Hello crime readers and food lovers! Today we are drinking with the Dame because the Sittaford Mystery, as wonderful a story as it is, (and it is an absolute cracker) did not have the most inspiring food within its pages. So, I am playing with the atmospherics of the book and sharing a cocktail called Damn The Weather with Dame Agatha.
The Sit-tea -ford Mystery?
Despite having hardly any food and passing references to generic cocktails, what the Sittaford Mystery has in abundance is tea:
- p73 – A good cry and good cup of tea – there’s nothing to beat them, and a nice cup of tea you shall have at once, my dear
- p74 – I’ll send the tea up to you
- p75 cup of tea
- p 76 Strong tea, bread and butter. Devonshire cream and hard-boiled eggs
- p 86 I ought to be able to produce a quiet cup of tea,
- p178 Tea was laid ready. Mrs Willett poured out
- p179 She must be sipping tea with that determined ladykiller Captain Wyatt
- p186 A cup of tea
Despite its prevalence, there was no way I was going to do a post on the perfect cup of tea. Least of all because I don’t like it.
And bread and butter and hard-boiled eggs also seem a little….well…basic.
Next to tea, this is quite a boozy book with more than one reference being made to generic “cocktails” and also to brandy. I found a recipe on Difford’s for a cocktail called Damn The Weather which seemed very fitting to the setting of the book. Let’s see why.
The Sittaford Mystery – The Setting
The scene that met his eyes was typical of the English countryside as depicted on Christmas cards and in old fashioned melodramas. Everywhere was snow, deep drifts of it….up here on the fringe of Dartmoor it had attained a depth of several feet”
– The Sittaford Mystery, Agatha Christie
Sittaford is a tiny village, pretty much cut off from the rest of the world due to the terrible weather. Which makes it the perfect setting for one of Christie’s closed circle mysteries.
The Sittaford Mystery – The Plot
Mrs. Willett, the winter tenant of Captain Trevelyan, and her daughter Violet have invited guests for afternoon tea. After eating, the group decide to do a bit of table-turning (ie summoning the dead). A message comes from beyond telling them that Captain Trevelyan is dead.
A Short Aside on Table Turning
To my mind table-turning has to be the most inefficient way of contacting the spirits ever. From what I can gather the table rocks back and forth for each letter…so even to spell out the first part of the message TREV DEAD that is 20 + 18 +5 +22 rocks of a table. 65 rocks of a table to spell a four-letter word? No thank you. How long did that take? How bored do you have to be for that to become viable entertainment? I mean even trapped in a snow storm Dartmoor in the 1920’s I would be spelling out H-E-L-L -N -O on the table turning.
Anyway, after they have spent HOURS ( my words, not Christie’s) getting that 8 letter message, Major Burnaby, the Captain’s best friend decides to trek the 6 miles on foot to the Captain’s house to make sure he is all right.
He is not.
Trev is indeed dead, having been hit over the head with a sandbag. Estimated time of death? Five twenty-five. The exact same time as the ghostly message from beyond.
(Cue spooky X-files type music).
As if that is not enough, we also have:
- An errant nephew being arrested for the murder
- An escaped criminal
- A reporter keen to get a good story
- The mystery of just why the Willetts wanted to rent Sittaford House in the first instance
- Retired police inspectors
- Newspaper prizes
- Boots hidden in the chimney
- Aunts in the know and,
- Maybe my favourite Christie heroine yet, the adorably plucky Emily Trefusis. (I am going to forgive her madly standing by her man, even though he is an idiot) because I love everything else about her.
The Sittaford Mystery has an average rating of 3.76 on Good Reads and comes in at # 26 at the time of writing on the All About Agatha podcast rankings. I feel Iike it a bit better than that but, I have not read all the books yet!.
The Covers
The covers for The Sittaford Mystery (called The `Murder at Hazelmoor in the United States) are amazing!
I love the nods to the table-turning at the weather and also the dead body on the carpet. I also like that the French version is called 5:25. You might also be wondering why some of the titles are called Murder At Hazelmoor and not the Sittaford Mystery. This was because the American publishers of the book thought their audience would prefer murder to mystery. Tell me, which title do you prefer?
The Recipe – Damn The Weather
You can find the Difford’s guide recipe here.
Other Food Mentioned in The Sittaford Mystery
Oh, so maybe there was more food than I remembered! Still the Damn the Weather was a fabulous cocktail.
Just a quick note on the adaptation of The Sittaford Mystery. It’s kind of terrible. For some reason, they made it a Miss Marple instead of a stand-alone mystery as written. And to be honest Miss Marple does not do a lot. It’s worth a watch but it is not the best Christie adaptation out there.
Next up in the Christie list is Peril at End House for anyone who wants to read along.
Have a great week!
