Martin Fone's Blog, page 5

Truffle Hunting

While the Italians and French used trained pigs to hunt for truffles, the English preferred to use dogs, more docile, easier to train, and without the unfortunate habit of devouring their find. With between 100 million to 300 million olfactory receptors in their nose, compared with the paltry five to six million we have, and a region of the brain dedicated to the analysis of odours which is forty times larger than that of Homo sapiens, a dog, especially a poodle, trained specifically for the task proved a very efficient hunting machine.

In his The Dogs of the British Isles (1882) John Walsh gave a detailed description of a typical truffle dog, a small poodle, similar to the Spanish barbet weighing about 15lbs. “These dogs”, he wrote, “are rather longer on the leg than the true poodle, but have exquisite noses, and hunt close to the ground…Arrived at the spot where the fungus lies buried, some two or three inches beneath the surface, they dig like a terrier at a rat’s hole, and the best of them, if let alone, will disinter the fungus and carry it to his master”.

The dogs often worked on a system of rewards, receiving “the tiniest morsels” of bread after unearthing a truffle, refusing to continue until they have received their end of the bargain. They were indefatigable, one observer noting that “I have seen [one] work from dawn until dark, collecting in that time nearly 8 pounds of truffles, and yet with as much briskness and apparent enjoyment for the last as for the first”.

Once trained, the dogs possessed a remarkable sense of smell as this report of the exploits of a dog on the estate of the Duke of Queensbury in 1802 demonstrates. It “suddenly leapt over the hedge which surrounded that part of the park, and ran with utmost precipitation across the field (which was the distance of at least 100 yards) to a hedge, opposite where, under a Beech tree, he found and bought in his mouth to his master, as the truffle dogs are taught to do, a truffle of uncommon size and which weighed 12 ounces and a half”.

Queen Victoria was given two white truffle dogs as a birthday present by Prince Albert in 1842.

As well as a good dog, they usually had two, an experienced one and one in training, the truffle hunter was equipped with a short staff, about 2 feet five inches long with a strong iron point at one end and two-fanged iron hook at the other. With this truffle spike he could both dig out even the largest truffles and draw aside the brambles and boughs to allow his dog free access to use his nose. A coat with pockets as voluminous as those of a poacher was also a prerequisite, one pocket for his lunch and the other for the truffles he collected. Out all day a determined hunter would often walk between thirty and forty miles.

The Wiltshire parish of Winterslow, near Salisbury, was known as the “headquarters of English truffling” with up to a dozen hunters working from there from the late 17th century until well into the 20th century. The skill was restricted to certain families and passed down the generations. Perhaps the most famous was Eli Collins (1840-1924), who began hunting at the age of nine and continued until he was 83, describing his occupation in the 1871 census as “truffle hunter and hurdle maker”.

Eli’s son, Alfred, carried on the tradition, often seen in the locale on his bicycle with one dog trotting behind and the other carried in a wicker basket attached to the handlebars, the dogs swapping positions every five miles, but after an exhausting day’s hunt both were carried home. On a good day Alfred could collect 25lbs but, equally, there were some days when the truffle eluded him. Once home, the truffles, mainly sold to private customers, were packed in shoe boxes collected from the local boot maker for a penny a time, and posted off.

Rheumatism was the bane of the truffle hunter, the truffles preferring damp conditions, and forced Alfred to retire in the 1930s. He died a poor man in 1953 and was known as “the last of the professional truffle hunters”.

Where There Was Smoke

A review of Where There Was Smoke by Brian Flynn – 250729

Originally published in 1951, Where There Was Smoke is the third of five Brian Flynn novels reissued by Dean Street Press in July 2025. The thirty-eighth in Flynn’s long-running Anthony Bathurst series, it is more of a thriller than a conventional whodunit. Nevertheless, the amateur sleuth is still capable of the odd Holmesian feat of deduction and exhibits a spirit of derring-do that discomforts his old mukker, Andrew MacMorran of the Yard.

