Laurie R. King

Award-winning, bestselling, thought-provoking mysteries

LAURIE'S NEWSLETTER

Laurie in Lisboa

by 2 Comments

As you may know, I’m currently in Lisbon working hard on the next Russell and Holmes novel—although I’ll be flitting northwards in the time zone this afternoon, to join the intrepid duo for a party in their Sussex cottage, where I hope you’ll join us: the party is set up on Twitterfall.com/#hivegod (All Tweets should include the tag #hivegod)

In the meantime, this is where Ms Russell will travel.  (Click on the photos to enlarge.) Here:

And here, beneath the Hand of God:

And in downtown Lisboa:

And in the ancient tumble of the Jewish Quarter, the only part of town that didn’t disappear in the 1755 earthquake:

LRK, Fernando Pessoa, and coffee

by 6 Comments

I came to Lisbon to write.

I got here Friday, following a lot of travel and those days of chaos that precede a long trip, and managed to check my email.  Period.  The rest of the day was travel and catching up with my daughter and son in law, who have lived here since October.

Saturday was a day with a goal: If I’m writing, I need a printer, since I am incapable of doing any extended work on a screen.  So my need determined the direction of our steps, into the town center.

Giant store located and conquered, printer identified, we could then relax and get on with such urgent matters as visiting the café where Portugal’s national poet, Fernando Pessoa, took root—and of course, a photo of yrs truly seated across the table from his bronze self.  (The chairs inside are an identical design, and every bit as uncomfortable.  Hard to imagine spending hours on them.)

Minuscule cup of startlingly powerful coffee drunk, traditional pastry shared, on we wandered to the second most important item on my shopping list: coffee.

To explain for a moment: I am not a coffee snob.  “Snob” suggests choices made for the purpose of proving one’s superiority in matters of fashion, and coffee is too vital a part of life for that.  My first real job, many and many a year ago, was selling coffee beans and tea leaves in a tiny store called, appropriately, The Bean and Leaf, where the press of customers was so leisurely I had no problem finishing my various university assignments and still having time to read novels from the nearby second-hand bookstore.  It was there the odor of coffee penetrated the deepest recesses of my brain, never to leave.

My first full-time, responsible job was managing a similar store, this one in a high-traffic, affluent town named Los Gatos.  We called the place Kaldi’s (now known as the Los Gatos Coffee Roasting Company) after the Ethiopian goatherd who first noticed that his lugubrious charges were remarkably cheery after they’d eaten from a certain bush, and decided to join them in sampling the berries.  Coffee became the drug of choice, first for Muslim holy men wishing to keep awake, then for the rest of the world when the coffeehouse spread from the Middle East to Europe and England, becoming the center of the Western world’s political and intellectual communities.

Religion, politics, and literature, all stimulated by a tiny pale green bean that when roasted becomes ambrosia.

In other words, coffee is important.

Which is a lengthy introduction to the next bit of Portuguese life.  Up the street from the giant store (everything in Lisbon is either up or down; nothing is flat for more than a few yards) was another stretch of urban landscape where trendy boutiques alternated with shops unchanged since the 1920s.  It was into one of the latter that my daughter led me, the Casa Pereira, and all the pores of my skin and lungs—do lungs have pores?—opened in pleasure: coffee.

I couldn’t see any, since the shelves of the dark, narrow little shop were crowded with shiny packets and the display cases showed mostly a boggling variety of candied almonds and other hard candies, but there was coffee here somewhere.  I sidled towards the dim recesses, spotted first two ancient grinders and then a small display of perhaps ten tidy mounds in small bowls: coffee.

Each mound had a neatly hand-written description, but they weren’t the kind of label we see in the US.  Three of these had place names and things like: 20% Robusta, 80% Arabica.

I grinned in recognition of the sign of true expertise, and with the realization of why the tiny espresso in the coffeehouse had pounded my heart like a mallet.  The bigger Robusta beans are grown in the lowlands, and have a higher caffeine content than the highland, and more subtly flavored, Arabica.  But they had two 100% Arabicas, both with unfamiliar names.

I summoned the resident translator, my daughter’s in-all-ways-excellent, Brazilian-Portuguese-speaking husband, and had him ask the small, elderly gentleman about the beans: Which had a flavor more like a Mocha (that is, deep and winey) rather than a Columbian (with its sharp, clean flavor)?

Six minutes later, the gent paused for breath and I got my translation: Portuguese coffee had traditionally been limited to that from Portuguese colonies, and the two coffees sitting before me were from those former colonies.  After some discussion, I asked for half a kilo of the Sao Tomé. He measured the beans, poured them into his once-red grinder (I might have to buy a printer here, but I’m not fanatic enough to buy a coffee grinder for five weeks’ stay) that was probably older than my daughter, waited a while for its burrs to work their way through the load, and brought out a plastic sleeve filled with aromatic powder.

