The Blackmail Blend

by Livia Day

  There’s something deliciously thematic about that kind of crime novel, where the story ‘happens’ to be narrated by the one person best equipped to catch the criminal, not because it’s their job, but because they have the most appropriate knowledge.

  I want to stop at this point and acknowledge something which only came to light in recent years—that the highly successful brand of Dick Francis novels were not just the work of Richard Francis, former Queen’s jockey. His novels were written collaboratively with his wife Mary, and in his later years after Mary’s death, with his son Felix. I skew very heavily towards female authors, and this is the second time in my life that a male genre author who influenced my younger self turned out to be a co-writer with his unacknowledged wife (the other being the case of epic fantasy writers David and Leigh Eddings).

  I find it fascinating that the Dick Francis brand was so powerful that it overcame not only the death of Mary, but that of Richard himself. From 1963 to 2000, there was a new Dick Francis novel out on the shelves every year without fail. You knew exactly what you were getting from the books. The racing world, a likeable protagonist, a thematically significant murder mystery, and sometimes even the exploration of disability, injury, body consciousness and masculinity wrapped up in a well-paced thriller.

  Mary Francis died in 2000, and there wasn’t a new book out for six years. The couple’s son Felix took over Mary’s role of co-writer, allowing the brand and the author name to surge ahead. After his father died in 2010, Felix continued to write books that now bore his author name, but were nevertheless marked as ‘a Dick Francis novel’.

  When we talk about author brand, this is the kind of story that comes to mind—a strong, tonally consistent body of work that draws in readers with a sense of comfort and fannishness. If the books stay fresh and move with the times while retaining that familiarity of expectation, all the better. Dick Francis is one hell of an author brand success story.

  So often, crime writers who become famous and iconic in the field are tied closely with one or several ongoing characters—and in many cases, their iconic detective becomes more famous even than the author herself. Sherlock Holmes. Hercule Poirot. Lord Peter Wimsey. Spenser. V.I. Warshawski. Phryne Fisher. Stephanie Plum. With amateur detectives, and obsessive thematic crime fiction, an iconic ongoing character is ridiculously hard to justify. How often can a person outside law enforcement realistically expect to fall over a crime that they are perfectly suited to solve? Miss Marple and Jessica Fletcher did it all the time, but in an ongoing series it starts to feel like everyone around them would start assuming they are serial killers.

  What Dick Francis—and when I say that name I mean the unit of writers who contributed to ‘his’ body of work—did so well was to build a consistent author brand of books that felt like they belonged to the same series, without a continuing cast of characters. Some, like his disabled private detective character Sid Halley, returned often, but for the most part his amateur heroes were only there for one or two books.

  To some extent, Agatha Christie did this same thing, but she’s not remembered now for her host of plucky girls who solved one murder, dropped the mic and walked off into the sunset with whichever young man caught her eye. She’s remembered for Poirot and Marple—and it doesn’t help that so many of the TV adaptations rewrite her plots so completely to include Poirot or Marple instead of letting the one-shot amateur detective shine.

  Keeping an amateur detective for a repeat gig is hard to do. And yet, there are so many crime writers now who do exactly that. Let’s get back to my obsession with obsessive people. One of the things I love about crime fiction is the sub-genres. It was something of a revelation for me when I moved beyond professional and private detectives to discover that there were whole subcategories of murder mystery devoted entirely to cats, or patchwork, or knitting, or music, or food, or any other deep hobbyist interest buried in the shelves of my library.

  I’ve often said that we need more murder mysteries set in the writing world. Clarion, a residential six week writing program, has always called out to me as something that should either be a reality TV show (cue the montage of furious typing) or is a murder mystery waiting to happen.

  The editor Michael Damian Thomas recently commented on Twitter:

  @michaeldthomas This literary festival has a £20,000 prize for an unpublished writer. That's pretty much *asking* for murders.

