The Importance of a Box of Chocolates

 

 

 

This box of chocolates is actually a cake made to resemble the box – made by

cakesbylynz.co.uk

 ADDED LATER: Reader Diane mentioned the above book in the comments, as having a good cover. It was such a perfect fit that I have added it... 

 

I do enjoy doing themed posts, and it seems readers like them too. In recent weeks we have looked at (and made lists of) forgotten books that are always in charity shops, and names for book characters and for real people, (some we liked, some we didn’t, some we thought were nicely typical…) I say 'we' advisedly: these posts gained huge numbers of comments and suggestions, which is lovely for me.  Then there have been such old favourites as the Hanging out the Washing post, and Ballerinas keeping up their stockings. (more on all this in the Mysteries of Blogging post). There is a whole tab devoted to Theme posts above, and at one time I regularly did articles for the Guardian newspaper listing random items that turn up in books – see this tab – from marriage proposals to digging up dead bodies.

Other recent posts have provoked great discussion in the comments: on Bad Parenting in Books for example. And if you want to read a very erudite, funny and thought-provoking discussion of the marriage plot in 19^th century literature, go to the comments on this post, which took the apparently unpromising, or at least niche, starting-point of a woman wearing a riding habit in a Trollope book. It is my readers who are erudite, by the way, not me. Still open for comments: if you HAD to choose between Mr Collins and Wickham, whom would you marry?

Clothes in Books is inching towards 2,500 posts, which means (with books appearing more than once, and random extra posts) a lot more than 2000 books covered, so I feel I could almost pick any random topic and find books on the blog with that feature…

Today’s challenge:

boxes of chocolates

CiB leans heavily into detective fiction, and the books of the 1930s were full of boxes of chocolates which, obviously, had poison in them. It apparently wasn’t at all difficult to inject the chocs…

 

1)   First place really has to go to The Poisoned Chocolates Case by Anthony Berkeley – much-loved by many crime fans, and usually described as a tour de force. I have issues with it – explained in the post: AB thinks up many different solutions to the crime, but to me that removes all sense of depth, character or jeopardy. But it is an entertaining and enjoyable read in its own way.

 

2)   The blog’s most featured author (by a mile) is Agatha Christie, and she did enjoy a box of chocolates. In At Bertram’s Hotel a young woman becomes ill after eating them. Discussing this on Twitter, Jessica Adams asked if they were Prestat violet creams (which they do appear to be from the cover of the book) and I replied I once did a Miss M basket as a prize for a themed charity thing, and obv had violet cremes in it. People acted like it was a joke item, as opposed to the summit of glory!

3)   Christie’s Hercule Poirot claimed his ‘only failure’ came with the affair of The Chocolate Box – a story written early in her career, but only published in the collection Poirot’s Early Cases in 1974

In Peril at End House, Nick Buckley becomes ill after eating chocolates in her nursing home –  they appear to have come from Poirot.

There’s also The House of Lurking Death, from the collection Partners in Crime: ‘a box of chocolates sent through the post… nothing to indicate…passed round… taken ill. Contained arsenic!’

There is a lot more chocolate in the books, and chocolate cake is important in A Murder is Announced, cocoa in Crooked House…. and I’m sure many more that my readers can suggest.

4) My favourite lines in the whole of Muriel Spark’s works come in A Far Cry From Kensington.  Mrs Hawkins and her landlady Milly are sitting on the stairs watching through the window as the couple next door have a row.

“Milly, always with her sense of the appropriate, dashed down to her bedroom and reappeared with a near-full box of chocolates. We sat side-by-side, eating chocolates, and watching the show.”

I would have no greater compliment for a friend than that they are the kind of person you could sit and watch an event unfolding in this manner, and that they would bring supplies.

4a) My favourite line (possibly) in all of Evelyn Waugh’s works comes in a novella called Work Suspended. This has not featured on the blog, though plenty of Waugh’s other works have, and the box of chocolates is purely metaphorical here. The narrator is doing some romantic manoeuvring, in love with a woman called Lucy, but finds that at a dinner party he has been sidelined off with a dotty, much younger, sister, Julia. His hopes are dashed. Now consider this glorious sentence:

‘My word, this is exciting,’ said Julia, and settled down to enjoy me as though I were a box of chocolates open on her knees.

The narrator's chess-like operations in pursuit of love include an expensive lunch party and the final line of this section is ‘That is what you have bought with your five pounds.’ Which in the circs is horribly funny. The story is considered to reflect Waugh’s obsession with blog regular Diana Mitford – ‘there is not a single point in common between you and the heroine’ he writes to her many years later. Yes, well.

5)   Elizabeth Gill, What Dread Hand? Is a 1932 crime story, with this fine moment:

Don’t you recall meeting the dear archdeacon’s wife in the first interval, and how she kindly offered us chocolates? They had become somewhat moist from resting in her lap, and not only that, when I took one I discovered that it contained alcoholic liquor. I remember being extremely surprised at the time, as she is the last woman I should have suspected of drinking. In chocolates too. Almost fast, I thought it.

 

6)   How’s this for a suggestive title? Sweet Poison by Rupert Penny, a 1940 crime story set in a boys’ school. I said ‘some chocolates have gone missing – those liqueur chocs that scream ‘poison opportunity’ to the experienced murder story reader’ although I also thought there was too much counting of chocolate bars…

 

7)  Then there is Framed for hanging by Guy Cullingford 1956, where I had this to say about the plot:

When someone is poisoned, there are boxes of chocolates in play: they have to be examined of course, but everyone is convinced the policeman is taking them to eat himself - ‘I didn’t know you ‘ad a sweet tooth’ – and will not be told otherwise.

8) A charming Christmas treat in Noel Streatfield’s A Vicarage Family. It is a lightly-fictionalized story of her life growing up, and one of the nice moments comes with a particularly good curate coming for Christmas – those who come from families with rules and lots of children will appreciate the nuances:

Right away he set a new standard for curates by arriving with five boxes of Fuller’s chocolates…Individual boxes from which the children were allowed, with permission, to help themselves were much valued.

9)   Bridget Jones is very keen on chocolate, and in the first book, Bridget Jones’ Diary (by Helen Fielding), the very first entry lists what she has eaten, including:

12 Milk Tray (best to get rid of all Christmas confectionery in one go and make a fresh start tomorrow)

Note for US readers: she has eaten 12 individual sweets from a popular, slightly down-market but much-loved and long-lived chocolate selection from Cadbury’s. Famed also for its adverts featuring the Milk Tray Man.

Later – in one of the few moments where he behaves well – Daniel Cleaver turns up at Bridget’s girls’ night in:

‘He was holding three boxes of Milk Tray.

‘I bought you all one of these,’ he said, one eyebrow raised sexily, ‘to eat with your coffee’.

[He doesn’t otherwise have much in common with the curate in Noel Streatfeild’s book above]

10)       There’s a John Dickson Carr book known as The Black Spectacles in the UK, and The Problem of the Green Capsule in the US – it’s here on the blog – and it contains a whole farrago about poisoned chocolates. They are actually delivered to victims in a paper bag, but I feel this moment earns the book’s place in my list: 

On top of this show-case there were five open boxes, slightly tilted up to show the contents. Three boxes contained chocolate creams, one box contained solid chocolates, and one box caramels.

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So – 10 instances of boxes of chocolates in books. And there must be many, many other examples – please add yours in the comments, or suggest other themes for a bloglist.