I haven’t got very much time to write, but I have got a lot of people to thank…

Big thanks to everyone at Constable and at Waterstones who are doing a great, great job of supporting both “The Venetian Game” and “Vengeance in Venice”. It was a pleasure to be in London last weekend, doing a round of bookshops and signing stock. Everybody was lovely, and it was a lot of fun.

I’m delighted to be going back to Wales in June for a signing at Carmarthen Waterstones at 12.00 on June 20th, and a talk and a Q&A at the Swansea branch at 6.30 on 21st June. It would be great to do some more signings around the country – it really does depend on when I’m back in the UK, but I will try.

Thanks to the design team at Constable for the splendid Twitter/Facebook/Webpage header – I’m absolutely rubbish at this sort of thing, and the site looks so much better for your work.

Mainly, of course, a very big thank you to all of you – do please keep reading.

More news on future releases to come, but I think that’s enough at the end of a very busy day. I need, in no particular order, a lie-down and a Negroni…

Many thanks again!

Philip

Well it’s been a mad, mad couple of weeks – and some of you will know a lot of the news already – but I think it’s worth setting down what’s happening over the next few months and beyond.

If you’ve pre-ordered “Vengeance in Venice” you’ll probably have received an email saying that publication has now slipped a week to April 12th. This is for the happiest of reasons as Waterstones have requested a few more thousand copies, and the cover finish is being tweaked slightly in terms of embossing etc. I can’t be more precise than that as I haven’t seen it myself yet, but I’m assured it looks lovely.

Moving forward, I’m absolutely delighted to say that “The Venetian Masquerade” will follow in the spring of 2019, and that a fourth Nathan Sutherland novel is confirmed for 2020.

As I said, it’s been a mad couple of weeks, but in a good way. My agent emailed me last Saturday morning to tell me that “The Venetian Game” was #4 in the Times bestselling paperback fiction list (*). Caroline was out, so I had no-one to hug. I picked up Mimi and gave her a cuddle. She gave a confused little n’yeep sound and her paws flailed through the air, albeit in a non-destructive way. In the end, I went to the wine shop and hugged the guy there instead.

A very, very big thank you to all of you!

(* It’s since made it as far as #2. And #1 in The Bookseller’s “Heatseeker” list. I am running out of people to hug.)

I’m writing in the Marciana library and Caroline emails me a link from “The Guardian”.

It is about pies.

Immediately I want a pie.

I am in Italy. I could have risotto with squid ink, fish fried in the crispiest of batter or one of the finest steaks in the world. I could even have a pizza.

But I cannot have a pie. Unless I make it myself.

The bust of Petrarch stares down at me disapprovingly as I close my laptop and make my way to the exit, as if summoned by the Bat Signal…

Meat pie with peas and parsnips

Ingredients (for two hungry people)

