Who Is Killing The Great Chefs Of Europe?

First things first. I have neither read the book I purchased four years ago nor seen the film I read about subsequently. I found this book in a cupboard while looking for some other book and couldn't wait to write about it. 

Originally published as Someone Is Killing The Great Chefs of Europe, 1976, this 239-page novel by Nan and Ivan Lyons is a comic-murder mystery. Someone is killing Europe’s most famous chefs "in a manner that reflects their most famous dishes." For instance, the lobster chef is drowned. Even more intriguing is that the recipe for each dish is given in the book. 

This is what the back cover of my 1979 Coronet edition (above right) says, “While the world’s sexiest cook prepares her ‘Bombe Richelieu’ for dessert at Buckingham Palace, a connoisseur criminal who makes Jack the Ripper seem like a vulgar amateur is serving up the bloodiest master-caper ever conceived. An outrageous mixture of liberated pleasure and gourmet violence sizzling with surprise-a-page suspense…”

And here are the first lines of the book: “Lacquered to perfection. Crisp skin. Warm moist pancakes. Spring onions and sweet bean sauce. Yes. If he were to leave London immediately, within eighteen hours he could be in Peking.”

In 1978, Ted Kotcheff (of First Blood fame) made a film starring George Segal, Jacqueline Bisset, and Robert Morley. It had music by Henry Mancini. The film was released as Too Many Chefs in the UK.

Have you read the book or seen the film?


For actual reviews of Forgotten Books this Friday, go to Patti Abbott’s blog Pattinase.

R.I.P.: Tom Clancy, 1947-2013

Tom Clancy at Burns Library, Boston College, in November 1989.
Photo: Gary Wayne Gilbert/Wikimedia Commons

Tom Clancy was one of my favourite authors of spy thrillers. His Cold War novel, The Hunt for Red October, tops my list of those of his books which I have read.

His novels were technically brilliant and technologically superior. In this regard he was ahead of all his peers. In fact, he was probably the only one to write the way he did. Frederick Forsyth and John le Carré are known for writing highly researched novels but mostly in a non-technical way.

Clancy was a fearless writer. For instance, in Red October, he took the reader into the bowels of a submarine and not only explained how it worked but also compared it with rival U-boats. Going into a sub is one thing, writing about its nuts and bolts is another (I don't know if Clancy actually went into one). My knowledge of a submarine is restricted to its periscope and torpedo. I know what the two things are used for but it was Clancy who explained in some detail how to look through the first and fire the second.

The author of several entertaining thrillers like Patriot Games, Red Storm Rising, and Clear and Present Danger had a large number of fans in the US and other world militaries including, I suspect, secret admirers in the then Soviet (now Russian) navy.

As far as spy thrillers go, Tom Clancy was in very good company. He is part of my list of 10 of the best writers of espionage books. I have mentioned the other nine below, along with titles of novels that I think are their best. Actually, I like all their work.

01. Tom Clancy – The Hunt for Red October

02. Harry Patterson (Jack Higgins) – The Eagle Has Landed

03. Don Pendleton (Mack Bolan) – Continental Contract

04. Frederick Forsyth – The Day of the Jackal

05. Alistair MacLean – The Guns of Navarone

06. John le Carré – The Russia House

07. Ken Follett – Eye of the Needle

08. Len Deighton – XPD

09. Craig Thomas – Firefox

10. Donald Lindquist – The Red Gods

Of all these writers, the last two, Thomas and Lindquist, have been forgotten. I recommend their books to those who haven't read them.

Books I read in the second quarter

Actually, that should read Books I didn’t read in the second quarter. Unlike in the first quarter, April to June, when I read 17 fictional and non-fictional books, I read only six in the past three months, averaging a poor two books a month. I didn’t read much because I didn’t feel like reading. You don’t have to scroll far down the blog to find out the ones I did.

The only book I read but didn’t review was A Dog of Flanders (1872) by English author Marie Louise de la Ramée. The short fiction, published under her pseudonym Ouida, is the beautiful and touching story of a poor boy and his bighearted dog. There is history behind this story which has been adapted to film thrice. I think there is an animated version too.

Of the remaining five books, I enjoyed reading The Girl from Sunset Ranch by Amy Bell Marlowe (1914), Vultures in the Sun by Brian Garfield (1987), and All the Lonely People by Martin Edwards (1991).

