The Rottweiler

"In my latest book, Damage Control , the main character is a perfumista. I talk about perfumes and I made perfume a clue in the book. I thought I was being so clever. I had never read a book that had perfume as a clue. But after I turned the book in I did more research, and to my shock and horror mystery authors have been using perfume and smell as a clue since Sherlock Holmes . In Agatha Christie ‘s novel Mrs McGinty ’ s Dead , the murderer actually sprays someone else’s perfume in the room to throw off the scent of the murderer. So it’s been used many times. I chose Ruth Rendell’s book because it’s a perfect example of using perfume in mysteries. She’s a wonderful, psychologically acute, dark writer, with very clever plots. I don’t want to give too much away, but perfume is a trigger in the book. Ruth Rendell also really knows her perfume lore. She talks about perfumes that have been discontinued and then brought back to the market. This is something that happens frequently in the perfume world. There are scents that stop being made, because consumers no longer want them, or because they’re too expensive to produce, or the company went bankrupt. Then someone else buys the name and reinvigorates the brand. Often, when they do that, they can’t find the natural ingredients that were in the perfume originally, so they use the same name but create a completely different scent. Or sometimes a classic firm like Dior gets purchased by a multinational, and the accountants look at the balance sheet and ask, “Why are we paying $8,000 for a kilo of jasmine when we can buy it from China for $2,000? Or when we can use synthetic jasmine, which has the same molecular structure?” Well, because it smells different. You can tell."