400g of stewing steak

2 onions

Sprig of  rosemary/thyme

150ml red wine

150 ml water

200g flour

100g suet

Milk

4 parsnips

Tin of mushy peas

Bottle of Henderson’s relish

Some gin

Two good-sized cans of tonic water

Method

1. I cooked this to Weber’s Oberon. A deeply, deeply silly opera, but then you’re making a pie. In Italy. ‘Silly’ is not something that need trouble us.
2. Make two gin and tonics, and distribute them.
3. Thinly slice the onions and cook them on a low flame until soft and just a little golden.
4. Cut the beef into bite size chunks and give them a good shake in seasoned flour. Then crank up the heat, add them to the pan, and let them sizzle for a bit until they’re nicely browned.
5. Finely chop the rosemary and thyme, and throw them into the pan along with the red wine and water.
6.  A word here on Henderson’s Relish. Caroline introduced me to this miracle ingredient almost twenty years ago. It only seems to be available in Sheffield, and, quite simply, there is no meat dish that it cannot improve. You could be eating a fillet of kobe beef, personally cooked sous vide by the ghost of Paul Bocuse : a shake of the Henderson’s bottle would improve it (and M Bocuse would, probably, understand). However, in the absence of a good shake of the Henderson’s bottle you need something else to add umami (or, to use the technical term, pieiness) of it all. A shake of Worcestershire sauce, a tablespoon of tomato puree or chuck an anchovy in if you like…you get the idea.
7. Stick a lid on the pan and let it cook for as long as you like on the lowest heat possible.
8. Make your pastry. I find 200g of flour and 100g of suet, brought together with water, is just right.
9. Roll out your pastry. At this point, realise that you have not made a pie for six years and have no idea where the rolling pin is. Do not despair! Like Bear Grylls, like Ray Mears, like Phaedrus in Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance your job is now to survive with the tools at hand. I started with the empty can of tonic, but this crumpled too easily. A full can, however, did a perfectly satisfactory job. It is not going to make a pastry that you can see your hand through, but it will be fine for a pie.
10. Congratulate yourself on your improvisational skills. At this point, you may treat yourself to another gin and tonic. Do Not use the tonic can that you have just been using to roll the pastry with.
11. Line two pie dishes. Yes, you could use one big dish, and it would look very fine, but nothing says I love you like a whole pie of your very own, does it? Glaze the lids with a little milk (use a beaten egg if you’ve got one. I didn’t).
12. Put them in the oven for 20 minutes at gas mark 6, and then another 50 at gas mark 4. But it’s a forgiving recipe, so don’t worry too much about it.
13. Roast the parsnips. This is an odd concept for Italians. They do not eat parsnips. Many of them do not even know the word – pastinaca – for parsnip. And, on the occasions when I’ve done lessons on British food, the general reaction of students has been : you eat these? So this is not something you are going to be able to find in Conad. Fortunately, we’d brought back a few bags from Edinburgh. Yes. We brought back vegetables from our trip back to the UK. Along with some mushy peas. And some suet. On a plane. I know how this sounds. Anyway, roast the parsnips – if you have a double oven and can crank up the heat, so much the better. If not, they are going to be a little compromised but still nice – put them in the gas mark 4 oven and turn them every ten minutes or so.
14. Mushy peas. You could make your own, but only serial killers do that. Take the lid off the can, and warm them through.
15. Gently turn the pies out onto a plate. You could, if you wished, make a little “Jenga” tower out of the parsnips and put the peas in a mould, but I managed to fight the temptation.
16. Eat, with copious amounts of red wine and a shaking of the Henderson’s bottle.

    Next time, we’ll be back to Italian food. But, every so often, a reminder of the old country is very welcome.

    And that can of tonic should be just fine for general use in a day or two…

 

 

 

The news came through just after my last class on Friday. Waterstones had chosen “The Venetian Game” as their “Thriller of the Month” for March.

I was, of course, honoured, thrilled and more than a little surprised. I took it in an appropriately dignified manner; which is to say I bounced around the staff room burbling away in hybrid Italian-English and trying to hug random people. Then I made my way to the Marciana library with the intention of spending the afternoon writing, fighting the impulse to embrace passers-by or break into a spontaneous song and dance routine en route.

I made my way halfway there, stopped for a celebratory spritz, realised that no productive work was ever going to be done, and made my way home again.

Coincidentally, we were both heading back to Edinburgh the following week, which gave me the opportunity for a stock signing at Waterstones on Princes Street.

We arrived to find the city under a blanket of snow and in the middle of a blizzard. It didn’t get any better. On the morning of March 1st, the city ground to a halt. The roads were blocked. There was no public transport, with the exception of the much-maligned tram system, and the airport bus service, ferrying passengers to an airport that was never going to open.

But, somehow, Waterstones had received their consignment of books. The sensible thing to do, perhaps, would have been to wait for a couple of days. But no. It was St David’s Day 2018 and the first day of Thriller of the Month. We were going to walk there through horizontal snow and biting, icy blasts of wind. Through a semi-deserted Edinburgh with snow and ice; a blasted landscape resembling Tarkovsky’s Stalker. We were going to get to Waterstones, and I, damn it, was going to sign books.

And we did.

The staff were lovely and Euan, the events manager, sat us down in the cafe with a trolley full of books to sign, and some coffee in an attempt to restore some movement to our limbs. I do apologise to those who buy the earlier copies I signed, before my hands had started working properly again : my signature is rather more of a scrawl than usual, but perhaps that makes them more of a collector’s item?

All too soon it was time to leave. Back out into the snow and the howling wind. I do not think I have ever been so cold in my life. I also know it was worth every last freezing minute.

With thanks to the brilliant staff of Waterstones, Princes Street. You are, of course, utterly mad for coming in to work on a day like that, but I love you for it!

And apologies to those people we didn’t manage to meet up with. The weather banjaxed everything. Hopefully we’ll be back later in the year.

It’s Sunday night. Lunch was a brace of spritzes and possibly the best porchetta sandwich in the world at the Corner Pub in Dorsoduro. But now I’m hungry again. There’s a fine piece of tuna in the freezer that I could make a pasta sauce from. All I need to do is travel back in time four hours and defrost it.

The fridge is a sad affair. There’s a quarter of a radicchio and some unexciting brie. Will it have to be pizza? No! Because there’s a big block of parmesan, some pepper, and some dried pasta. And if you have these you need never go hungry again.