The story, divided into four parts, starts off with Donald Finney, a bright young chemist, who is tempted by an advert to visit the premises of Messrs Morgan and Trevor at 7, King Lud Street in London, lured by the prospect of the £100 offered by the firm’s Mr Reheboam for just one night’s work. Later, though, Finney’s body is discovered and, curiously, the skin is conspicuously discoloured and within the victim’s belly button is a piece of paper bearing the letters NST…IRE and a piece of cooked bacon rind.  

At the local East Burne police station is an officer by the name of Noel Stire, but he steadfastly denies any knowledge of or association with the victim. Then a bright sergeant at Eppfield police station remembers another body being found in a similarly discoloured state, again of a chemist, some months earlier. Inspector Manning of the local police wisely recognizes that this is a case complex and baffling enough to require the big guns of the Yard. Enter Messrs MacMorran and Bathurst.

The investigation has a languid feel about it as the requisite information is gathered, requiring visits to a greasy spoon-like café, a factory with Bathurst disguised as an inspector, the whiff of pigs and Bathurst’s cruciverbalism enabling him to give a convincing explanation to the message found on Finney and his encyclopaedic knowledge of the scriptures, particularly the Book of Kings, giving him the link between Rehobaum and the Scorpion. There is an inventive use of alphabet spaghetti to convey a message and Bathurst is more than once the beneficiary of being in the right place at the right time or being in a position to overhear some important remark.

One such tells him something big is going to happen in three days’ time and the pace of the book picks up, spurring Bathurst into action as the clock ticks, leading to an incendiary finale. We find we have strayed into an international conspiracy to produce an infinite supply of a substitute for petrol, using a formula developed by a Moravian who had died before his work was completed. The process required the input of clever chemists, both of whom, when their contribution was complete, paid for their acquired knowledge with their lives, cooked in a device used by Customs and Excise to incinerate contraband tobacco.

The finale has a slightly inconclusive feel about it as Bathurst can only reconstruct what has happened without the benefit of cast-iron evidence. It might not be one of Flynn’s better stories but the joy for me lies in his use of language, his inventive use of idioms and variations of well known sayings. They stick out like an overgrown toenail, showing that he certainly knows his artichokes. Along the way we meet the Rajah of Bhong, the  Young lady of Devizes and the Colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady with Sir Garnet making a welcome return and even the odd archaism like serpiginously creeps into the text.

A few hours in the company of Flynn and his amateur sleuth are never wasted and there are moments of delight to be found lurking in many of the pages. Great stuff.

My thanks to Victoria Eade for a review copy.

It’s The Way I Tell ’Em (37)

Some of the best one-liners from the Edinburgh Fringe 2025, allegedly:

We named our children War and Peace – it’s a long story – Olaf Falafel.

I just got a personal trainer. She’s horrible to me but my body goal is a thicker skin – Bella Hull

At my lowest, I was kicked out of the museum for being inappropriate with Michelangelo’s David. I’d hit rock bottom – Andrew Doherty

Everyone is worried about AI. I’m more concerned with what the other vowels are up to – Rob Auton

People who say bath bombs are relaxing have clearly never tried to carry one home in the rain – Ian Smith

I love getting Latin chat-up lines. I carpe every DM – Amelia Hamilton

This spider has been in my house so long, it should pay half the wifi. As a web developer, it can afford to – Sikisa

I went on a date with a matador but there were too many red flags – Chris Grace

America is like my ex-boyfriend. Our relationship was toxic, when I left everyone called me brave, and now every morning I pull up social media to see how ugly he’s getting – Candace Bryan

I’m not nostalgic but I used to be. Those were the days – Rajiv Karia

Wedding Idea Of The Week

The average cost of a wedding in the UK in 2025, according to Bridebook, is around £20,822. However, the cost of an engagement ring and a honeymoon can add another £5,750 on to the bill. It is a serious amount of money and happy couples are likely to be on the lookout for cost-saving ideas.

It is here that a Parisian startup, Invitin, sees an opportunity. By signing up to their app, the bride and groom can sell tickets to their wedding to complete strangers. Each guest will pay between €100 and €150 to share the big day, the happy couple will have the ability to vet their profiles, and the paying guests will have to sing up to some strict rules including dressing appropriately, arriving on time, drinking with moderation, and, perhaps most importantly, not publishing or sharing photographs or videos without prior approval.

