On the Road

Chris Roerden, Sarah Glenn, Heidi Saunders, Karen Pullen, Patricia Winton

This has been a heady week.

Last Thursday morning I stepped onto a plane. Twelve hours later I stepped into a whirlwind. So far, I've driven 1200 miles (almost 2000 kilometers), and I have miles to go before I sleep in my own bed again.

Two days with my fellow Fish Tales authors Karen Pullen, Heidi Saunders and Sarah Glenn were a joy. Writing is a lonely profession, and it's odd to have your work in an anthology because yous share pages with strangers. This is my second one, and I don't think I ever met any of the writers from the first.

We four bonded on several levels: they critiqued the synopsis for my work-in-progress; we taught Heidi how to keep the seat belt from cutting into her neck. Karen hosted us in her remarkable Bed & Breakfast, Rosemary House, in Pittsboro, NC. (I can recommend this without reservations as a splendid holiday destination.) During down time, Sarah, Heidi and I gathered in the common room with our laptops, doing our own work and sharing tips on how to work easier with Twitter or how to avoid creeps on Facebook.

On the way to our first signing at McIntyre's, we were almost in an accident. The driver ahead was distracted and her car began drifting to left. We watched in horror as the car struck a bridge abutment. The collision startled the driver who jerked the wheel to the right, causing her car to strike the other side of the bridge, sending it into a spin. Very scary.

Chris Roerden,who wrote the Fish Tales introduction, joined us for the first reading. At both McIntyre's and Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh, we had audiences of true mystery fans who asked intelligent questions and displayed enthusiasm for the genre. We came away on a high. At Quail Ridge, they asked us to sign our photographs, which they will hang in their bathroom, a gallery with photos of Alexander Call Smith, Madeleine Albright, and other writers of greater or lesser renown. We are honored to be in that company on a bathroom wall.

The following day, Chris, Karen and I joined fifty other writers in Charlotte for a meet and greet and eat event. I got to see old friends, meet face-to-face people I've known via the internet for years, meet writers whose work I've long admired, and make contact with other people who will be at Killer Nashville this weekend.

There are too many names to mention, but I want to single out one: Ellis Vidler. We took an on-line course together a couple of years ago. She was very hard on me, demanding that I be a better writer. Then she became the first follower of ItalianIntrigues—before it was up on the web. I still don't know how she did that. It was nice to see her smiling face in person. And to talk.

I'm off to Killer Nashville on Thursday. I'll report in again as I continue this journey.

Pete Mock, Mystery Guru at McIntyre's

How an Idea Became a Story

            Fish Tales, an anthology of mystery stories from the Guppy chapter of Sisters in Crime, officially went on sale this week, following a week of ebook sales. I’m delighted to be one of the twenty-two authors.

The publication process spread over two years, including the writing, the evaluation, the editing, and the submissions to publishers. Wildside Press offered a contract last November, and now we have a book.

 As soon as the call for submissions went out, I knew immediately that I wanted to write a story spotlighting Caroline Woodlock, the protagonist in the novels I’m working on, and I had a plan. Then the call was amended. Each story had to include water, preferably water where fish would swim.

I was furious! To begin with, I thought the idea of a themed anthology was lame. Second, I thought the idea of using fish as the theme because our chapter of SinC is called the Guppies was even lamer. (For the uninitiated, let me explain that Guppy is short for Great Unpublished, a description that doesn’t fit many Guppies anymore.)

But I was wrong! I’ve read all the stories in the anthology, and they are a wonderful mix. Each author brings an original slant to the water/fish idea, and the central theme links the diverse stories. The back cover blurb tells the tale:

Fish Tales, The Guppy Anthology, casts a wide net across the mystery genre, delivering thrills, chills, and gills. This water-themed collection features locked room puzzles, police procedurals, cozy characters and hardboiled detectives. With a pool of motivations ranging from greed and revenge to loyalty and justice, these stories will lure you with killer hooks and fishy characters.

Come on in, the water’s fine. But be careful or you might find yourself sleeping with the fishes!

My original story featured neither fish nor water. I had to develop a new plan. Caroline lives in Rome, and while a river runs through the city, the Tiber doesn’t immediately bring fish to mind. She writes about food, so I realized that she could be cooking fish. A body of water was more problematic. A pot of water boiling for the pasta just wouldn’t do.

And then I had one of those “lightbulb” moments. The Trevi Fountain gushes water in the heart of Rome, and its imagery of fish and the sea provided a way to symbolize the murderer’s character. Once I had these two elements, the story practically wrote itself.

Throughout the story, Caroline cooks a fish stew from Livorno called cacciucco. The recipe follows. Originally a peasant dish, cacciucco has made its way into fine restaurants around the world. The recipe can be daunting, but if you take things in stages, it isn’t overwhelming.

Preliminaries

First, you need to make fish stock. You can make this ahead and store it in the freezer. Ask your fishmonger for fish scraps (the heads and bones left over from filleting fish); they’ll give them to you. Take these scraps home and put them in a pot with a white onion, a carrot, a rib of celery, some parsley stems and a little white wine. Cover with water, and bring to a simmer. Cook for about 30 minutes. Cool and strain. Boil it down to concentrate flavors if it seems too watery. You can freeze it at this point, and I recommend it. It’s like having gold in the freezer.

You can speed up the actual cooking process by doing preps of all the ingredients a few hours ahead and storing them in the fridge.

The Recipe

2-3 pounds mixed fish—really get a mixture varied flavors. If you can get a squid or an eel, so much the better. And a few small octopuses are also nice. And choose inexpensive fish; this was a peasant dish. (My story tells the legend of the soup’s origin.)

½ pound of mussels, cleaned of their beards

3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

4 cloves of garlic

½ cup finely chopped Italian flat-leaf parsley

¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper

1 medium onion, (I prefer red)

1 medium carrot

1 cup dry white wine

2 cups canned tomato sauce

2 cups of fish stock

6 large shrimp

6 slices of rustic bread (Tuscan bread is unsalted)

Salt and pepper to taste

Cut the fish into bite-sized pieces and reserve.

Chop together the onion, carrot and two of the cloves of garlic.

Put the olive oil in a large pot, add the onion-carrot-garlic mixture, ¼ cup of parsley and the cayenne pepper. Cook over medium heat for about four minutes, until the vegetables begin to lose their color.

Pour in the wine and cook for a minute or two, then add the tomato sauce and the fish stock. Salt and pepper to taste. Add the fish, reserving the mussels and shrimp for later. Cook for about 20 minutes. Add the mussels and shrimp, and cook another 5-7 minutes until the shrimp has cooked through and the mussels have opened. Taste again for seasoning.

Chop the remaining garlic together with the remaining parsley. Place a slice of bread in each soup plate, ladle in the cacciucco, and sprinkle with the garlic-parsley mixture. Serves six.