Spaghetti cacio e pepe is hip. Tragically so. More than that, everyone has their own recipe for it and will tell you that you’re doing it wrong.

1) I know I am doing it wrong.

2) I am hungry and I do not care.

So here is my recipe for Incorrect Cacio e Pepe. Or, if you prefer, Cacio e Pepe sbagliato.

Ingredients (serves 2 people)

150g linguine (should be spaghetti but I haven’t got any)

Parmesan. Lots. (should be pecorino romano. You know what I’m going to say, don’t you..?)

2 tsp peppercorns (these, I have)

Method

1. Put the pasta water on to boil.
2. Put some music on. This won’t take much time. This is not a Ring Cycle dish. We had Alban Berg’s piano sonata, and that pretty much covered it.
3. Pour two modest glasses of prosecco. One for you, one for Caroline. Or, if Caroline is not there, your wife, husband, partner etc…
4. Toast the two teaspoons of peppercorns for a few minutes, just to release the aromas, and then grind them with a pestle and mortar.
5. Finely grate a lot of parmesan. I don’t really know how much. Just a lot. Fifty grams plus should do it, but, if you want to, keep grating until you can grate no more…
6. Beat in a little pasta water until you have a nice emulsified sauce (I found two coffee cups worked well as a measure).
7. Drain and toss the cooked pasta in the sauce. Serve with copious quantities of red wine.

For a quick tea with staples from the fridge, this is hard to beat. I could have happily eaten as much again. Caroline could have done with twice as much cheese, and half as much pepper, but I rather like the way that this makes your mouth sing with the heat.

At the end of the day, this is a very personal dish. Everyone will have their own variation. Everyone will tell you that your version is wrong. My version is made with what’s in the fridge and, as such, it suits me just fine…

 

Yes, they do exist, and they’re on the Rio Tera dei Assassini, just round the corner and downstairs from Nathan’s apartment. And back in the days where we lived not that far away, in Campo Santo Stefano, we used to go there quite a lot.

 

They’re actually called the Caffè Brasilia. But they will always be The Magical Brazilians to me. Why? Well, if you’re a British man of my age, you will remember a time when football on television wasn’t quite as ubiquitous as it is now. The only live game you were likely to see was the FA Cup final, and highlights were restricted to a couple of games on Match of the Day and The Big Match. Football, even if you watched it in colour – hell, even if you watched it live – was one of those things that seemed to exist in black and white.

Except when the World Cup came round, with agonising slowness, every four years. When, for a month, there would be football on television almost every day. But not football as we knew it. This was football that – even if you watched it in black and white – seemed to be played in the brightest of technicolour. I was too young to remember the great Brazilian side of 1970, and so my first experience of what football could actually be was the Brilliant Orange of the 1974 Dutch side, carving out patterns of Mondrian-like geometrical perfection on the pitch. I saw Johan Cruyff in his pomp. Even if I was eight years old, and it was on television.

Flash forward to 1982. The Dutch have declined, a lad called Diego Maradona might just be a bit too young to steer Argentina to the title, and the Germans, as ever, are a bit useful. Italy? They’re reduced to playing some guy called Paolo Rossi, just back after a two year suspension following a huge match-fixing scandal. Nobody expects anything from them (*).

No, there’s only one team in this competition, and that’s Brazil. They’ve got Zico. They’ve got Falcao. They’ve got Socrates, the chain-smoking, hard-drinking Marxist doctor of medicine. And they’ve got, well, some bloke that no-one really remembers in goal, but that doesn’t really matter because the basic philosophy of this team is : if you can score three, we can always score four. They are, after all, Brazilian.

Except that they’re not. Because for four weeks in the summer of 1982, they were inevitably referred to as “The Magical Brazilians”. And ever since then, in my mind at least, the word “Brazilian” must, by law, be paired with the adjective “Magical”.

And so the caffè Brasilia became The Magical Brazilians. The staff weren’t Brazilian (I changed this in the book, so that Ed, the barman, is) but they made a magical Negroni. The piece de resistance was to rub a little orange peel around the rim of the glass, and then carefully, oh so carefully, crush the zest and set light to the fumes giving a burnt, bitter-orange perfume to the very first sip. It was no ordinary Negroni. It was a Magical Negroni, a work of art worthy of the most Magical of Brazilians.

They changed hands a couple of years ago. The Negronis are still good, but they don’t flame any more and it’s not quite the same. Still, it’s time I paid them another visit. It was almost certainly there, nearly five years ago now, sitting outside with a Magical Negroni that I started to think…”Street of the Assassins, eh?”