My appreciation brought a smile to his face.

He neatly folded the top of the plastic bag close against the coffee and taped it down.  He then took the resulting corners, tapped the bag against the counter to settle it, folded the ears against the top, and taped them neat.  And turned the bag over to do the same with the bottom corners: no stray corners flapping around THIS gent’s coffee.

Then he took a ball-point pen and jabbed a small hole in the bag.

Because fresh coffee breathes.  If Folgers sealed its cans with the fresh-ground beans, they would swell alarmingly, which is why tinned coffee is allowed to stale first.  A small hole in the bag permits the exhalations to leave and the packet to remain tidy.

He performed the same ritual (minus the jab of his pen) with a square of white paper, slid the package into a plastic bag, and exchanged it for 11 Euros.

That coffee is what I drank this morning.  That coffee is singing through my veins now, as I prepare to begin the next Russell.

A Gift

by 4 Comments

“Yesterday was a gift.”
The gentleman on the elevator was dressed in a heavy jacket, a beret on his head and a cup of takeaway coffee in his hand. I’d asked when I got in if it was cold outside, since I’d spent the morning in the hotel having breakfast with a friend, and he said it was not too bad. I replied (the elevators are not speedy) that I was grateful that the weather was better this week than it had been the week before, which was when he agreed, saying, “Yesterday was a gift.”
The words reverberated in me, and not just because yesterday’s unexpected sun made one want to stand on a street corner and open one’s face to the warmth. I had lunch in a nearby park with SJ Rozan, sitting in a café that was almost too warm, watching a hundred and more people skate in the ice rink set up there—tiny children, old bearded men, a young nun in full habit, all color of skin and clothing, rotating around and around the artificial pond while the two of us talked books and writing and life: a gift.
And last night, dinner with my friend Les Klinger at the China Grill on 53rd Street, an unrelentingly hip Chinese/fusion place with hard-edged music and sculptured food, the sort of place you go for the fun of it and are pleasantly surprised to have interesting food, but not so noisy you can’t talk family and books and the mystery world and a writing project. A gift.
The entire weekend has been a gift, from Thursday’s easy flight to the interesting lecture at the end of it, to productive meetings with editors and publicists I adore, to a raucous luncheon, to Friday’s dinner in which I was given the singular honor of being welcomed as one of only 300 Baker Street Irregulars in the world.
No doubt having said this I have now laid a curse on the remainder of the trip and my flight will be delayed and wind will toss it around and I’ll get drenched waiting for the jitney and my car won’t start when I retrieve it, but up to now, the trip has been a gift.
So here is my heartfelt thanks, to New York and all the people in it.

Third Thursday

by 4 Comments

I’m in the air today, and hoping that the ground isn’t absolute ice when I come down in New York.

Think warm thoughts for me, please…

Stilton, we hardly knew ye

by 23 Comments

One of the more delightful aspects of British culture is their determination to cling to the radio as an art form.  Long stretches behind the wheel of the car becomes a seat in a theatre or lecture hall, with the same disinclination to climb out that one has with an audio book—more so because it’s not a recording.

One of my drives across the British southland was accompanied by a long piece on Radio 4 about Stilton cheese, the EU, and the village of Stilton.

Readers of Mary Russell’s memoirs may remember that the young Miss Russell kept an alarmingly ripe piece of Stilton in her sock drawer as an undergraduate, and feared that her sudden and prolonged absence might have a disastrous effect on the wood below.  Stilton is a powerful blue cheese, one of those myriad foodstuffs that are better tasted than smelt.  On a lightly sweet biscuit or slice of apple, there is nothing better.

Rolling a Stilton on May Day

Rolling a Stilton on May Day

 

 

However, Stilton is not made in Stilton.  Stilton the village is in Cambridgeshire; Stilton the cheese, according to the officials of the European Union, is 1) a pasteurized milk cheese 2) unpressed and with blue veins that 3) comes from one of three UK counties: Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, or Leicestershire.  Not, please note, Cambridgeshire.

However, Mr Richard Landy, of Stilton (“of” in both senses) protests that Stilton was indeed originally made in Stilton.  Daniel Defoe talked about it.  And just because in the late 18th century the production of said cheese moved to Leicestershire doesn’t mean that Stilton should be banned from making their own Stilton, and calling it by the name.  Mr Landy has even found evidence of ancient cheese-making in the town, when he was out walking one day and discovered a Roman cheese press in a ditch, where presumably it had lain for 1700 years waiting for him to walk his dog.

Mr Landy is now engaged in a battle with the European Union over the very definition of a cheese, as a village rises up in age-old and rightous indignation against the foreign oppressors from Brussels.  That no one in the village currently manufactures, or even wishes to manufacture, Stilton cheese is beside the point.

