The Trouble with Too Much Sun

The Trouble with Too Much Sun
A Simona Griffo Mystery
by Trella Crespi


Where I Get My Ideas

I'd been to a few Club Meds and thought the idyllic setting would be a great backdrop for a murder. Plus I needed a vacation badly.

A Sense of Place -- Imagining a story without first knowing where it takes place would be impossible for me. I think it has to do with feeling rootless for most of my life. I grab on to a place for dear life, hoping it will never go away.

Setting

La Caravelle, Club Med, Guadeloupe. The villages of Pointe-à-Pitre and Sainte-Anne, Carbet Falls, and Soufrière volcano.
Plot

When Simona's boss gets called back to New York on an agency emergency, she suddenly finds herself in charge of a publicity shoot for Beau Soleil, a sun product line, on the island of Guadaloupe. The job does not proceed smoothly. The photographer is morose and difficult. Simona feels fat and lonely. The model has rocks thrown at her. The island guide Simona hired turns out to be mixed up with gun runners and voodoo. When Simona tries to return a lost two-year-old boy to his mother, she finds the woman's body under the sail of a Windsurfer. The commissioner in charge, Cristophe Beaujoie, believes someone from the club is involved. Simona wants to help.

"Why do you wish to mix yourself up with violent death?" the commissioner asks Simona.

"It comforts me to know that if I work hard enough, I can come up with solutions."

In this book I worked hard to give the reader a sense of the island, its people, its history and cuisine. I was particularly taken by the folktales, and I created a character Papa "La Bouche" (the mouth) who weaves the history of the slaves and folktales together. The story is also drenched in the sensuality of the tropics.

Recurring Characters

* Ellen Price, the model Simona discovered in A Small Raise.
* Stan Greenhouse, her on-and-off-again lover

Reviews

...Crespi creates a believable inner life for Simona, a transplanted Italian with a keen interest in human nature, lush descriptions of paradise and a whodunit plot that keeps the pages turning. -- Publisher's Weekly
The Beginning

I was buried up to my neck in the gloriously welcoming, warm sand of La Caravelle -- Club Med on Guadeloupe, while Mozart's Jupiter Symphony was allegroing over the sound system to the rhythm of creaking tree frogs and breaking waves. In the past three happy days the late-January sun had warmed, burned, and finally tanned me.

Now it was sunset time, a quiet affair in the Caribbean.

Recipe -- Pasta Crisi (Crisis Pasta)

Serves 4 as a main course

* 2 lbs. ripe plum tomatoes -- thickly sliced lengthwise
* 1/2 bunch arugula -- leaves torn into small pieces (Substitute with watercress if arugula not available.)
* 2 cloves garlic -- minced
* 1/4 tsp. red pepper flakes
* 1 large mozzarella -- diced
* 8 sun-dried tomato halves (packed in olive oil) -- drained and chopped
* 1/3 cup olive oil
* 1 lb. imported dried penne or spaghetti
* salt and pepper to taste

Heat broiler.

In large serving bowl mix olive oil, garlic, red pepper flakes, sun-dried tomatoes, and mozzarella.

When broiler is very hot, line the fresh tomato slices on an aluminum-wrapped broiler pan, season with salt and pepper, and broil tomatoes until their edges turn black -- 10 minutes approx. (repeat this process if pan is not large enough to accommodate all the slices.)

Add broiled tomato slices to serving bowl. Add arugula. This sauce can be prepared a few hours ahead of time. Best served at room temperature.

Cook the pasta in a large pot filled with salted boiling water. When the pasta is al dente, drain and transfer to serving bowl. Toss all the ingredients together, letting the hot pasta soften the mozzarella.

Eat and forget the crisis!

The Trouble with Moonlighting

The Trouble with Moonlighting
A Simona Griffo Mystery
by Trella Crespi

Where I Get My Ideas

I wanted to bring my Italian life into this one to flesh out Simona's past so I gave her a two-week vacation to act as dialogue coach for an Italian film crew shooting New York locations. Again the autobiographical intrudes heavily. The film director, Sara Varni, is modeled after Lina Wertmüller and the male film star bears a strong resemblance to Marcello Mastroianni, people I worked with often.

Setting

New York City -- Lincoln Center, the Upper West Side, Spanish Harlem, Greenwich Village, Soho, the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn, the tony Royalton Hotel.
Plot

Simona's dialogue coach stint starts with the glamorous Hollywood star nearly getting electrocuted in the Lincoln Center fountain during a shoot. Simona will also have the pleasant job of finding Johanna dead in her fancy Upper West Side apartment. The still photographer, Toni Berto, Johanna's lover and Simona's old friend, is accused of the murder. Simona, overriding the objections of her detective lover, jumps in to help Toni and uncovers old and new obsessions. It's also a story about loyalty and Simona's search to find her American legs which leads her to make mistakes.

More about names -- Some people objected to a man being named Toni with an i. That's the Italian spelling of the name and since Toni is Sicilian, it would have been wrong to spell his name Tony.