Numbers will be limited to between five and ten per event. One couple who had invited five paying strangers to their nuptials reported that it was a “boost for their other guests” as three of the five were single men, balancing out the number of single women.

A clever idea but surely the answer is to rein in your ambitions so that the event becomes more affordable.

Murder In The Moor

A review of Murder in the Moor by Thomas Kindon – 250726

There is as much mystery about Thomas Kindon as there is in Murder in the Moor, his only published work. He entered the manuscript into Methuen’s Prize Competition for Detective Novels in around 1927 and the distinguished trio of judges assembled by the publishers deemed that it was worthy of being one of the runners-up. It was eventually published in 1929, garnered some excellent reviews, but then along with its author sank into obscurity. Since then a copy has been as rare as hen’s teeth, but a cheap and fairly presentable version is now available in e-book format.

Kindon’s sleuth is a full-time policeman, Peregrine Clement Smith, who because of his simian appearance goes by the rather ungainly moniker of Pithecanthropus Smith, In some ways he reminds me of Joyce Porter’s much later creation, Wilfred Dover, although not quite so repellent. Smith is a loner, not concerned about his appearance or how he is perceived, just focused on catching culprits, more concerned with the whodunit it than why it was done. This contrast with the approach of his colleague Harford who is obsessed with motive to the extent that he has a warrant in his pocket for the arrest of the wrong man.

We meet up with Smith at the start of a walking holiday over Dukesmoor, a thinly disguised version of Dartmoor, complete with prison, Georgetown, from which, inevitably, a prisoner has escaped. What I liked about the opening three chapters was how Kindon slowly drip fed salient information about Smith so that we had got a rounded picture of his character and only later that he was that dread trope of crime fiction, a detective on holiday.

Like many others Smith is a crime magnet, and shortly after striding out over the moor on a particularly misty morning together with his chance companion, Angus MacFee, a body is found by two young women by Okemere Pool, having been killed by a blow to the head with a military shell and stripped of its outer clothing. The obvious conclusion is that the victim, later revealed to be Algernon Rapper, was murdered by the escaped convict for his clothing.

From this Kindon weaves an ingenious plot, full of twists and turns, too complex to give it justice in a brief review, with several surprising connections between his characters emerging. It is written with no little wit and a fine sense of humour and although a tad long, it manages to maintain its momentum until the end. As well as the contrast in methods between the two policemen, Smith and Harford, one of the fascinating aspects of the book is the relationship between Smith and MacFee.

Although Smith did not know MacFee from Adam at the start of the book, they just happened to be in the same place with the intentions of engaging in a bit of pedestrianism, what we would know as rambling, the insight into MacFee’s character that Smith gleans proves invaluable, especially when details of the Scotsman’s stormy relationship with the victim emerges. MacFee has a very scientific approach to life, obsessed with his latest toy, a prismatic compass and takes a very geometric approach to planning his route, a trait that initially irritates Smith to the point that they separate at a vital moment as MacFee is challenged to demonstrate the superiority of his methods.

There is more than a little nod of the head towards Wills Crofts and Austin Freeman in the scientific analysis of the routes taken over the moor and the times involved, although, frankly, done without the aplomb of those two undoubted masters. Fortunately, that is only a minor aspect of the story. The brooding and disturbing aspects of the moor are well done – there is a great sense of place and the wild and forbidding nature of the moor – and the denouement is well done albeit a tad melodramatic which would not be out of place in a pot boiler, especially as we were introduced to the real culprit unbeknownst to us early on.      

A tale of revenge, double dealing, counterfeit money and a case of mistaken identity, it is one to look out for,

Patent Leather

I remember my first pair of patent leather shoes with their shiny black finish. I felt the bee’s knees, but it never dawned on me to wonder what differentiated it from on ordinary leather and whether it was really patented and if so, by whom. Of course, I know now that patent leather is made by glazing animal hides with layers of resin-based varnish which provides protection against wear and tear while also giving a finish that smacks of luxury.

One of the earliest references to patent leather appeared in The Bee in 1793, a short-lived literary magazine. It told of a Mr Hand from Birmingham who was granted a patent for a  new form of “flexible leather…[with]…a glaze and polish that renders it impervious to water”. This new material was used to create luxurious shoes for the wealthy.

