Drinks of detection

Last month I wrote about tea and coffee in a general way. I also introduced you to Reginald Hill, one of the finest writers of detective fiction ever. Now, while Dalziel, Pascoe and Wield almost never drink anything without some considerable alcoholic content, tea does loom large in several detective series of my memory.

Going back farthest, the year I graduated from college I was introduced to Arthur Upfield’s novels about a half-Aboriginal detective inspector named Napoleon Bonaparte of the Queensland Police. Bony applies his understanding of both the land and humans of all varieties in solving crimes from the 1930s to the 1950s.

I have no take whatsoever on the accuracy of these “skills”, but they’re excellent story devices, and Upfield used them the way Tony Hillerman did with his Navajo detectives, Jim Chee and (to a lesser degree) Joe Leaphorn. (Chee and Leaphorn are coffee drinkers, though.)

(Let me just point out that having two of the best writers of police procedurals so close together on the “H” library shelf has made my patronage quite efficient.)

Anyhow, my recollection is that when Bony needs to step back from a problem, he often brews up a cuppa using his billy can over a small fire. He never goes anywhere without his billy.

By way of indicating how this sort of device can affect the reader, my sister started reading the novels during one of her summer breaks, and she was quite taken by that whole tea thing. Story is that in the wee hours of the night one time, her husband came out and found her in the kitchen making tea to accompany whatever book it was she was immersed in at the moment.

“What are you doing?” he asked, never having seen her make actual, you know, tea before.

“I’m boiling my billy,” she replied.

He retreated back to bed.

In Alexander McColl Smith’s series about Botswana detective Precious Ramotswe (which begins with The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency), things also move slowly, in the rhythm of nature. Bush tea becomes a mechanism for Precious to encourage an emotional client to divulge the nature of his/her problem, or to focus her own mind on a case.

Well, I actually think she must have it delivered to her office in industrial quantities, because she goes through a lot of it. Like Bony, Precious relies on her understanding of the largely rural country around her, and her insights into human emotions, to solve her clients’ problems.

I was introduced to the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency at a dinner party a few years ago in Palm Springs. Several of the women were reading the series and they recommended it to me; one gave me about five of the books. They also discussed the whole bush tea thing.

Turns out that bush tea is Rooibos, “a broom-like member of the legume family of plants growing in South Africa’s fynbos”. The same woman who gave me the books said that she’d been so interested in it that she’d gone out and bought some. I asked her how she liked it, but she shook her head. Not much, apparently.

Still—when you’re reading something like that, you have to give it a try. I did, and I tend to agree with her—probably an acquired taste.

Finally, another sort of tea figures heavily in the series by Eliot Pattison about Shan Yao Yun, a Beijing police inspector who ran afoul of the Party and was sent to prison camps in Tibet. The books are very well written, to the point that they’re actually harrowing to read at times. (And you understand that, as a military historian, I come across some ghastly stuff; so when I say “harrowing”, I mean that I’ve had to put the book down and literally walk away from it for a while.)

During his imprisonment with “outlaw” lamas, over the course of the series, Shan comes to understand the land and people of Tibet, knowledge which he uses to unravel complex and delicate problems. (Anything that puts you in the way of the Chinese government is de facto complex—and life threatening.) The beverage of choice here, though, is something called po cha, butter tea. It’s made from tea leaves, yak butter and salt.

Whether this would be an acquired taste or not, I can’t say, as so far I’ve not found any butter tea to try here in the Valley they call Silicon. Lack of yaks might be part of the problem. I imagine yak butter would be extremely expensive.

But if I do come across it, I’ll let you know.