"Two Women Chat About Perfume and Books" Cara Black and Denise Hamilton

Photo by Laura Skayhan

Cara Black writes the award nominated and bestselling Aimée Leduc investigations set in the different arrondissements of Paris.

She's a San Francisco library laureate, a member of MWA, Sisters in Crime, and the Marais historic society in Paris. Cara lives in San Francisco with her husband, a bookseller, and their teenage son.

As often as possible, Cara frequents a Paris little known outside the beaten tourist track. A Paris she discovers on research trips and interviews with French police, private detectives and café owners. Her series has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese and Hebrew. She's included in the GREAT WOMEN MYSTERY WRITERS by Elizabeth Lindsay 2nd editon published in the UK. Several of her books have been chosen as BookSense Picks and INDIE NEXT choice by the Amerian Association of Independent Bookstore. She loves black and white photography and took many of the photos on her website.

Her new book the 12th in the series Murder at the Lanterne Rouge came out yesterday. She looks forward to hitting the road on book tour with Denise Hamilton, Rhys Bowen, Jacqueline Winspear and Kelli Stanley this time.

thank you so much Kaye!

http://www.carablack.com

http://twitter.com/#!/carablack

http://www.facebook.com/cara.black1

Murder at the Lanterne Rouge "Outstanding." *PW Review

Denise Hamilton’s crime novels have been finalists for the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity and Willa Cather awards. She also edited Los Angeles Noir and Los Angeles Noir 2: The Classics, which spent two months on bestseller lists, won the Edgar Award for “Best Short Story” and the Southern California Independent Booksellers’ award for “Best Mystery of the Year.”

Denise’s new novel, Damage Control, received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Library Journal, raves from USA Today, Los Angeles Magazine and BN.com and kudos from James Ellroy (A superb psychological thriller).

Denise has five books in the Eve Diamond series and her standalone book “The Last Embrace,” set in 1949 Hollywood, was compared to Raymond Chandler. Her debut “The Jasmine Trade” was a finalist for the prestigious Creasey Dagger Award given by the UK Crime Writers Assn. Her books have been BookSense 76 picks, USA Today Summer Picks and “Best Books of the Year” by the Los Angeles Times, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and the Toronto Globe & Mail.

Prior to writing novels, Hamilton was a Los Angeles Times staff writer. Her award-winning stories have also appeared in Wired, Cosmopolitan, Der Spiegel and New Times. She covered the collapse of Communism and was a Fulbright Scholar in Yugoslavia during the Bosnian War. Hamilton lives in the Los Angeles suburbs with her husband and two boys. She also writes a perfume column, Uncommon Scents, for the Los Angeles Times.

http://www.latimesmagazine.com/uncommon-scents/

http://www.denisehamilton.com/

CARA: Ok Denise, looks like we're going to be roomates again at Left Coast Crime in Sacramento later this month. After attending the ALA Library Conference in Dallas and rooming together, the pillow fight bar has definitely higher. will be raised. I know you’re the perfume columnist for the L.A. Times and obsessed with fragrance, and I know you’ll sneak away from LCC to comb the second-hand shops in Sacramento for perfume, so I’m wondering if you can sniff me out some samples - this time something citrus?

DENISE: First of all, I love rooming with you. It’s like a slumber party! We stay up way too late talking. How often to I get to do that!!! Yes, I’ll recommend some citrus scents for you. Maybe I’ll bring you some little vials when I come up from LA. I’m thinking Christian Dior Eau Savage, or maybe Serge Luten’s Fleurs d’Oranger or Fleurs de Citronnier. But that’s for you, not for Aimee. What perfume does Aimee wear?

CARA: Aimee is a signature scent gal. A classicist. She only wears Chanel No. 5.

DENISE: Then she’s right in line with chic Parisians because Chanel No. 5 remains the most popular perfume among French women. Speaking of Paris – which I’m so jealous that you get to visit each year for research - what is your greatest extravagance when there?

CARA: I go barebones on research trips, scrape up frequent flyer miles and camp on my friends couch in Montmartre. But taking my friends and contacts out to dinner it’s become part of the routine, especially the policewoman who invited me to the police firing range and the private detective who lets me hang out with her... inviting them out is the only way I can thank them. And with the French dining is an art form, a wonderful experience lasting hours, with the wine flowing, many courses and full of discussion. I splurged once attending the Comedie Francaise, the national theatre, red velvet seat, murals the works to see Phedre, the Greek tragedy. Despite the classical French which went right over my head, just sitting in those seats that Proust, Cocteau, you name it, had sat in was worth it. Ok, once in the Marais, I found an incredible second hand, like new, suede shearling coat, the very thick European kind for those winters,...It weighed a ton, cost next to nothing and I coveted it...of course, I bought it. Wouldn’t you know, it cost an extra baggage fee... more than the coat! But there’s always Chanel No 5, duty free at the airport that Aimée insists on.

DENISE: Aimee’s definitely a femme fatale. What’s she gotten herself into in your new one, Murder at the Lantern Rouge?