As always, I read comic books including Action Comics #1 (June 1938) where Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster introduce Superman to the world. The rather immature storyboard didn’t hold up but that is to be expected in this digital world of comics. I read the comic book online though I wouldn’t mind owning the rare comic worth millions of dollars.

So if I didn’t read books in my spare time, what did I do? I have been watching Friends all over again with the family. We are now in Season 6 where Monica proposes to Chandler. I think it is one of the best sitcoms to come out of the nineties. It has plenty of good humour. I also like its central premise about six friends who stick up for each other. It gives you a nice feeling.

I’m hoping to read more books in the third quarter, from now until new year’s eve. Let’s see how that comes out.

The Concrete Jungle, 1982

A little-known B-movie for Overlooked Films at Todd Mason’s blog Sweet Freedom.

In the days before videocassette recorder and video cassette and colour and cable television, I watched films in the theatre, often alone. I saw all kinds of films, mostly bad films; so bad, in fact, you’d have to be really frantic to go to a theatre to see them. One did this sort of thing in one’s adolescence, when one is rudderless.

Even after all these years, I can’t get over the fact that I actually saw The Concrete Jungle made by someone called Tom DeSimone and starring Jill St. John, Tracey E. Bregman, and BarBara Luna. I have no idea who they are.

I don’t know if I went for this film because I thought it was about urban construction but I do remember that it made me squirm in my seat. I dislike films involving frame-ups and innocent victims doing torturous time in prison usually at the mercy of the evil warden and a bunch of depraved sex maniacs. The repeated rape of Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) in The Shawshank Redemption (1994), an otherwise brilliant film, had me squirming too.

You might think the girl-on-girl action in The Concrete Jungle would raise testosterone levels in a 15-year old. It didn’t because I was scared silly. Since then, I have seen few sick films, like The Exorcist (1973), again brilliant but sick.

Around the time I saw The Concrete Jungle, I also saw two other films in the theatre, one about heaven and the other hell—Jesus Christ, a documentary, and The Day After (1983) that some people thought was a porn film. It was, in fact, about the devastating effects of nuclear war.

As I said, I saw all kinds of films back then. Did you?

Favourite children's stories

As a child which were your favourite children's stories? 

Mine were Pinocchio and Jack and the Beanstalk. This was before Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, the Famous Five and the Five Find-Outers, the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, the William stories, and C.S. Lewis came along and nudged me toward books for young adults. Incidentally, I discovered the term ‘YA’ somewhere in the nineties long after I grew out of my teens. Did the term originate later or was it my ignorance? The latter, I guess.

The magical world in the two fairy tales held me spellbound. I suspect I used to like these books more because of the covers of the Classics Illustrated editions that I owned and read over and over again. I was so fascinated by the clean and colourful illustrations that I used to draw some of the strips and paint them with water colours, which came in a pocket sized flat box of 10 or 12 circular shaped colours with a small flimsy brush. I’d sit with this set, a little plastic palette, a steel container filled with water, and an A4 sized drawing book, and proceed to recreate those charming pictures. It was annoying when the colours got mixed or the round paints came off. Nonetheless, many a happy hour was spent this way. 

Although I liked Pinocchio, I felt sorry for Geppetto’s wooden puppet. I think he has been one of the most recreated and vulgarised characters in all of literature, adapted in so many mediums that you forget what the original looked like. For instance, I don’t particularly remember Pinocchio as being whiny, Shrek told me so. I remember him as being a quiet little fellow. Well, he didn’t inspire me as much as the adventurous Jack did. I thought it was very brave of him to climb a giant tree with his harp and confront the monster lurking in the sky. The huge tree spiralling up endlessly caught my imagination like few things did in those days.

Pinocchio and Jack and the Beanstalk are fairy tales, morals actually, but I wonder if these and other similar children’s stories can be considered as fantasy, sf, and supernatural literature; perhaps, a child’s initiation into these genres. Alright, let’s not take the fun away from the kids.

Books by weight

On August 18, I wrote about our visit to a book exhibition on India’s 66th Independence Day. Out of hundreds and thousands of books on sale, I bought one, Me Tanner, You Jane, an Evan Tanner paperback by Lawrence Block. I have yet to read it.

Last Sunday, we went to another book exhibition at the same venue, a large auditorium at Churchgate in the central business district of South Mumbai.