Recurring Characters

* Stan Greenhouse, her NYPD homicide detective lover
* Raf Garcia, Stan's partner

Reviews

[regarding Small Raise and Moonlighting]: Both these books are fine mysteries, well and fairly plotted. But Trella Crespi deserves special congratulations for her characterization of Simona. Crespi has made Simona confident and uncertain, happy with her life and regretting choices made, self-sufficient and, just occasionally lonely. In the hands of some authors the results would seem inconsistent and irritating, but Crespi's writing makes Simona seem very very human. And Crespi has given Simona a normal love life, with lows as well as highs, with everyone doing the best they can and hoping things will work out at last. The reasons for this are numerous as they are trivial, but the end result is a heroine who rings true. -- The Drood Review of Mystery

As the series progresses, she [Simona] will undoubtedly become more skilled in her search for information and more discriminating about what she seeks. I hope she will also become more analytical. At times I grew tired of her efforts to assuage the feelings of the other suspects, but then a less-involved amateur sleuth would not have lingered to create the delicious Sicilian Good Fish Salad, whose recipe concludes the book. -- Mystery Scene

Author comment -- Simona is starting her life over again. She's new at sleuthing and is propelled by emotion and intuition. Give her a chance to settle, to come of age all over again in America. My aim is to give the reader the arc of a woman's life.

The Beginning

Things were getting off to a fine start on my moonlighting job. I was standing on skyscraper-high stiletto heels, wearing a summer evening dress one choking size too small and being sprayed by the wind-swept fountain mist at Lincoln Center on an unusually cold September midnight.

Recipe -- Sicilian Good Fish Salad

Serves four

* 1 19-oz. can of cannellini beans
* 1 15-oz. can of corn kernels
* 1 heart of celery sliced very thin -- about two cups
* 1 bunch scallions sliced -- green part included
* 1/2 red pepper diced very small (for color)
* 3 hearts of palm sliced (optional)
* 1 1-inch tuna steak or 2 cans of light meat tuna
* 4 large basil leaves

Dressing:
* 1+1/2 tbsp. balsamic vinegar or 1 tbsp. lemon juice
* 4 tbsp. extra virgin olive oil
* salt and pepper
* 1 clove of garlic -- minced

Drain the beans and the corn, and put in a serving bowl. Add sliced celery, scallions, red pepper, hearts of palm. If using tuna steak, sear it in a tbsp. of oil in a very hot skillet three minutes per side. Let cool and slice. Add to bowl. If using canned tuna, drain and add. Tear basil leaves into small pieces and add to bowl.

In a small bowl mix salt, pepper and garlic to lemon juice or balsamic vinegar. Add olive oil. Whip together well, pour in tuna bowl, and gently mix all ingredients. Serve at room temperature with hearty bread and chilled white wine. Buon appetito!

The Trouble with a Small Raise

The Trouble with a Small Raise
A Simona Griffo Mystery
by Trella Crespi

Where I Get My Ideas

I was angry with my boss. I wanted to kill him. When I told him I'd committed murder on paper and he was the corpse, his response was, "A lot of women have written about me." I may just have to kill him again.

Setting

New York City -- Greenwich Village where she lives, the Union Square area where she works.
Plot

Simona comes to the advertising agency early one Monday morning, hoping to catch her boss and ask for a long-deserved raise. Instead she finds him dead. She is busy working on a new perfume campaign, but she's appointed the agency's liaison with the police. That's how she gets to spend time with Stan Greenhouse and his partner Raf Garcia. She shares cooking tips with Raf, but Stan is the one who gives her hormones a big surge. When Simona gets implicated in her boss's death, she sets out to clear herself.

There are a lot of characters in A Small Raise. Apart from giving the reader a fun mystery, I was trying to describe the New York advertising world which is full of many egos. I added a Cast of Characters at the beginning, something I've continued in my other mysteries.

Reviews

Nothing spoils the fun of this thoroughly engrossing whodunit, introducing one of the boldest and most likable of female sleuths. -- Publisher's Weekly

Ms. Crespi truly shines in the humor department....Though her characterization of Simona Griffo was wonderful and her portrayal of the inner workings of an ad agency was realistic and richly detailed, Ms. Crespi did not write what I consider a taut, well-honed mystery. There are far too many characters to keep up with: twenty-three to be exact, many of whom had French, Italian or Spanish names -- pretty darned confusing when trying to figure out the culprit. -- Mostly Murder

Author comment -- Too many foreign names? Ever look at the New York City phone book?

The Beginning

It wasn't going to be the usual manic Monday someone on the radio was singing about. It was going to be much worse.

Recipe

There's no separate recipe in this one. Simona cooks an eggplant pasta dish with a friend while discussing possible suspects. After the book was published I got two conflicting complaints: 1. All of a sudden it sounded like a cook book! 2. I want to cook that dish but you didn't give the exact proportions!

That's when I decided to put the recipe in the back from then on. At the time I hadn't heard of Virginia Rich and Diane Mott Davidson whose first book was published only a few months before mine.