Historical Gastronomes. “A Tasty Way to Die” was published this year, and “Hotel Morgue” has already been published in England, though it won’t be available here until next year.

Laurence is writing a cookbook as well, and she’s not the only one. Last year the Mystery Writers of America published “Plots and Pans,” a collection of short stories, anecdotes about writing . . . and recipes, “spiced with their wit, leavened with their malice.”

A remarkable coincidence, wouldn’t you say, Watson?