Beskuit on the veld, with a side of crime

• 1 stocky man who abuses his wife
• 1 small tender wife
• 1 medium-size tough woman in love with the wife
• 1 double-barrelled shotgun
• 1 small karoo town marinated in secrets
• 1 red-hot New Yorker
• 2 cool policemen
• 1 handful of red herrings and suspects mixed together
• Pinch of greed

So starts the back cover of Sally Andrew’s Recipes for Love and Murder, a quite accurate description of its contents.

Mystery novels featuring middle-aged or elderly women are not uncommon. Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple. Alexander McCall Smith’s Precious Ramotswe. Jessica Fletcher in the TV series. Nina Borg…. and Sally Andrew’s Tannie Maria is a distinctive and welcome addition to the club.

Set in the Klein Karoo, a narrow, largely arid valley in rural South Africa, Tannie (like the Indian ‘Auntie’, a polite Afrikaans address for women older than you) Maria is a ‘soft’, middle-aged widow who lives alone, happy that the husband who beat her is now dead, but occasionally lonely. She writes a recipe column for the local paper, but the paper wants an agony-aunt column instead, so she merges the two into ‘Tannie Maria’s Love Advice and Recipe Column’.

So far, this has all the makings of a genteel, cosy mystery series, but the first few letters she receives set a distinctly different tone.

Dear Tannie Maria, It feels like my life is over and I’m not even thirteen. I’ve had sex three times but I only swallowed once. Am I pregnant? […] Desperate

I promised to love and obey this man. The beatings only happen when he is drunk or jealous. If I don’t fight back it’s not too bad. […] The beatings are only once a month. The sex once a week. So I have twenty-five days a month when he doesn’t bother me much.

This second letter brings back miserable memories of Tannie Maria’s own marriage.

I didn’t ever run at him with a knife. I had been scared of dying. And scared of living too. While he was alive, I just could not escape. Even the priest at our church said it was my duty to stay by my husband, so I stayed and stayed. I hoped this woman would not do the same.

Tannie Maria’s advice is always accompanied by a recipe. The 13-year-old girl gets a recipe for frozen bananas dipped in chocolate and nuts. She advises the beaten woman to leave, and provides a recipe for a delicious-looking mutton curry recipe to placate the abusive husband until the woman can get her plans together.

And then the woman, Martine van Schalkwyk, turns up dead. The husband Dirk is an obvious suspect, but so is the woman’s friend, Anna Pretorius, who was in love with her. There is a father who has financially disinherited her, a brother who wants the inheritance, and a few other possible leads.

I must admit it is a bit startling to see the word ‘coloured’ as a description of a person.

Jessie Mostert was the young Gazette journalist. She was a coloured girl who got a scholarship and then came back to work in her hometown. Her mother was a nurse at the Ladismith hospital.

It is, however, an accurate reflection of the word used in South Africa for those who are of part European, part African or Asian heritage, and probably exactly the word Tannie Maria would use for Jessie, without a pejorative slant.

There is a very handsome Detective Kannemayer on the case, along with Constable Piet Witbooi, a brilliant Bushman tracker and Reghardt Snyman, who has always had a soft spot for Jessie. Kannemayer is a widower, and Tannie Maria is inspired to put on her nice cream dress and make lamb stew and chocolate cake when he comes to take her statement.

Tannie Maria is not one of your feisty, brave detectives. She is shy and finds herself tongue-tied in sensitive situations. But she is determined, and feels some responsibility for poor Martine’s death because of the advice she had provided. Jessie, however, exemplifies the intrepid investigative journalist, and the two are quite the resolute pair.

Racial dynamics are not ignored. Mandela dies, and Tannie Maria thinks of her mother and husband Fanie’s reaction to him.

The ANC came into power and Mandela was our president. My mother, along with lots of other whites, was terrified. [..] Mandela eventually charmed my mother, but Fanie never relaxed with […] the black government.

After Jessie and Reghardt have a lovely night together, he ignores her in public.

“I’d forgotten what a racist little town we come from,”, she said. “Reghardt wouldn’t want his father and friends to see him with a coloured girlfriend.”

As you see, Tannie Maria’s world is darker and more realistically complex than the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency novels, set just next door in Botswana.

The conversation is a lovely mix of Afrikaans, English and what I think is local slang.

“Dankie, skat,” I said. “Bobotie for you. “

“Ooh, lekker,” Jessie said.

The pacing is excellent and natural, and Tannie Maria’s own past is gently woven into the novel: the English father who abandoned her, why she married Fanie, why she stopped going to church, and her life after Fanie’s death. She is a thoroughly appealing protagonist. There is a soothing sense of place:

When I came out with the roast lamb and vegetables, Kannemayer was holding the letters in his hand, and looking out across the veld at our red mountain, the Rooiberg. I could still hear the bokmakeries calling, but they sounded farther away now, maybe in the big gwarrie tree.

The finale, when it comes, is appropriately nerve-wracking in a distinctly South African way, where a night out in the veld for an injured person is likely to be their end.

And Tannie Maria’s recipes look very good indeed. I was also fascinated by her use of a hotbox: ‘a big box filled with styrofoam balls that retains the heat, saves electricity, and is ideal for soups and curries.’ Alas, it probably works better in the temperate South Africa than in a Maryland winter.

The next book in the series is on its way to me….