  To which I replied: I am always surprised there aren't more actual murders in the writing community. There should be enough that we have to maintain at least one genre-specific amateur detective. One per genre, that is. And they all hang out at the same bar and complain about their life. "Let me tell you, WESTERN novel writer murderers are the worst."

  When I started writing the Café La Femme books, back in the distant mists of time, I knew that it would be about amateur detectives, and that it would be about food. Living in a small city like Hobart, I was well aware of what we call the Mt Wellington leyline phenomenon—the lines of coincidence and chance that seem to skew most normal odds when it comes to running into people you know, or having people in common with each other. It’s nicely summed up with the phrase ‘everyone is everyone else’s ex-girlfriend.’

  When I was a kid, there was nothing more frustrating than trying to walk across the city with my dad, because he knows EVERYONE, and there were days where we would be literally stopped every two minutes by someone he hadn’t seen in ages, or to say hello, or continue a conversation that had broken off a few weeks or months or years earlier.

  And it occurred to me that the person who heard all the gossip and was just generally interested in people would be in a good position to solve mysteries. A very early (and mostly awful) teenage draft of the book that would eventually become A Trifle Dead had a scene in which my protagonist Tabitha declared that the most effective way to solve a mystery was to go about her ordinary day and trust in the power of Hobart coincidence to throw clues in her path. That’s a terrible thing to do in a murder mystery, and one of those things that probably makes more sense in real life than in fiction.

  But what I did have, as the final version of the book took shape, was a world of social activity and gossip and feeding people, revolving around Tabitha’s café, and the idea that knowing and liking and being interested in your community can effectively be a crimesolving superpower.

  It worked for Miss Marple, after all. The trick to Miss Marple is that she’s really good at knowing about ordinary, everyday people. Her skills are often placed in opposition to those of a standard police detective. The idea being that the professional police are at their best when dealing with criminals, but if the murder is committed by someone who doesn’t have standard criminal tendencies—the random, inexpert, impulsive killing—what you need is someone who notices odd little details and puts them together exceptionally well.

  Another of my favourite quirky, obsessive amateur detective characters is Jonathan Creek, from the TV series featuring Alan Davies, and written by David Renwick. Creek’s specialist skill is building magic tricks for the stage, which makes him highly useful for solving technical problems, but only with crimes that appear to be impossibly staged. Never mind the adage about the simplest solution being the right one—Jonathan’s crimesolving skills only work against murderers who construct elaborate ruses and baffling contraptions. He wouldn’t be a lot of help faced with a dinner party and one arsenic-laced prawn cocktail—though to be fair, that’s true of most of us.

  In the case of my reluctant amateur detective, Tabitha Darling, feeding people is her specialist skill. It’s amazing how much information you can get out of people if you put the right kind of cake in front of them, or find the perfect cup of tea to put them at their ease.

  If you know people well enough to pick what kind of coffee or ice cream they like best, does that mean you can also know whether or not they are capable of murder?

  Every draft I ever wrote of the first Tabitha Darling novel had a caf
é as its central hub, but it was only when I really delved into the thematic significance of food that the novel came to life.

  My relationship with my publisher Alisa is a long distance once, for the most part, conducted over Twitter and email. We came up with the title A Trifle Dead as a joke tweet, but it was the kind of joke you make only to realise thirty seconds later that it is brilliant and true and perfect. The title came to symbolize the balance of light and dark in the book—of creamy dessert and nasty crimes.

  Tabitha’s personal quest to reboot trifle in new and interesting ways is an essential part of her character. She’s always thinking about recipes even as she puts pieces of a mystery together. And of course, the sort of person who designs recipes is going to have the necessary thought processes to put together how a crime works—as long as the author is on their side.

  When I came to write the sequel, Drowned Vanilla, I was faced with a narrative problem—which was that Tabitha wasn’t a detective. After the events and resolution of the first book, she was far less enamoured with the idea of solving crimes as a hobby. As an author, it sucks when your main character refuses the call to adventure.

