New Books from Patricia Guy

One of our members, the prolific Patricia Guy, has three books published this year. Yes, that's three!

Patricia is first and foremost a wine writer, so perhaps we should start with the wine book, Wine with Asian Food, published in Singapore by Landmark Books, and to be published In the US next Spring by Tide-mark Press. It is the first book to offer consumers a method for matching wines from around the world with the Asian spices, herbs and cooking methods. There are 50 recipes, each with extensive wine suggestions. Italian wines get loads of mentions. It always used to irritate me that French wines were listed in generic wine and food books but Italian wines were often neglected because their nomenclature was (and often still is) more complex. In this book they get a proper look in.

But Patricia is not only a wine writer, she is a keen Sherlockian and she currently has two books out in that genre.

The rationale behind the first, is that the great friendship between Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson began with a chance meeting in a bar. So, with Bacchus at Baker Street, Patricia has written a witty study of Victorian drinking habits, including information about the best vintages (with tasting notes written in an age when people were not afraid to express their exuberant enthusiasm or icy contempt), details on drinks advertising, a look at a Victorian cellar and medicinal uses of wine, along with a fine compendium of popular Victorian and Edwardian cocktail recipes. Of course, there are chapters comparing the art of wine tasting with the art of detection, and the way Sherlock Holmes’s knowledge of wine led to the resolution of criminal investigations, as well as an essay on what drives wine merchants to crime (their motives have not changed).

In the second of the two Sherlockian books, Patricia is in the role of co-editor and contributor.

The book is Ladies, Ladies: The Women in the Life of Sherlock Holmes, all about the women who visit 221B Baker Street. They are more than storefront mannequins of their era. Whether love interests, femmes fatales, or independent career women they faithfully mirror the changes and challenges real women faced in the nearly half century during which the famous detective stories were published.

The contributors include well-known and highly respected scholars of the Holmesian Canon from both sides of the Atlantic. Their individual efforts have resulted in an illuminating and entertaining anthology of original essays, poems, classic British music hall ditties, and insightful pockets of history examines topics ranging from libations to libido, perfumes to prejudice, in the context of the Sherlock Holmes stories. It will delight all explorers through the cultural landscape of the Victorian and Edwardian eras.

The book is published by Aventine Press and is available from online booksellers.