Seattle knows Peter Lewis. He started Campagne in 1985, Café Campagne nine years later, sold them both in 2005 (to Simon Snellgrove) and went on to consult for restaurants like Bastille. A wine guy, francophile, friend of boutique winemakers in Burgundy, Bordeaux and the Rhone as well as their American importers. Also, it turns out, a writer, the latest to enter a crowded field of wine-related murder mysteries in which the victim is almost invariably the industry's favorite punching bag, a pompous wine critic. Plenty of motive, many suspects.
There's been a slew, a raft, a deluge of such books lately. Murder by the Glass is one of dozens to take place in Napa. The Merlot Mysteries take place in Virginia. An Unholy Alliance, by Portland wine critic Judy Peterson-Nedry, takes place in the Yamhill Valley. An entire platoon of scribes and scribblers (five are credited, but there were several others; I was one of them) developed a particularly lurid concept (incestuous twins, gothic graphics, the pH of decomposing bodies) for Kestrel Vintners, a whole series called The Merlot Mysteries. Where's the first body found? In a vat of wine.
The protagonist in these stories is usually an insider, a divorced (yes, always divorced) wine maker on the skids or wine writer facing an impossible deadline, not a cop or a detective but a wine specialist who uses the particular talents of his (or her) profession to help solve the case. Gotta be a bit of an anti-hero (broke, overweight, impotent, whatever) but sympathique regardless; the reader has to care about and root for the protagonist. Everybody else is potentially a suspect or a false friend.
And the genre allows the author to do some travel-and-nature writing (the golden colors of Burgundy's vineyards after harvest, the hoot of owls on Howell Mountain); repay some favors or settle some scores through cameo appearances by well-known industry figures; make observations like "the French are vindictive and vengeful" by ascribing them to an otherwise sympathetic French character. There's usually a whiff, no more, of sex (a bite of caviar is a reminder of "how long it had been since I'd tasted a woman"), a lot of wine.
Which brings us to Lewis's Dead in the Dregs, which opens with, yes, a body in a vat of wine. And a missing, severed hand.
On one level, Dregs is a romp, a roman à clef game of guess-who that you play while following Lewis's narrator, a former Seattle sommelier named Babe Stern around Napa (That fatso "Jordan Meyer"? Can't be Harvey Steiman, can it? The body, once inhabited by the person of wine writer "Robert Wilson"? Clearly Robert Parker! "Jacques Goldoni"? Parker's associate Pierre-Antoine Rovani! Maybe, maybe not, but this is sure fun!). Some 100 pages into the book, Stern flies off to Burgundy, where the wine and familiar faces become more interesting (There's Kermit Lynch! There's Per- Henrik Mansson! They're drinking Chambolle-Musigny!) even as the geography and the occasional French phrases gets murkier. (You can't see the spire of St. Nicholas in Meursault from the north side of Beaune; an investigating magistrate is a juge d'instruction, not a juge d'enquête.)
Still, there are plenty of delicious moments and characters, most notably a French police colonel, Émile Sackheim, who always takes time to have a proper lunch. There's a Hispanic California vineyard manager annoyed by the young French intern who's come "to see how we Mexicans make wine." There's a drinking scene which introduces the term "Incoming" to denote a fruit-bomb of a wine.
Because it's a first-person story, the reader can't ever know more than the narrator, which means there's a lot of driving around, from winery to restaurant to hotel lobby, requiring a cascade of coincidences, starting with the imperious wine writer being Stern's brother-in-law, to get the right characters into place, at a wine bistro in Beaune where Stern can overhear a crucial conversation. On the other hand, Stern has a nose for more than caviar; in the action-packed finale, he comes up with critical evidence based on his sensory memory of a distinctive perfume that lingered in the victim's apartment..
Stern doesn't end up solving the case but he does witness its grisly denouement, involving more gruesome murders, distilled body parts, sulfate poisoning, explosions, suicides, human blood used as a fining agent, and the grim, convoluted histories of French several wine-making families. When it's all over, Stern returns to California, where his ex-wife and their ten-year-old son await.
Is this the end, then? Not a chance. Having created his character, Lewis won't let go so easily; the subtitle of Dead in the Dregs, after all, is "A Babe Stern Mystery." Next stop, says Lewis: Babe returns to the scene of his first success as a sommelier, Seattle.
Lewis has three local readings and book-signings this month: Sept. 8th at noon, at the Seattle Mystery Bookshop (113 Cherry St.), and at 7 PM at Third Place Books, (17171 Bothell Way NE, Lake Forest Park);. Sept. 15th at 7 PM at Elliott Bay Book Company (1521 10th Ave.) .
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