(* Rossi always denied the match-fixing claims. In the end, his hat trick would knock out the Magical Brazilians in perhaps the World Cup game to end all World Cup games. They would go on to win the tournament. Those images and stories from 1982 – Sandro Pertini playing cards with Dino Zoff, Rossi’s three goals, Tardelli’s scream, Bearzot implacable on the touchline with his pipe – are, in all seriousness, the very foundation of my love affair with this country).

It was a great pleasure to be at the (belated) launch party of Gianfranco Munerotto’s Navi della marina veneziana at the Mare di Carta bookshop last Friday. Now, I must declare an interest here as I provided the English language translations for this, but this really is a beautifully produced piece of work. Gianfranco has an encyclopaedic knowledge of Venetian maritime history and what he doesn’t know, frankly, is probably not worth knowing. He’s also an extremely talented artist, and possesses a fine bass-baritone voice to boot. In fact, if he wasn’t such a nice bloke I’d be very jealous.

Elsewhere, the ebook edition of The Venetian Game is currently available at a bargain price, with a correspondingly satisfying spike in Amazon sales. I get asked to talk about it at school a fair bit which manage to be both fun and a bit embarrassing at the same time. There’ll also be an audiobook version later this year : no more information on that at present, but I’ll post it as and when I get it.

And then, of course, there’s Vengeance in Venice which comes out on the 5th April. Which is just slightly more than two months away now or (not that I’m counting) something like 70 sleeps.

Fingers crossed but, hopefully, it’s going to be a busy year…

 

It’s difficult to be angry with a man wearing a Santa hat.

The plane has been sitting on the tarmac at Marco Polo airport for nearly thirty minutes now, waiting to depart. The pilot has told us that there’s been an incident at Bristol airport. A plane has skidded off the runway during landing. Nobody, thankfully, has been hurt but there is likely to be a delay of several hours. There’ll be more information as soon as he gets it, but it’s likely they’ll be taking us off the plane soon.

It’s not ideal, but neither is it the end of the world. We have, perhaps, a three hour drive to Pembrokeshire at the other end so we’ll be arriving later than expected, but nothing too serious. I adopt the sleeping position (always easier for me than the brace position) and settle down for forty winks prior to the next announcement.

I only manage about twenty of them. The pilot emerges from the cabin wearing a bright Easyjet-orange Santa hat. He exchanges a few words with a couple in the front row and I hear the words “not good news”.

Not good at all. The airport has been closed until further notice. Easyjet have therefore cancelled all flights into Bristol and the customer service in Arrivals will do their best to make alternative arrangements for us. In the meantime, he suggests, we’re free to use our telephones or tablets in order to try and sort things out for ourselves.

Phones are whipped out like Colt 45s at the O.K Corral, and everyone taps away furiously. I check Bristol. There are no flights scheduled for tomorrow. Gatwick, then? Yes! I tap in our details as quickly as I can and submit them. I slump back in my chair. Starting our holiday on the M25 isn’t ideal, but at least we’re going to get back. Then the screen flashes up a message. The cheapest flight is not longer available. The next one costs half as much again. I don’t care. I’m prepared to throw money at the problem to make it go away, as long as we can get back to the UK for Christmas. I hit submit again. In the time taken to press the button, somebody else has nabbed it. There are now no seats remaining.

I’m trying to stay calm, but it’s not easy. Edinburgh? Is Aberdeen too far away? If we fly to Belfast could we get a boat? If the worst comes to the worst could we just get a train back? Hell, if there’s nothing else at all would Easyjet be obliged to pay for a cabin on the Orient Express?

Liverpool. Lovely, wonderful, almost-in-Wales Liverpool, with plenty of seats available the following morning. I receive the booking confirmation and sigh with relief. It’s not perfect, but it’s a flight to the UK.

We get taken off the plane, and bussed back to the terminal. The pilot apologises to everyone, and wishes us good luck and a Merry Christmas. He hands out sweets to the kids. People are stressed and unhappy and yet – it’s that damn Easyjet-orange Santa hat – it’s impossible to be angry with him.

As we wait for our bags to be taken off, one of the passengers is wandering around and telling anyone who’ll listen that the pilot – the pilot, mark you – has personally told him that Bristol remained closed for just thirty minutes, and that Easyjet were the only company to cancel flights. This, naturally, has the effect of angering and upsetting people. One woman puts her hands to her face and seems to be on the verge of tears. ‘Only company to cancel,’ he repeats. ‘The pilot told me on the way out.’

This will turn out to be nonsense. Bristol airport remained closed until midnight. But, for some reason, Unknown Passenger has chosen to play the part of Scrooge in our little Christmas Carol.

