In detective stories, you need to learn as much as possible as fast as you can. Detective writers use lots of different kinds of details to tell you about the detectives and the cases-- often, this includes food and drink. From the solicitous attention of Madame Maigret to the indifference of Spencer's girlfriend Susan, and from the fussy old-maidish tastes of Hercule Poirot to the macho life-style choices of V.I. Warshawski, breakfast in particular reveals much about fictitious detectives.

A French Detective Gourmet

Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret is renowned for the hearty French cooking of his wife and for the cafes and restaurants where he seems to go during every investigation. Most of the time, food, along with other details, serves to point to Maigret's lower-class origins, and particularly, to establish his common background with the criminals that he is investigating. Food tastes and attitudes also help to distinguish him from higher-class suspects or witnesses that he must interview.

When Maigret is at home, Madame Maigret fixes his coffee for breakfast; this is consistent with French habits where little else is eaten early in the morning, except perhaps some bread. When he's in a hurry, he may not have time to drink it, as in Maigret and the Apparition. In contrast, during the tense questioning of suspects at police headquarters, he orders beer and sandwiches from a nearby cafe at any hour, even at breakfast time.

In Maigret and the Hotel Majestic, the entire story centers around a breakfast cook in a large hotel; Simenon describes every detail of the guests' breakfast from the point of view of the harried workers below the elegant hotel rooms. Maigret feels much more comfortable in the lower depths of the service quarters than above, with the elegant and wealthy guests. His class feelings also come up when he goes to the home of the breakfast cook, where dinner simmers on the stove. Immediately afterwards, in his own home, the stew that Madame Maigret is cooking smells exactly the same as the one he had just smelled in the home of the cook, a man implicated in a murder (Hotel Majestic, p. 35.) Madame cooks stew often, in these stories, building up the homey atmosphere that contrasts to the police station and seedy crime scenes.

Check out Mae Sander’s blog: MAEFOOD.BLOGSPOT.COM