Butterfly Books, the organiser this time, was selling over a million books in various categories including world war and history. There were separate sections on cookery, architecture and interiors, children and young adult, management, sports and leisure, travel, health, reference, classics and general fiction, and more.

The fiction section consisted of all kinds of books, paperbacks and hardbacks, but it lacked structure. It was a complete mismatch of authors and their books. You had Joanna Trollope rubbing shoulders with John Grisham and Patricia Cornwell hobnobbing with Frederick Forsyth. Missing in action were several popular and widely-read authors like Agatha Christie, P.G. Wodehouse, Louis L’Amour, Enid Blyton, Stephen King, and Roald Dahl.

What was unusual about this sale was that books were being sold by weight rather than at discounts. For instance, children’s books and Mills & Boon were sold at Rs.120 a kg while fiction was sold at Rs.120-200 a kg, the maximum rate. We picked up five paperbacks weighing 0.8 kg for Rs.120 (a little over $2) that included The Arsenic Labyrinth by noted British crime writer Martin Edwards, Persuasion by Jane Austen, Icon by Frederick Forsyth, and two M&B.

I am waiting to read The Arsenic Labyrinth as I liked the first Martin Edwards book I read, All the Lonely People, and reviewed here. The tagline on the back cover piques your interest. It says, ‘You’d never believe it to look at me now, but once upon a time I killed a man.’

The Butterfly Books exhibition is on until October 10. I should go back and take some pictures and pick up some more books.

If you want to read about a fascinating book exhibition at the other end of the world, assuming you're living in South Asia, head over to TracyK’s engaging blog Bitter Tea and Mystery and read about the Planned Parenthood Book Sale, 2013.

A parody of presidential films

For Overlooked Films at Todd Mason’s blog Sweet Freedom this Tuesday, a somewhat upside-down look at films about American presidents and how they might seem in the Indian context.

Hollywood loves to sell the American President and the rest of the world loves to lap up his films. I, for one, enjoy watching the flag-waving, jingoistic, and superpatriotic movies (I know they all mean the same thing) that Hollywood studios dish out periodically.

While I can imagine a rather youthful and charismatic American president as a pilot taking on aliens or as commander in chief fighting terrorists, I can’t imagine his Indian equivalent doing anything of the sort. This is because the average age of the last three US presidents, Obama, Bush, and Clinton, on the day they entered the Oval Office, was 45-55, while the average age of the last three Indian prime ministers was 75.

Harrison Ford as President James Marshall in Air Force One.

 
It would be a comedy of errors to visualise our head of government, attired in national costume, usually a white kurta pyjama or dhoti, fighting a rogue agent with his bare fists while clinging with one hand on to the loading ramp of Air India One. Neither can I picture the ageing prime minister delivering a knockout punch to the agent and barking, “Get off my plane!” as President James Marshall (Harrison Ford) does in Air Force One (1997). I had goose bumps.

Imagining the next scene in the Indian context would be even more preposterous. Marshall is flying through the air like a kite without a string as the crew of a rescue plane, Liberty 24, frantically tries to rein him in. The daring mid-air rescue culminates successfully with the crew welcoming their gravity-defying president with a smart salute and the words, “Liberty Two Four is changing call signs—Liberty Two Four is now Air Force One!” immediately followed by a loud whoop somewhere in the White House. More goose bumps.

Bill Pullman as President Thomas J. Whitmore in Independence Day.

I can't envision the Indian prime minister exhorting a ragtag group of pilots in the middle of an alien invasion either. President Thomas J. Whitmore (Bill Pullman) not only rasps out a 156-worded speech loaded with chauvinistic fervour in Independence Day (1996)—“We will not go quietly into the night! We will not vanish without a fight! We're going to live on! We're going to survive! Today we celebrate our Independence Day!”—but the war vet even hops into a fighter plane and leads the air assault against the aliens. Plenty of goose bumps.

Frankly, I was in two minds whether to include Mars Attacks! (1996) in this farcical post as President James Dale (Jack Nicholson) does not exactly paint himself in glory. He welcomes the Martian leader into the Oval Office and offers his hand of friendship, saying “Why can't we work out our differences? Why can't we work things out? Little people, why can't we all just get along?” Instead, the Martian’s spiderlike hand comes off and attacks the trusting president. When I heard James Dale’s peace offer I thought of the Indian prime minister and when I saw what the Martian did I thought of his Pakistani counterpart.