We collect our bags and make our way to Arrivals. The queue snakes away into the distance, to where the customer service desk – a little orange cube at the end of the hall – is manned by two people.

We try and take stock of things. We have, at least, a flight which is more than many people have. We could just go home. But we have friends staying in our flat and cat-sitting over the holidays. It doesn’t seem fair to disturb them. There are people who, we know, would put us up. Similarly, it doesn’t seem right to put them to trouble just before Christmas. No. We’re going to queue up, and let Easyjet arrange a hotel for us.

And then something quite wonderful happens. We start talking to the people behind us. Then Caroline spots a couple of teachers from Padua who she met only the week before. We all joke about the length of the queue and how we could all do with a drink, and, before you know it, people are working in shifts to go to the bar and bring back spritzes in plastic cups. We keep a place in the queue whilst people head off to eat pizza slices off paper plates, and then they do the same for us. An Easyjet representative works her way along the line, handing out food vouchers. It turns out that the nearest bar will not accept them as payment for drinks. But then a public-spirited citizen announces that they’ve found a bar at the opposite end of the terminal which will. Huzzah!

Slowly, but surely, the distance to the recycling bins to dispose of the empties increases, as the distance to the customer service desk decreases.

It should be horrible, stressful and upsetting but – against all the odds – our section of the queue is having a right little party. We all get booked into the same hotel, a workaday Marriott just ten minutes from the airport, and say we’ll meet up again later.

We don’t, of course. Neither of us feels up to two parties in a day any more. We have a modest dinner, and an early night. The next day we’re up early for an uneventful flight to Liverpool and a drive to Wales where Christmas will properly begin. And yet, in a strange way, those three hours in an airport queue were amongst the most, well, Christmassy of the entire holiday.

 

I’ll try and write a more detailed round-up of the year before it ends, but I’ve got a flight to catch to the UK in a couple of hours and so this will have to be brief.

It’s simply to say thanks : to all who came to visit this year, to those of you who looked after Mimi while we were away, and to all of those who sent messages of support or told me how much they’d enjoyed The Venetian Game (*)

Thank you. It really does mean a lot.

“There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,’ returned the nephew. ‘Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round—apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!” 
― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

Merry Christmas everyone!

(* and in the event that you didn’t enjoy The Venetian Game, well, thank you even more for not telling me…)

Caroline came back from the market at Santa Marta with a rabbit. But not just any old rabbit : a boned rabbit.

I took a look at it. It looked, basically, rabbit-like. Only floppy. Clearly, proper work had gone into it. And so, I felt obliged to put a similar amount of work into cooking it.

Ingredients

One boned-out rabbit

Three good sausages

200g of thinly sliced pancetta

100g-150g mushrooms

50g grated parmesan

Chopped herbs : I used rosemary and sage. Oregano wouldn’t hurt. You decide.

Two large glasses of white wine / prosecco

Salt & Pepper

Method

1. First, bone your rabbit.

2. No. Do not do this. Get someone else to do it. Your life will not be the less for not boning out a rabbit. Get a boned rabbit from a butcher.

3. Congratulate yourself on being sensible. Put some music on. This recipe takes a bit of time, but not a whole opera. I chose George Harrison’s “All Things Must Pass”, along with miscellaneous Beatles with occasional Stones/Who/Yardbirds on the side.

4. Make the stuffing. Scrape the meat out of the sausages into bowl, and add the parmesan. Finely chop the mushrooms and herbs, and add them to the mix with a good grinding of salt and pepper.

5. My rabbit came with its liver and some rather tough white meat. Chop this up finely and add to the mix. Give it a good scoosh together with your hands and form it into a big ball. Or, if you prefer, a long sausage shape.

6. Take your boned-out rabbit and lay it out flat. Take your stuffing and, well, stuff your rabbit like this :-

 

7. Roll up your rabbit and secure it by wrapping the pancetta around it. Yes, you could use cooking twine for this. But it’s more fun using bacon, surely?

The Great Beast should now look something like this :-

8. Stick it in a roasting tin, and pour a glass of white wine or prosecco on top. Drink the other glass.

9. Cook for 90 minutes on gas mark 4. The temptation will be to stick it on a higher hear to crisp up the pancetta – if you do this, the bacon will shrink too quickly and the end result will look a little sad. A longer, slower cook is better.

10. After 90 minutes, it should look like this…

11. Carve into slices, and serve with some greens. But let’s be honest, green things are not the main event here. Hopefully, it will look something like this :-

 I made this for two. There will be cold cuts and sandwiches for a couple of days to come. It would make a cracking dish for a dinner party. If you are worried that, perhaps, you are not getting enough protein in your diet, I can think of no better dish!