  I realised that maybe Dick Francis had it right all along—starting afresh with new characters makes a lot more sense for thematic crime fiction. If Tabitha wasn’t going to play ball, I didn’t have a story.

  Food to the rescue again. While Tabitha struggles with her reluctance to get involved in a missing persons case that culminates in a murder, she finds a different mystery to entangle—trying to create the perfect ice-cream recipe, and figure out exactly why everyone is so devoted to vanilla as a flavour.

  Talk about a red herring! While Tabitha buries herself in the safer mystery of food and flavours, her friends (who know where her talents lie) keep nudging her into a place where she can bring those people and gossip skills back into play, and get her confidence back about being the person to put the pieces together when it comes to the crime as well as the dessert.

  Crime always tastes better when served with dessert.

  My plan for Tabitha into the future is to solve the amateur detective problem by building her reputation. The better she is known for solving tricky mysteries with her powers of conversation and providing really good coffee, the most likely she is to be drawn (on occasion) into a world of suspicious deaths and the tangled webs of ordinary people committing extraordinary crimes.

  Either that, or her reputation for awesome desserts will lure even the most calculating criminal to come for the snacks, but stay for the murder.

  ENJOY THIS EXCERPT FROM A TRIFLE DEAD

  Book 1 in the Café La Femme series, set before The Blackmail Blend

  Chapter 1

  You can tell a lot about a person from their coffee order. I play a game with the girls who work in my café—guess the order before the customer opens their mouth. It’s fun because half the time you’re spot on—the bloke who would rather die than add anything to his long black, the girl who doesn’t want to admit how weak she likes her latté, the woman who’ll deliberate for twenty minutes as to whether or not she wants a piece of cake (she does), the mocha freak, the decaf junkie.

  The rest of the time, you’re completely wrong. An old age pensioner requests a soy macchiato, a gang of pink-haired school girls want serious espresso shots, a lawyer in a designer suit stops to chat for half an hour about free trade…The best thing about people is how often they surprise you.

  Ever wondered what kind of coffee a murderer drinks? Yeah, me neither.

  I tumbled into the kitchen of Café La Femme, arms full of bakery boxes, a vintage mint-green sundress swirling around my knees. Late as usual, but at least I was wearing my favourite sandals.

  A gal can cope with anything when her shoes match her bra.

  Nin paused in the middle of kneading focaccia dough to stare at me from under her expressive eyebrows. I love her eyebrows. They make Frida Kahlo’s look meek. ‘They’re here again,’ she said, and went back to kneading.

  My assistant cook doesn’t use paragraphs when a sentence will do, so I had to read between the lines. ‘They’ almost certainly referred to several respected members of the Hobart police force, most of them in uniform, some of them armed. ‘Here’ meant all the comfortable chairs in the main room of the café, and probably leaning on the counter as well. ‘Again’ meant that Nin was sick to death of them all asking her where I was, and how I was doing, and I probably owed her a raise.

  I couldn’t afford to give her a raise, so I piled my boxes of bread rolls, bagels and croissants on the bench and tied on my Barbarella apron instead. ‘Can I help you with that dough?’

  Nin’s eyebrows judged me. Hard.

  ‘Okay, okay. I just have to bring in the eggs, and then I’ll go front of house. Five minutes.’

  I ducked outside and took several breaths of salty spring air before she could object. Five minutes, and I could just about deal with a café full of guns and bicycle clips. Couldn’t I? The café courtyard is a gravel square, walled in by sandstone blocks that were once shaped by convict hands. I keep saying I’ll clean it up and put tables out here, but the truth is I don’t want to lose my little sanctuary of calm.

  Our local egg supplier had left a basket by the back step. I’d asked her more than once to take them straight into the kitchen so no one will trip over them, but she claims to be afraid of Nin’s eyebrows. Who can blame her?