Equal rights for village Stilton!

And now, take a look at the Stilton home page, and tell me that your mouth doesn’t immediately begin to water: cheese, figs—and oh my god, Stilton cheesecake!

Writer on the ground

by 7 Comments

It’s always reassuring when memory and photographs combine to create a correct setting for a scene, rather than a setting absolutely impossible for what you’d intended.  I finally got into London yesterday to check on the details of Westminster Bridge, Westminster_Bridge,_River_Thames,_London,_Englandwhich plays a major part in the ending scenes of The Green Man (name to come!  soon!!  I swear!!!)  I started at Green Park, walking down Pall Mall (Mycroft’s home) and past the Horse Guards Parade ground and along the back of Whitehall (Downing Street is now shut to foot traffic, sensibly enough) to Parliament Square, where I was greeted by the noon strike on the Parliament clock, the four-fours of the famous striking quarters followed by twelve reverberating beats from big Ben.

I prowled around the bridge for quite some time, comparing the angles, noting the considerable rise in the middle, both lengthwise and across; the relationship between the placement of my characters; the needs of clear lines of fire from there to here.  (I was grateful my thoughts could not be heard.  Grateful also I was a grey-haired female crime writer rather than a young male of the species, since I’d seen no fewer than three young men being questioned by the police, their rollie-suitcases opened, their identities checked—St James’s Park is alarmingly close to Buckingham Palace for police comfort.)

One building down the Victoria Embankment from Westminster Bridge is the two-toned brick pile that was New Scotland Yard time3a3(now replaced by the modern building a stone’s throw inland, known, disappointingly enough, not as New-New Scotland Yard, but just the same old New Scotland Yard.)  You may remember that Our Heroine was shot at in a window of that very building, in 1919, and the building will play a part in the denouement of the next story.

A bagpiper was playing on the north part of the bridge itself, a great temptation for a writer looking for Authentic Colour but perhaps not suited to the scene as written, which takes place not only in 1924, but at three in the morning.  A juggler will have to do.  And I peered across the wall at remnants of the truly ancient St Thomas’s hospital, skulking along the edges of the modern hospital and convenient for concealment of Russell’s means of escape.

And Monday?  Kensal Green cemetery, site of many eminent burials and one minor (and apparently fictional) riot.  And an evening event with my friends at Heffer’s in Cambridge, and then an attempt to cram all the books purchased on this trip into a suitcase, and away to home tomorrow.

London Calling

by 11 Comments

In the early Twenties, BBC (the radio variety) used the phrase “London calling” as its call sign, informing the world that London was still up and active. During the War, the phrase took on overtones that were both poignant and pugnacious: We’re still here, damn your eyes!

I like London, despite there being far too many people, and even its major streets retain their pre-Great Fire (1666) twisting incomprehensibility, when London was a warren of alleyways.  Monday was particularly bad, and I seemed incapable of figuring out where I stood even with a map in hand.  My publisher’s street—a mews—is not on the London A to Z (pronounced Zed, if you please) which doesn’t help.  And Charing Cross tube stop is a spider’s web of exits, so one stands in the main hall and studies the options of Strand (north) and Strand (south) when what one wants is Charing Cross (library.)

But I found it, if ten minutes late for my meeting with Meg Gardiner, who was polite enough to claim that even after years in England she still gets lost in town.  I didn’t believe her, but we ducked into the Garrick for a quick drink and had a nice chat about covers, titles, offspring, and British plumbing.

Then into the Charing Cross library, where Nicola had set out civilized bottles of both red and white wine, and little cups of pretzels.  She couldn’t do anything about the street noise, other than shut the windows, but the gathered audience sweltered gently and not a one of them dozed off—or if they did, they kept their eyes open.

I was happy to find that the British tendency to reticence was in abeyance, and when Q&A time came, they came up with some good remarks.  And not one of them asked what I, an American, thought I was doing writing about England.

Last night’s event was set up by the estimable Lizzie Hayes of Mystery Women.  Started in the 80s by my friends Michelle Spring (with whom I have a panel in Cambridge next Monday) and Kate Charles, it’s now run by Lizzie (whose mother is very ill, good thoughts in their direction, please) and Ayo Onatade, and on Monday three of the group joined us: Sara Townsend (MW’s London events manager,) author Mary Andrea Clarke, and Kirsty Long.  Mystery Women is a good group, you should think about joining them—especially if you’d like to keep up on UK events.  The annual St Hilda’s mystery conference is heavily attended by members of the group, and if you ever find yourself in Oxford of an August, I urge you to register for that conference, if for no other reason than the..I won’t say pleasure, but experience of living in the dorms.  It was at a St Hilda’s conference that my punting style was given the classification “stately,” meaning “she’s slow but she doesn’t plant the boat in the nettle-covered banks.”

