Yerba Mate

Annamaria on Monday

Among the plants the first Europeans found in the New World were many that rather quickly became important parts of the European culture.  Tobacco comes quickly to mind.  There was another, yerba maté that slowly gained huge popularity, but then fell out of favor, and is now - once again - increasingly sought after.

Yerba Mate' is an indigenous tree that grew wild in that heart of South America, in an area occupied by the Guarani' people.  They harvested its leaves and twigs and soaked them water to make a beverage that helped them find the energy to deal with their primitive lives.  Mate'contains more caffeine than coffee or Ceylon tea.

Old myths told of a visit to the heart of South America by the goddess of the Moon, who was delighted with the beauty of the place.  But then she was threatened by a Jaguar that wanted to devour her.  An old man came to her defense and killed the jaguar.  In gratitude the goddess gave him and his people the yerba mate tree. 

With the arrival of Europeans, in the 16th Century, the Spanish settlers also began to enjoy the drink they called Mate (pronounced as two syllables.). When the Jesuits began to defend the Guarani' against the Portuguese and Spanish slave takers, they gathered them into Indian "reductions" - communes, and the priests learned to domesticate the plants and create orchards.  With the increase in suppply, mate' became more and more known and more and more popular.

Eventually, when the Jesuits were expelled in 1776, the plantations were taken over by the crown.  The popularity of the yerba mate continued spreading across South America, and eventually to Portugal, Spain, Italy, and France.  And Paraguay became enormously rich.

So rich that it's dictator, Francisco Solano Lopez thought he was wealthy enough to take on a war with Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay. That war is the background history to my novel, invisible Country. And in that war Paraguay lost 25% of it land to Brazil and Argentina. The victors, of course of, took the most valuable parts of Paraguay: those where yerba maté grew.

Then and now, mate' is typically drunk from a calabash gourd.  Early on the Europeans' began fashioning special cups decorated with silver that are still popular in Paraguay and Argentina. Here are some close-ups of my mate' cup that is also shown the photo at the top.

 

The straw, called a bombilla, is designed to for allowing a person to drink without imbibing the leaves or the twigs

Customarily, family members, when visited by friends, stand in a circle, and pass the gourd around clockwise. The first person drinks, and then the gourd is refilled for the next person, etc. At the very end, everyone says thank you. It's a social faux-pas to say thank you before everyone has drunk.

Nowadays, in South America, the drink is still very popular. Wherever I went in Paraguay and Argentina, especially outside of Buenos Aires, even in Brazil near Igusu Falls, in the parking lots of places that travelers visit, there were people, mostly men, in or near the cars, drinking mate at all hours of the day.

hi 

Currently, mate' has gained a following in the Middle East, and with the arrival of many South Americans to the US, it is more and more popular here, where it accounts for 5% of the caffein drinks, and growing each year.

What about you?  Have you tried it?  Would you care to? For me, I tried it when I first encountered it Paraguay. I think it must be an acquired taste.  And I think I am too Italian to prefer any source of caffein other than a delicious espresso.

I will leave you with this taste of the brilliant, the gorgeous The Mission, a film about those Jesuit missions in Paraguay.  If you have never seen it, watch it!  Even if you have, I promise you, you will be glad to see it again.

Sunday Guest Blogger: Sara E. Johnson–"Killing the Cat"

 

Our Sunday Guest Blogger––Sara E. Johnson 

 

Sara spent a year exploring wondrous New Zealand, finding everywhere she snooped a mystery that needed writing.  The experience led her to write the much-praised New Zealand based Alexa Glock Forensics Mysteries series. 

 

Molten Mud Murder, Sara's debut novel, was published in 2019 by Poisoned Pen Press/Soucebooks. It is the first in the series, followed by The Bones Remember, The Bone Track and–this past June–The Bone Riddle. A former reading specialist, Sara lives in Durham, North Carolina, is a graduate of Durham Citizen Police Academy, past president of Triangle Sisters in Crime, and a member of the North Carolina Writers' Network.

 

All of which brought Sara to write this post that has her going where few authors have dared venture before, i.e., “Killing the Cat.”

 

 Welcome, Sara –– Jeff

 

***

 

A cardinal rule of mystery and crime writing is Don't Kill The Dog. It's a deal breaker. Kill the doodle and you kill readership. There's also the Save The Cat concept. If Alexa Glock, the protagonist in my forensic mysteries, climbed a towering kauri tree to rescue Hello Kitty, you – my reader – are more likely to bond with her. (Alexa is afraid of heights, so her climbing New Zealand's largest tree isn't likely. Plus, she's clumsy.)