  As I leaned down to pick up the basket, I caught a whiff of strawberry perfume, and then someone came up behind me and yanked my braid. I reacted with a lifetime of skipped self-defence classes by screaming like a girl, and slamming the basket of eggs behind me and into the face of my assailant.

  ‘What the—!’ she exclaimed in disgust, and let go of my hair.

  Oops. I turned around to see a tall, glamorous woman in black. Not black like a Goth, but black like Emma Peel in The Avengers, circa 1966. ‘Is that actually a catsuit?’ I asked, impressed. Even if I had a stomach as flat as hers, I doubt I’d have the nerve to wear something like that, and I have (almost) no shame when it comes to fashion.

  ‘It was,’ said my assailant. Egg and shell dripped down over the black catsuit in question, and down into her fitted leather boots.

  ‘It looks great,’ I offered.

  ‘Thanks.’ She crossed her arms, elegant and menacing despite wearing twenty dollars worth of smashed free range egg. ‘So where is he?’

  ‘You’re going to want to get in a shower really soon. Raw egg does bad things to hair, when it goes hard…’

  ‘I’ll keep that in mind.’ She paused meaningfully. ‘Tabitha? I’m in a hurry here. Your landlord. The arsehole. Where is he?’

  Ah, well that made more sense. She was looking for Darrow. ‘Does he owe you money? Or are you planning to hurt him?’ Both possibilities were more than likely.

  ‘Both. Hurry up, I can feel my hair hardening as we speak.’

  ‘I don’t know where he is,’ I admitted. ‘Honestly, haven’t seen him for weeks. But he’s Darrow. He’ll stroll back in, sooner or later.’

  She gave me a filthy look, and somehow managed to still look gorgeous in the process. ‘You wouldn’t lie to protect him, would you?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  Yeah, I probably would. There’s something about stupidly attractive men. They smile, and your knees turn to honey, and suddenly you’re doing things you never thought you would, like giving false witness, or accidentally learning how to poach quail eggs. But I wasn’t lying today. ‘If you must beat the information out of someone, why not try his white-haired, old grandmother?’

  She smiled tightly. ‘Good suggestion. I’ll keep it in mind.’

  I didn’t feel guilty. Darrow’s white-haired old grandmother was more than a match for either of us. ‘Okay, then. I have to go inside and call my egg supplier. And evict twenty police officers from my café.’ I backed away from her, until I reached my kitchen door. ‘Oh—Xanthippe?’

  ‘What?’ s
he said, sounding tired.

  ‘Good to see you back.’

  She glanced down at her egg-streaked outfit. ‘Yep. Just like old times.’

  Back in the kitchen, Nin had put the focaccia in our little pizza oven to toast, and was making salad rolls so that the breakfast crowd could take their lunch away with them. When I was growing up, a salad roll was a confection-like sticky bun filled with cheese, tomato, lettuce, beetroot and sliced egg, all glued together with a mock-mayonnaise. Good old Australian corner shop tucker. Now, if it didn’t have cranberry sauce, gouda or red pesto on it, our customers whinged the roof down. Oh, and ham wasn’t good enough for most of the hipster lunch set, even if it was triple smoked and carved off an organic local pig. Fat-free turkey and smoked salmon were where it was at—with a growing interest in grilled mushrooms and haloumi.

  I realised I had reached the point of no return when I put ‘tofu and ricotta salad roll, deconstructed’ on the menu, and it became my biggest seller. After that, I started really having fun. If food isn’t creative, what’s the point?

  Unfortunately I still had a very vocal (if minority) group of customers who were firmly attached to the Good Old Days, and relied on me to provide the basic staples of Man Food. Steak, fried potato products and pies. I never had this much trouble with the uni students when I was working at the café on campus. At least students appreciated an ironic sprout when they saw one.

  Well, no more. The old guard were going to have to find their pies somewhere else. I had hipsters to feed.

  The customer bell twanged loudly in the café.

  ‘In a minute,’ I protested as Nin’s eyebrows became stern and judgemental. ‘Egg emergency.’