The next name to appear in the story of the development of patent leather is that of London-based inventor Edmund Prior, who in 1799 was granted a patent for a new coating technique. This involved the use of a combination of dies and boiled oil with the leather then finished off with the addition of oil varnish. Six years later, in 1805, fellow Londoner, Charles Mollersten, was able to create an exceptionally shiny surface to his leather by using a concoction of whale oil, linseed oil, lamp black, and horse grease. He was also granted a patent.

The European fashion of using patent leather was slow to be adopted in America and the name that is synonymous with its introduction there is Seth Boyden. A New Jersey-based entrepreneur and engineer – amongst his many accomplishments he invented malleable cast iron, joined the California Gold Rush (without success) and developed hybrid strawberries that won awards at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia – Boyden used descriptions of the British processes to come up with a method of applying lacquer to leather by 1819.

He then set up a factory in Newark and proceeded to mass produce patent leather very successfully. Despite his success and his many inventions, the only patent Boyden ever held was for a hat-forming machine.

Scientific American treated its readers to a detailed description of the process of making patent leather in 1857. A single batch required five gallons of linseed or drying oil which was boiled with four pounds and a few ounces of white lead, and an equal amount of litharge ie lead oxide until it reaches the consistency of a syrup. An ochre or chalk is then added and the mixture is spread evenly on both sides of the leather and well rubbed in, a process that is repeated several times until the required level of protection and sheen is obtained, allowing sufficient time for each coat to dry, and the surface ground down each time with pumice stone.            

Then it was time to apply the finishing varnish, which either contained asphalte for a reddish effect, Prussian blue for a greenish-blue leather, or, most commonly, ivory black which produced a beautiful and brilliant black. The process was slow and laborious, something that was reflected in the price of the patent leather.

While today we would be worried about the high lead content in the process described by the Scientific American, what concerned the editors was that its presence explained “the prevalence of tender feet, corns and bunions, among those who are in the habit of wearing boots and shoes of this material, as it has a very drying and drawing action.” Those who “so indulge [in patent leather], look shiny about the feet at the expense of their health. They had better exert themselves a little, by using paste blacking, and thus be able to walk in comfort and with ease.”

For those of you who own patent leather shoes today, fear not. The modern process uses synthetic coatings, like polyurethane or acrylic, and does not contain lead.

While various processes for producing patent leather were patented, there is no grand overarching patent and, even if there was, it would have long since expired.

Silence After Dinner

A review of Silence After Dinner by Clifford Witting – 250724

The reissue of another of Clifford witting’s novels is a moment to celebrate and when I learnt that Galileo Publishers of Cambridge had just released Silence after Dinner, I had to read it. Taking its title from an Oscar Wilde quip that murder is a mistake as you should never do anything you cannot talk about after dinner and originally published in 1953, the story takes in China during the throes of the Communist takeover from the Nationalists in 1947 to the seemingly peaceful Downshire village of Yateham.

Three missionaries are in a precarious position, one of their number making an audacious escape from Haolaofen by killing his guard and their servant, Yi Cheng, leaving his two colleagues to the far from tender mercies of their Communist captors. Both survive and return to England but are scarred both mentally and emotionally and with a burning desire to confront their former colleague over his treachery. Incredibly their paths collide in Yateham.

The Chinese aspect of the story is provided by extracts from a journal written by the so-called traitor, although we do not know their identity until the denouement. The events in Yateham, which make up the majority of the book, are told by way of third party narrative.

Andrew Micheldever is the recently retired vicar of Yateham, one of a long line of Micheldevers to hold the post, and his hopes that his son, Harold, would follow suit are cruelly dashed. Although he went out to China as a missionary, he lost his faith, if he ever had it, and the prodigal son returns to the village a drunkard and a wastrel, spending every penny he gets his hands on, by fair means or foul, on alcohol. The local squire, Sir Timothy Chatthume, with whom Harold when to preparatory school, tries to take him under his wing.