 

In New Zealand, where my mysteries are set, the Kiwis let the dogs out, but killed the cats. To be exact: two hundred and forty-three feral cats in one hunting contest.

 

My husband and I spent nine months in New Zealand. (We wanted to stay a year, but no-can-do on a tourist visa.) We rented a small house in Christchurch while the owners spent a sabbatical in the States. We did not mind that the house came with a cat flap and Iris, a Russian blue cat. We promised to take good care of her. We did not know that Iris, like most cats, was a prolific hunter.

 

One morning I stumbled through the 'lounge' (that's what Kiwis call the den)  to make coffee. Feathers coated all surfaces and a large dead bird presided on the carpet like an Agatha Christie corpse, minus knife sticking out of its breast. Iris and the bird, which obviously had been brought in alive, had gone ten rounds as we slept.

 

Iris expressed her love or disdain – I'm not sure which – by gifting us dead birds. She was especially generous if we left her for a weekend. Three or four dead birds, arranged by size, would be lined up in front of the washing machine (strangely in the foyer), heralding our return. It got so bad I sent my husband in first, as a scout.

 

Once I was vacuuming the bedroom and peeked under the bed. Big. Dead. Bird. 'A stiff,'  Alexa Glock would say. I imagine her proclaiming, 'The deceased is past the active decay state of decomposition.'

 

Tired of bird bouquets, we belled the cat. It helped lessen the slaughter. Attaching a bell to a cat's collar reportedly cuts the number of birds it kills in half.

 

Iris was bad for birds. She's not the only feline killing machine. In the U.S., cats kill a staggering 2.4 billion birds a year. In much smaller New Zealand, it's estimated that feral and domestic cats kill up to 100 million birds each year. One of the wild and wonderful facets of New Zealand is that there are no indigenous land mammals (except a fruit bat). Many of New Zealand's birds – the kiwi, kākāpō, weka – evolved flightless because there was no predator to escape from. This makes them especially vulnerable to cats and other introduced species.

 

Organizers of a hunting competition in a small rural village on the South Island wanted to do something about the problem. They added a feral cat killing category to their annual hunting contest and let children have a go. The hunting competition, run by volunteers, is a fundraiser for the local school and pool. Kids fourteen and younger were warned not to kill pet cats, but were encouraged to shoot as many feral cats as possible to win a monetary prize.

 

Children shooting cats?  What cruel plot twist is this?

 

One Kiwi in a Facebook posting said, 'Bloody awesome. Feral cats are a problem and should be culled.'

           

Another Kiwi disagreed. 'This is vile and barbaric.'

 

(As a mystery writer, I think the competition would be a great place to murder someone and blame it on an errant bullet. “I thought she was a cat skulking in the bushes,” the suspect claimed.)

 

National and international backlash to the hunting category was intense and the 14 and younger kill-the-cat category was scrapped. (The children still hunted rabbits, possums, rats, and other invasive species.) The tally for the hunt, held this past June, was 243 feral cats, 145 possums, 231 pigs, 142 deer, 128 hares, and 69 rabbits. Looking at photos of the dead cats horrified me – I can't tell a feral from a house pet – but there are an estimated 2.5 million feral cats roaming New Zealand. What do you think? Are feral cats vermin? Are they a problem in your area?

 

There are better solutions than a hunting competition. One method is TNR: Trap, neuter, return. PETA says trapping feral cats and adopting them or taking them to a vet or animal shelter is the kindest solution.

 

Domestic cat owners can help save birds in all nations by de-sexing their cats and keeping them indoors.

 

In my most recent Alexa Glock forensics mystery, The Bone Riddle, the president of the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society is a suspect. When Alexa visits her seaside house, she is surprised to see that the bird lover has a large orange cat. The woman says, 'They kill billions of birds a year, but she's a wonderful friend and we don't let her roam.'

 

*****

 

Thanks, Sara.

I Have a Favor to Ask...

 

Jeff–Saturday

 

I’m quick to do favors for people, but not very good at requesting the same for myself.  I suspect it’s some sort of inborn thing.  Yet, I believe the moment has arrived for me to test whether the relatively small favor I’m about to ask of a large group of people gathers momentum, or sits alone like a stone, ignored and unloved.

 

Cue the violins and tearful community sobs.

 

Fourteen years ago, Poisoned Pen Press published Murder in Mykonos, the first novel in my Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis series. Over the years Poisoned Pen published eleven more in the series, all but the last under the inimitable editorial guidance of the legendary Barbara Peters. But with Barbara gone from PPP, and it under new ownership, I sensed the time had come to move on.