CARA: Aimee’s investigation plunges her into the history of the Knights Templar, secret medieval guilds, Chinatown sweatshops and botched affairs of the heart.

DENISE: I love books like yours that teach me about a foreign place. I’ve just read an amazing non-fiction book called Tokyo Vice by Jake Adelstein. He’s a real character, a Midwesterner who learned fluent Japanese and became the only American reporter at Japan’s biggest newspaper, the Yomiuri Shinbun. For years he covered Tokyo’s seamy underbelly and the Yakuza. He smokes clove cigarettes, has death threats against him and fashions himself a Japanese Phillip Marlowe, fighting crime. Highly recommended. What are you reading these days?

CARA: I'm loving the Coco Chanel biography you lent me when I stayed chez toi in LA. Coco Chanel comes alive and it's intriguing that she might have had a son whom she referred to as her nephew all her life. Strikes me we gravitate towards people and characters who keep secrets. You explore those hidden past secrets so well in Damage Control.

DENISE: I was an L.A. Times reporter for many years and learned that almost everyone has secrets. And people in the public eye are rarely what they seem. That’s always the starting point of a novel for me. Because the more wealthy and powerful and upstanding you are, the more motives you have to keep those dark secrets hidden. And therein lies the tale! It’s just a matter of figuring it out. And mostly that’s fun. It’s only scary when you don’t know what happens next.

CARA: Speaking of scary, do you remember how your car tire blew out on the L.A. freeway at midnight? We were coming back from the LA Times Festival of Books and we were yakking and yakking and then you had to pull onto the shoulder next to Forest Lawn cemetery and you kept saying 'freeway stalkers' and I kept thinking Sean of the Dead.

DENISE: Turns out we’re not much in the femme fatale department. We called my husband, who came quickly to the rescue and put on the spare. He was the hero! Thank goodness for cell phones, because I do a lot of evening events all over town.

CARA: You're doing a bunch or readings from Raymond Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake with other LA Noir writers like Judith Freeman, who wrote that incredible Raymond Chandler biography that you gave me which I inhaled on the plane back from LA...how does that feel? I mean you're in the City of Angels that Chandler describes and it's changed - how do you all evoke his spirit?

DENISE: Ha! I just drive around. Hollywood continues to cast a huge shadow and the physical beauty – the snow-white sands, the blue sky, the palm trees and bougainvilla, the snow-capped mountains, the people who come here to start a new love, to be discovered, to leave the past behind – can lull you into forgetting that there’s plenty of crime and desperation. But L.A.’s as noir today as it was in Chandler’s time, which is what I love to explore in my novels. There’s just five times as many people and they come from all over the world these days to chase their dream. What’s your dream, Cara?

CARA: Besides the farmhouse in Provence? The dream starts ‘Fasten your seatbelts please, we’re beginning our descent into Charles de Gaulle airport, Ground crew reports weather in Paris a sunny 75 degrees, ‘ By some force of magic a motorcycle awaits me outside Terminal 1 and I zoom along the peripherique into the outskirts of Paris, then into boulevard Saint-Ouen, nodding to the local cheeseseller who waves ‘ I’ll save you that good camembert that just came in’. I pull up at Cafe Rotonde, to find my smiling friends Anne-Francoise, her beautiful one year old daughter Gabrielle, and Cathy my policewoman friend with an open bottle of champagne - Veuve Cliquot, of course - sitting at an outdoor table. And then my son, magically arrived from his new job, appears with our dog Kipper who also magically behaves and has by osmosis imbibed the well behaved manners of Parisian dogs followed by my husband who smiles...’I’m going to run a bookstore in Paris now...you’ve convinced me.’ Of course, we’re joined by Catherine Deneuve who just happens to be walking by and shares her makeup secrets and Charlotte Gainsbourg who begs ‘I want to play Aimee in the new film, please.’ And the incredible director Bertrand Tavernier appears with a script in hand. ‘I’ve made a few changes, little ones.’ And then Georges Simenon, magically risen from the dead and writing again, sits down, pipe hanging from the side of his mouth and says ‘Maigret needs a helper.’

DENISE: Ah! I love it. I’m coming for a visit.

Denise Hamilton, Cara Black, Deborah Crombie & GM Malliet

My Secret Obsessions by Denise Hamilton

Denise Hamilton’s crime novels have been finalists for the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity and Willa Cather awards. She also edited Los Angeles Noir and Los Angeles Noir 2: The Classics, which spent two months on bestseller lists, won  the Edgar Award for “Best Short Story” and the Southern California Independent Booksellers’ award for “Best Mystery of the Year.”

Denise’s new novel, Damage Control, will be published by Scribner on September 6, 2011 and has already received a starred review in Publishers Weekly (excellent), a rave advance from Kirkus (In a novel that marries celebrity culture, surf noir and the bonds of friendship, Hamilton is at the top of her game) and kudos from James Ellroy (A superb psychological thriller).

Denise has five books in the Eve Diamond series and her standalone book “The Last Embrace,” set in 1949 Hollywood, was compared to Raymond Chandler.