Two characters appear on the scene with links to missionary work in China, Bruce Gault, the recently appointed rector of the parish, and Dafydd Price, a firebrand itinerant preacher. A brooding presence in the village and the book is a sinister, forbidding water mill which clanks away noisily, the scene of the death by drowning of Micheldever’s immediate successor, Angus Donaldson.

It is inside the mill that Harold’s sister, Janet and her then fiancé, Richard Farringdon, find Price’s body, drowned after being hit on the head with a beer bottle. Ominously for Harold, the beer bottle was his, he was seen near the scene of the crime, he was uproariously drunk, and had one of the five pound notes that Gault had given Price that evening on his person.

Inspector Bradfield is called upon to unravel the mystery, Witting’s usual series detective, Harry Charlton, now retired making a cameo appearance as a sounding board, giving Bradfield some sage advice that makes him look beyond the obvious suspect. Gault, who seems to be being blackmailed by Price, could have motive enough but an attack on another character thwarted only by the fall of a tree and Janet’s change of heart , throwing her fiancé over for another, give the game away.     

Witting has written an intriguing murder mystery, one in which the reader is never quite sure wo the culprit is until the end, a story with a satisfying vein of wit running through it and some delicious turns of phrase. It is a story of overpowering guilt and a thirst for revenge and two murders, one perhaps justifiable in the circumstance, the other not. And who does not love a murder mystery with a deep seam of the ecclesiastical running through it. The moral of the story is you can never escape your past, no matter how deep you try to bury it.

Great stuff.

A Taste Of Truffles

Long regarded as the epitome of fine dining, the French gastronome, Jean Brillat-Savarin called it in 1825 “the jewel of the Kitchen” and Rossini dubbed it “the Mozart of mushrooms”. Byron kept on one his desk, claiming that its perfume would stimulate creativity and attract the muses. There are at least 180 species of truffle, although only around thirteen have ay commercial interest. The doyen is Tuber melanosporum, the black truffle, a kilo selling for over €10,000, while the white truffle (Tuber magnatum) is also highly prized.

Truffles were for centuries shrouded in mystery, found only in Western Europe, including England, and were extremely rare. This was not only because they required the convergence of many conditions and variables such as temperature range, well-marked seasons, rainfall or controlled irrigation and perfect soil conditions, such as acidity, humidity, minerals like phosphorus and potassium to grow but also because they grew some 20 to fifty centimetres underground in complete darkness and attached to the roots of trees.

The secret to the truffle’s success is its strong and exquisitely pungent aroma which is produced by a set of volatile organic compounds and designed to attract animals who dig for them, ingest them and then disperse their spores through their waste product. One of the animals that are attracted to truffles is the pig, especially the female of the species because the aroma contains a compound which is chemically similar to androstenol, a sex pheromone that is also synthesized in the testicles of wild boars.

Since the 15th century black truffle hunters in France and Italy have used trained pigs to search out the fungi. The only drawback is that the pigs cannot resist eating them and it has proven difficult to train them to resist their allure, leading to the banning of truffle pigs in Italy in 1985. In England truffle hunters used dogs, as we shall see later.

The earliest known description of a truffle in England appeared in a paper presented to The Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions in 1693 by Tancred Robinson. The truffle he found in Rushton in Northamptonshire was “included in a studded Bark or Coat; the Tubercules resembling the Capsules or Seed–Vessels of some Mallows and Aloeas the inward substance is of the consistence of the fleshy part in a young chestnut, of a paste colour, of a rank or hircine odour, and unsavoury, streaked with many white Veins or threads, as in some Animals’ Testicles; the whole is of a globose figure, though unequal and chunky”.  

What Robinson was describing was the Common Truffle (Tuber cibarium), now known as the summer or autumn truffle, whose season begins in July or August and lasts until January or February. The areas in England where truffles were most likely to be found were the chalk downs that run diagonally from Devon to the mouth of the Wash in Norfolk.

They were also particularly associated with beech trees and the English Landscape Style popularized by Capability Brown and Humphry Repton, consisting of naturalistic parkland with trees, expanses of water, and smoothly rolling grass, produced conditions in the country estates founded on chalk for truffles. It gave the gentry another hobby to go along with fox hunting and shooting, that of truffle hunting.