 

And I have. 

 

I’m pleased beyond words to announce that Kaldis #13, AT ANY COST, will be published on February 6, 2024, by SEVERN HOUSE, an imprint of Canongate Books. They’re a terrific team of people who’ve made me feel right at home from the very first words we exchanged.  But on February 6^th the rubber hits the road, and it comes down to selling books.  I want to do my new publisher proud by doing just that.

 

Since no time is more important for selling books than the Preorder Period, at the bottom of this post are links to where you can purchase AT ANY COST online today, and be doing me a very large, much appreciated favor in the process.

 

For those of you who’d like to know a bit more about AT ANY COST, and my declaring it to be my best Kaldis book yet might not suffice, here’s what the jacket copy has to say:

 

Greece is burning and Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis is determined to save his country from disaster.

 

Chief Inspector Kaldis is initially dismayed to be asked to investigate a series of suspicious forest fires that took place last summer. In Greece, forest fires are an inevitability, and he fears he and his team are being set up to take the political blame for this year’s blazes.

 

He quickly becomes suspicious, though, that the forests were torched for profit – and for a project on a far grander scale than the usual low-level business corruption. There are whispers on the wind that shadowy foreign powers intend to establish a surreptitious mega-internet presence on the island of Syros, with the intent to weaponize the digital world to their own dark ends.

 

Can Kaldis and his team stop the hostile foreign takeover of the idyllic island – or will the rise of the metaverse set not just Greece, but the whole world, on fire?

 

 

AT ANY COST is available for preorder purchase at these locations:

 

BOOKSHOP.ORG

BARNES & NOBLE

BAM!

AMAZON

 

Thanks,

 

–Jeff

Call The Polis!

                                                                   

I think this was the first Bloody Scotland.

Jeff should recognise EVERYBODY in this picture!

 

I moderated a panel at Bloody Scotland on Sunday. I felt it was going to be rather a challenge. One of the authors has produced one book in 2014 and was struggling to get the next one written. The other author was a one book a year contracted person and the third author is a publishing phenomenon – it's difficult to calculate properly but I think he’s written 17 books since 2019. 

And this blog was prompted by – and I’m not sure this is right either - Amazon putting some kind of ban on authors who produce more than four books a day as they suspect they are written by AI. I am not saying in anyway that any of my lovely panellists do any AI stuff, but variation of their writing process was very interesting to hear. 

The first panellist was voted Scotland’s most creative person in 2002. He’s a best-selling musician, singer, songwriter now turning his hand to writing and worthy of a whole blog on his own, as he has collaborated with Ian Rankin, Val McDermid and lots of other writers in a project called 'In My Mind There's A Room', The writers wrote the lyrics, he wrote the music, all about a room that has played a big part in their life.

 More about that later.

Colin MacIntyre

Multi instramentalist and chart topping Mega being.

Known as The Mull Historical Society

The middle panellist, one book per year, was Marion Todd who did a guest blog for me – the one about St Andrews - just a few weeks ago. Her writing process, I think, will be very like mine once I retire from the day job.

JD Kirk is the real subject of this blog. Before we went on stage, the director of the festival said to him, 'I bet you get fed up with moderators asking you how you manage to produce so many books'. And he just laughed and said 'It's just what people want to know.'

JD Kirk is the pseudonym for Barry Hutchison who was a best-selling children’s author and to my mind he is 'an entertainer'. I said to him that when reading his book – the crime book - I had the feeling that the author was having a lot of fun when writing it and he agreed that he did.

Sold out, standing room only so pics are not good.

After his "Hollywood experience" ( More later)  he decided that he would turn his hand to deep and dark crime fiction, he was two pages in and started with very funny foul language and various bodily processes. Now these books are multi million sellers and the sales are only getting bigger. The queue of little old ladies wanting to hold his hand was extraordinary. ( They like the filth you know!!). The first question I asked him was 'Do you think Hoon should be sectioned?' I.e., does he think his main character should be placed in some kind of institution for his mental health. By law.  Interestingly, he laughed and said not far from it. And I suspect that in the more recent books, Hoon has retired from Police Scotland. His underling Logan has taken over as the main character so maybe there's a TV series in the offing as Barry himself said ‘There’d have to be the normal watershed at 9pm, then another watershed for Hoon and only Hoon.' Watching that you can’t complain about anything as the viewer would know what they had signed up for.

