Recipes for Love and Murder: A Tannie Maria Mystery

"This is set in South Africa, in the Klein Karoo, which is a rural area in the semi-arid part of the country. It’s just delightful. It’s an intriguing murder investigation with wonderful small-town characters. The heroine, Tannie Maria, is a superb cook. She loves to prepare and create recipes. She writes a recipe column for the local newspaper, the Klein Karoo Gazette , and then she gets pushed into writing a lonely hearts column as well. The two are combined: she solves the lonely hearts problems with recipes which she suggests that the romantic parties should try on each other to improve their relationship. It’s very enjoyable. I suppose you would call it cosy, though the murders can be quite dark. In the times that Maria is investigating the murders, she runs afoul of the police by interfering with what they’re trying to do, but she develops a romantic relationship with one of them. The Tannie Maria series has been very successful worldwide, and there’s a TV series of the book as well. We chose the first book in the series, Recipes for Love and Murder, because it’s the right place to start, in terms of introducing the characters. Yes. It’s an area of the country where Afrikaans is the main language. The majority of people speak Afrikaans and probably a local African language, but the books are written in English. I think you’ll find the same with Deon Meyer’s and Mike Nicol’s books and we do it too with our books. We put in a few words that we think give a little bit of local flavour and colour, because that’s what people do. You sometimes hear people talking to each other and it’s a mixture of English, Afrikaans, and another language. I think that all the authors—and we certainly do this—will only do it where the word’s meaning is either obvious from the context or doesn’t matter. In our books, we include a glossary of the local words that we use for people to look up if they really care. But we don’t do it in such a way that people have to start paging back and forth to the glossary. That’s not going to work in fiction. That’s absolutely correct. Andrew does address serious themes, and abuse is one of them. Tannie Maria has had an unhappy marriage. Her husband has died and she managed to escape from it. This colours a lot of her thinking. In particular, she’s very cautious about a relationship with another man after that. So yes, there are deep issues and those extend into the other books in the series as well. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . All the writers we’re talking about have tried to bring issues that may be universal, may be Southern African, or may be both into their books. We certainly do that with our Botswana books. That’s perhaps another reason why we set them in Botswana: we felt we could bring up Southern African themes (and not just those in the spotlight of the aftermath of apartheid). For example, the independence war in Zimbabwe; blood diamonds; so-called muti murders—a very dark theme: the murder of individuals to harvest body parts for use in black magic. It sounds like a science fiction or horror trope, but it’s a real issue in Sub-Saharan Africa. All of these themes can come out and make the books a bit different from what you’d find, perhaps, in Western fiction."