The Man In The Brown Suit

A review of The Man in the Brown Suit by Agatha Christie – 250721

An early Christie, the first in her Colonel Race series and originally published in 1924, The Man in the Brown Suit is more of a thriller than a conventional murder mystery story. It is written from two perspectives, that of Anne Beddingfeld, a young woman, restless, looking for adventure, and from that of Sir Eustace Pedler MP, a man who professes to be looking for a quiet life. The book also has a broad canvas, taking us from London to Cape Town in South Africa, Bulawayo, and a fictional island on the Zambezi. It is quite a ride.

Our heroine, Anne, begins her breathless adventure when she witnesses a man step back on to a live wire on a tube station in fright, having spotted someone he is afraid of. Someone who purports to be a doctor makes a cursory examination of the body, in reality simply to rifle through his pockets, but on departing the scene drops a scrap of paper which Anne picks up. The following day a woman is found murdered in an empty house in Marlow owned by Sir Eustace Pedler, which is available to rent, and the last person to visit the premises was a young man wearing a brown suit.   

The scrap of paper leads Anne to sink her life savings into buying a passage to South Africa on the Kilmorden Castle, where she meets Suzanne Blair, Colonel Race, Sir Eustace, his secretary Guy Pagett, a man of the cloth, Edward Chichester, and perhaps most significantly, Harry Rayburn. During the voyage Race tells a story of the theft of some diamonds, attributed to John Eardsley and his friend, Harry Lucas, a story, which as the plot unfolds, becomes increasingly more significant as does the incident foreshadowed in the book’s prologue. There we meet Nadina, a dancer in Paris, and Count Sergius Paulovitch, who work for an international agent provocateur known as the Colonel and are planning to blackmail him to stop him from retiring.

Although the identity of the man in the brown suit provides a minor distraction, easily and speedily resolved, the kernel of the story is the identity of the shady Colonel. Christie does her best to spin that conundrum out, but in truth there are very few credible suspects. The problem with reading the book in hindsight rather than when it was published is that on the basis of what the modern reader knows of the later development of one of the characters it is highly unlikely that they are the Colonel, even though they could fit the bill. Of course, this knowledge would not be available to the contemporary reader.

The plot moves along at a breathless pace with Anne often finding herself in perilous situations, enduring a murderous assault on board the ship, being kidnapped, falling for the same trick over again, but always managing to extricate herself from danger, usually with the help of Harry Rayburn, with whom she gets closer as the story unwinds. It is a tale where scores are to be settled, characters have multiple identities and not everything is as it might seem, with rolls of film with hidden secrets and where some important life decisions are to be made.

The plot might be a tad clunky but it is great fun and it is easy to be swept away in the thrill of the story. The eminence grise manages to extricate themselves from a tricky situation and escape to South America – where else? – and although they have been responsible for some terrible crimes, Christie’s portrayal of them is sympathetic and this reader at least was pleased they were spared the hangman’s noose. As for Anne and her beau, they settle down to the contented life they both deserve.  

Smoothie Of The Week

Can’t get enough of tomato ketchup? Well, here is something which might just catch on.

The manufacturers of the world’s favourite tomato ketchup, Heinz, have teamed up with Smoothie King to launch a ketchup smoothie on the unsuspecting world. Along with the iconic taste of Heinz Simply Ketchup the concoction incorporates a sweet acai sorbet, apple juice, plump strawberries, and tart raspberries.  

The smoothie is served in a cup which bears the Heinz Tomato Ketchup label but, according to some of those who have tasted, that is where the resemblance stops. It does not have the bright red colouring you would associate with ketchup but rather a deeper red more reminiscent of raspberries and the flavour profile is dominated by the acai sorbet and raspberries with the ketchup taking a distinctly back seat.

It costs $5.70 obviously – a nod to the famous 57 varieties of Heinz – and is available for a limited period at select Smoothie King locations across New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Denver, and Miami.

I suppose it is an innovative way of trying to entice people to sample a healthy drink as tomatoes are full of vitamins and antioxidants and as a fruit there is no obvious reason why they could not be made into a smoothie. However, is the ketchup element a bridge too far that will hinder its success and preclude its arrival on this side of the Atlantic?

A question to ponder on for the rest of 2025!