I asked the panel about their writing process. Colin, the talented musician admitted that he has yet to find his writing feet. He can write songs, lyrics and poetry, that’s an instant and immediate process for him. Books? He finds that more difficult.

Then, Marion said she thinks about the book in the morning while out with the dog. Does displacement activity in the afternoon, then drags herself to the computer around 4 pm to start writing.

I suspected Barry was going to say something different, and he didn’t disappoint. He writes while on a treadmill. He works out ( unintentional pun) how many words he must do before publication and makes sure he does that amount per day. He converts words into steps, 10 000 steps on the treadmill equals x number of words. Like Victoria Beckham, he works with a keyboard shelf over the treadmill and types away. A graph charts his progress. He loves his graphs! And his spreadsheets.

An audience member asked them about research.

Colin said there had been a light plane crash on Mull, the pilot’s body took a long time to find. He has taken that well known fact and used it as a basis for his new book. So, in some ways, he didn’t want to know the whole story so didn't do any more research into the subject. Marion spent three months researching a very interesting way of killing somebody…asked the son of a friend who asked their professor who asked an expert, emails back and forth honing the process.

Standing room only.

Gordon Brown and Colin MacIntyre ( Multi talented being)

With the latest album

Barry/JD- he has more facial hair now.

Barry/JD/Him anyway

As it came to Barry’s return, the audience gave a little titter… I guess your approach is somewhat different I suggested. Oh yes indeed he said, I just strangle and stab folk, what research do you need to do with a knife and a bit of rope. Four books a year. At least. Makes you think.

 

Marion

 

His Hollywood experience: I’m not sure of the exact book that was picked up, but it was for 5–7-year-old, called something like Charlie Chumpy and Mr Mumbles. Charlie was a wee boy, Mr Mumbles was a Mummy who had his lips sewn together (yes it was kids’ book). Hollywood bought the rights, thinking of making it into a tv programme. At the first meeting, he was told that they wanted changes, to make it into a film; Charlie was now a 17-year-old goth/vampire and Mr Mumbles was now to be an inert gas.

Yes, an inert gas.

The film has never been made. Funny that.

Have a good week!

Caro

Writers on the Farm

 http://sujatamassey.com

Near my childhood home in St. Paul, Minnesota, you’ll find the Gibbs Farm, a historic farm homestead dating from the 1850s which includes a one room schoolhouse, barn, and household—all of it filled with a miscellany of pioneer life. Old books, clothing, toys, farm equipment, and household furnishings enchanted me. During the summer I was nine, I “volunteered” at Gibbs Farm, walking over daily and doing small tasks the docent staff kindly gave me. I wished I'd been born a hundred years earlier, and by spending days at Gibbs Farm, I pretended that this was true.

Gibbs Farm, Falcon Heights, MN 

 

Gibbs Farm nostalgia returned last weekend when I visited a late 1700s farmhouse called Linthicum Walks. The clapboard house is sited in the Anne Arundel Maryland town of Crofton, where a Welsh immigrant family, the Linthicums, farmed for more than 200 years on a large parcel of land originally purchased in the 1700s. Today, a small graveyard exists, as well as a barn and the original 1700s farmhouse which was built on through the 1920s. 

Linthicum Walks, Crofton, MD

 

Development surged in Anne Arundel County in the 20^th century. Now the small gravel driveway into the Linthicum Walks acreage intersects busy Maryland State Highway 424. Linthicum Walks is flanked by public middle and high schools on either side. Still, because of the tall trees, it remains a private sanctuary. 

 

Today Linthicum Walks is managed by a board of trustees endeavoring to bring the local community to enliven the house.The board first invited Marcia Talley, an Anne Arundel County writer, to speak about mystery writing. Marcia generously invited me. So in short order, the two old friends got to chatting with a group of women from Maryland and Virginia in the home’s cozy colonial parlor. Sitting comfortably in a pair of wing chairs, Marcia and I had a signing that really doesn’t compare to any other event we had. It felt like going back in time to a social hour in an enchanting atmosphere.. Sunlight streamed through small old-fashioned windows; patinated wooden cabinets were filled with vintage fine china; and original fireplaces were surrounded by  fox hunting prints and paintings. 

 

Marcia and I talked about mystery; how we both treasure writing books that are low on violence and high on character and setting. The readers wanted to know about the kind of research we did. Marcia has spent many hours in Maryland graveyards and doing genealogical research that has enriched her Hannah Ives mystery series. I lose myself in libraries such as the Ames at the University of Minnesota that have rare historical source materials. It was heartwarming to be among a group of readers who treasured history while being open to new stories. A board member of Linthicum Walks told us about a library in Maryland we needed to visit that had a strong collection of historical records.