Over the hills to Calke

by 10 Comments

For twenty years, one of my favorite places in Britain has been Calke Abbey, not far from the gloriously named Ashby de la Zouche in Derbyshire.  The National Trust took possession of the property in 1984 and embraced its idiosyncratic nature of it by treating and presenting Calke as “a country house in decline.”

The Harpur family bought the land, which had indeed long before been the site of an abbey, in the early 1600s.  A few years later, Sir Henry purchased a baronetcy to go with Calke’s grand setting, but it wasn’t until the early years of the 18th century that the house itself was vastly renovated into the impressive hall of its prime.  (And we shall stop here for a moment while you scroll through the slide show of the house and grounds.)

When the first NT employees entered the house, they must have felt like explorers in darkest Africa, for Calke had been the home of generations of eccentric collectors, passionate assemblers of seashells, stuffed animals, and oddities in general.  The sitting room is piled high with scores of glass display cases of birds and animals.  The kitchen was simply closed one day, leaving the pans and implements where they had last been used.  Behind the stables doors were all the tack and supplies of the horse world, simply abandoned.  And imagine the shock when the NT pried open a large wooden crate found in a room with a leaky roof, and found this:

w-48533-statebed-200x200[1]

A pristine, unused, unfaded, un-motheaten set of embroidered silk bed hangings dating from a 1734 marriage, never unpacked.

The Harpur family, later Harpur Crewe, was not only possessed of a gene for manic collection, but also that of solitary eccentricity.  The family slowly died off over the 20th century, leaving it finally to the National Trust to cherish the deer and the rusty buckets, the orangerie and the stables. 

If you go, the nearby village of Ticknall has a lovely inn called The Staff of Life, with an impressive and beautifully cooked menu, friendly staff, a pair of black labs eager for a toss of the ball, and a couple of draped four-poster beds that, while not up to Calke’s state bed, will comfort the sleeper tired by a day’s hike over the Calke  grounds.

And in case you’re wondering, yes, I’m tempted to discover that Mary Russell was there…

Books and dream libraries

by 7 Comments

Laraine was the winner of the signed copy of The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, by Alan Bradley.  We’re discussing the book this month over at the Virtual Book Club, and Alan will join us—or, me, for a discussion towards the end of the month.

In the meantime, here in the UK I had a lovely conversation with the excellent Chaz Brenchley last night at one of my very most all time favo(u)rite places, the Lit and Phil.  This private library in Newcastle on Tyne (watch the slide show here) is my fantasy home, and I am deeply envious of Chaz’s table in the Silence Room downstairs.  If only I lived a touch closer…

Impossible loyalties

by 7 Comments

Oxford is my second home. I’m not much of one for cities, and there’s no doubt that’s what Oxford is, but especially now the authorities have banned private motor traffic in the town center, it feels more like a really crowded village than a large manufacturing city.
So Thursday was an Oxford day, with a personal tour for visiting Californians conducted by my stepson, the bursar of St Michaels in the Northgate.
In a 1990 paper, Michael Popkin wrote:
About the year 900, the Saxon inhabitants of Oxford built an earth rampart round their settlement to protect it from marauding Danes. One stone building that survives from the period is the tower of the church which stood at the north entrance to the ramparts, the present St Michael at the North Gate. In 1986 the tower was restored and opened to the public as a tourist attraction where the church treasury, the clock and the bells may be seen and from whose roof there is a fine view of the city.

One of the jobs my relative oversees is the annual beating of the bounds, at which a crowd bearing willow sticks solemnly marches the parish bounds and whacks various walls (in an alleyway behind a pub, through the lingerie section in Marks and Spencer’s) to delcare the boundaries. Also in St Michaels can be seen the font at which William Shakespeare stood for the baptism of the godson who might have been his son.   

St Michael’s also served as a debtor’s gaol (or jail, for the Yanks among us) and one can see in the church’s little museum the beer-mug sized container the prisoners lowered down on a string for donations, since debtors were not fed by the city. Among St Michael’s more famous prisoners were the Oxford Martyrs, Protestants Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley, burned by the Roman Catholic Queen Mary (the site of their execution is marked by an X in the Broad Street, outside the city walls and in front of Baliol college.)
From the tower, the rooftops of Oxford jumble away from underfoot, leads and tiles in all the shapes one can imagine. There is a line in Sayers’ Gaudy Night, which is set here (and which we’ll be reading next month on the book club,) in which Harriet Vane looks down from a nearby rooftop at the pale head of the man she loves, walking away in the streets below her.

Oxford: home of lost causes and impossible loyalties, whose spires dream in the mist, a city of light under whose streets lie the darkest sides of history.

If you'd like to hear about my upcoming events and publications, sign up for The Buzz, here.

Sign up!