 

After the book talk, I tiptoed up a narrow staircase and explored three more rooms. One was a sleeping porch, now closed in, from the twentieth century and still furnished like an old-fashoined bedroom. The second room was a nursery bursting with toys and oddities. The other original bedroom contained a melange of antiques, among them a gilded purple velvet gown that somebody's great aunt is said to have worn to a Presidential inauguration. 

 

That’s the thing about historic house museums. The stories behind treasures are often orally transmitted legends. Rooms rarely hold furniture that completely belonged to the family, or shows the same time period. There are no little signs that tell you the age and provenance of items, but there’s a lot of amusement to be had when poring over vintage boots, empty tins of Hershey’s cocoa, and samplers embroidered by children. However, there is information galore about the families who lived for generations in one place.

 

Volunteer gardeners planted several lovely beds of flowers and shrubs outside that attract local pollinators. I spotted a proud-looking beehive, and a cozy squirrel house. And as I regretfully left Linthicum Walks, the air stirring through the trees whispered: “come on back.” 

Currency in East Africa, Then and Now

Annamaria on Monday

When I first started to research British East Africa's history ifor my Vera and Tolliver series, I needed to know everything I could find out about everyday life.  My searches eventually took me how people bought and sold goods.  As you can imagine, before the Brits, The tribal people mostly bartered with things that just about everyone wanted: livestock, food, weapons, iron work, shells and beads, and very importantly salt, which was rare, since in the highlands they were a three-month trek from the sea.

This was the case from prehistoric times until the Arab traders came searching the area for ivory and slaves.  To begin with, the Arabs carried salt bars to complete their transactions.  

But eventually they switched to the convenience of currency of the sorts that were floating around in the Indian Ocean sea trade: Indian rupees, British florins, silver thalers from Austria.  It's hard for me to imagine what the people of the highlands thought of coins that must have looked like trinkets to make jewellery to the.

In the waining years of the 19th Century, once th British king's empire builders had moved in and taken over, they minted coins in India, which became the currency with which they paid the Indian workers they imported to build the Uganda Railway. 

After that the East African and Uganda rupee became the official currency and it stayed that through World War I, when Kenya became a colony and the shilling took over.

Nowadays, the currency relics of those long ago times are collectors items.  

These days, my interest of the local currency has to do with the work a group of us are engaged in to improve the fate of girls in Kenya.  Our efforts, of course, involve financial matters.  As it happens, in the remote area where those girls live bartering is still a common way of doing business.  And people using Kenyan shillings often trade them among themselves on their phones.  Many of the local people do not have bank accounts at all.

I am hook, line, and sinker devoted to saving those girls and women from horrifying retrogressive practices and giving them a choice in the kind of life they will lead.  But there is this little niggle that accompanies all the joys of progress.  That somehow, by connecting them with the international banking system, I am - as an unwanted side effect - bringing some of the last free people on earth into banking captivity.  

We Made It!

 

 

Read my eyes

Jeff––Saturday

 

In the thirteen years I’ve contributed to Murder is Everywhere, I never missed my Saturday slot. I owe that to abject fear that I’ll somehow be turned into a pumpkin should my post not appear at the stroke of midnight each Friday.  This week tested me to my core…or should I say stem. 

 

After a fantastic Bouchercon week spent in San Diego (documented by many of my mates in their posts), I returned to NYC for my nephew’s wedding (congrats again to Danny and Malina) and a couple of days spent with my son visiting from Houston. On his departure, Barbara and I commenced a rush of appointments in advance of our returning on Thursday to Greece. 

 

The fact our flights to Athens were cancelled by the carrier late Wednesday night only added to the sturm und drang surrounding our trip and the odds against my making a timely Saturday post. 

 

Yet, with a bit of grand luck on finding new (and better) flight connections, and the aid of my bride and her camera, I was able to patch together a post with photos to subtly document the stress of the occasion via its effect on the participants. 

 

 

Will the bus make it to Mykonos before we do?

 

Passing time with dueling selfies

 

Photobomber wins, as usual

We made it to Athens!

 

Now on to Mykonos

Where is everyone at the airport?

 

I mean, WHERE IS EVERYONE? 

I get it, they're all in synagogue praying to welcome the Jewish New Year 5784.

 

L'Shana Tovah y'all on this first full day of Rosh Hashanah.

 

--Jeff