Denise’s debut “The Jasmine Trade” was a finalist for the prestigious Creasey  Dagger Award given by the UK Crime Writers Assn. Her books have been BookSense 76 picks, USA Today Summer Picks and “Best Books of the Year” by the Los Angeles Times, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and the Toronto Globe & Mail.

Prior to writing novels, Hamilton was a Los Angeles Times staff writer. Her award-winning stories have also appeared in Wired, Cosmopolitan, Der Spiegel and  New Times. She covered the collapse of Communism and was a Fulbright Scholar in Yugoslavia during the Bosnian War. Hamilton lives in the Los Angeles suburbs with her husband and two boys.

She also writes a perfume column, Uncommon Scents, for the Los Angeles Times.
www.losangelestimesmagazine.com/uncommon-scents/

My Secret Obsessions

By Denise Hamilton

When people ask how many bottles of perfume I own, I make a joke and change the subject.

It’s a little bit like my other passion – books.

My husband is a college librarian and I’m an author. We have books scattered, shelved or stacked in every room of our house – including the kitchen and bathroom – but I’ve never counted them all. Maybe I’m scared to find out.

By contrast, my perfume collection is limited to my bedroom bureau, my walk-in closet, and one bathroom shelf.

I don’t have a problem, do I? 

There comes a time when all of us who collect things – from matchbooks to antique pottery to knitting patterns - begin to wonder if we’re obsessed. Do my kids need each volume of the Redwall books by Brian Jacques in hardcover? Should I buy that cultural history of Los Angeles when I’ve already got an entire bookcase of L.A. books? Would I be foolish not to snap up the Shalimar vintage parfum extrait in the crystal fan bottle from the antique shop when I already have three bottles stashed away, more than I’ll probably finish in my lifetime?

The answer, of course, is a resounding yes.

Right about now, you’re probably shaking your head and tssskking.

If so, you’ll be happy to learn that I’ve found a way to blend my love of words and fragrance.

I’ve become the perfume columnist for the Los Angeles Times. Link: www.latimesmagazine.com/uncommon-scents/

 I’ve also woven perfume into my new novel, Damage Control, which came out this month. (Sept). My heroine, a PR executive named Maggie Silver, is a budding perfumista, a hobby that will come in handy by the end of the book when she has to identify a scent that provides a clue.

I thought I’d been pretty clever, but then I learned that other crime writers were way ahead of me In Mrs. McGinty’s Dead by Agatha Christie, a villain sprays a scarf with a heavy, instantly recognizable perfume to throw off the killer’s identity.

Dame Agatha doesn’t name the perfume, which has left me wondering madly. But plenty of other crime writers do name the perfumes their characters wear. Take Ruth Rendell. I think she’s a secret perfumista. Her books practically waft with fragrance.

As I write these words, I’m wafting a bit myself, wearing a marvelous linden and orange blossom perfume called Zeta made by Andy Tauer, who got a PhD in molecular biology and worked for years as a scientist before abandoning it all for the Quixotic goal of making perfume.

Talk about following your bliss!

Tauer’s hand-crafted perfumes use approximately 50% natural ingredients such as Bulgarian rose oil and Indian sandalwood. Believe it or not, that is a huge percentage by today’s standards. Most department store fragrances contain a much smaller percentage of natural ingredients – the balance is what the perfume industry calls aromachemicals – synthetic versions of iris, gardenia, clove, musk, cedar and whatever else makes up the ‘notes’ of your perfume.

I am extremely aware that many people today have chemical sensitivities and allergies that prohibit them from wearing fragrance and  make them miserable when others over-apply scent in close quarters.

Like everyone who lived through the 80s and 90s, I’ve suffered through toxic blasts of Christian Dior’s Poison, Yves Saint Laurent’s Opium, Givenchy’s Amarige and the once-ubiquitous Giorgio of Beverly Hills. 

A pox upon those over-spritzers!

Most perfumistas I know apply perfume with a light hand, though we have been known to spritz with abandon at home, when no social engagements beckon. I often apply my favorite and most soothing perfumes just before going to bed, so I can waft off to dreamland on notes of incense rose or orange blossom. Luckily my husband is a fan of most of my perfumes too.

But as more people develop chemical sensitivities, the perfume world has seen the rise of niche, artisanal perfumers that work with natural materials. These include Honore des Pres, Anya’s Garden, Mandy Aftel’s Aftelier, Roxanna’s Illuminated Perfumes, Ayala Moriel, Dawn Spencer Hurwitz, La Via del Profumo and Strange Invisible Perfumes.  

These trained perfumers have revived an art form that dates back to the ancient Egyptians, Etruscans and Assyrians. Just don’t expect  these all-natural perfumes to last all day. Without synthetics to extend their lifespan, many natural perfumes last only several hours. But their complexity certainly rivals, and often surpasses, what you can find at Sephora.

Which brings me back to a point I want to make.

We have long respected and honored composers, architects, painters, sculptors, designers and writers. We consider them artists who follow a creative path, who invent new ways of thinking, hearing, reading and seeing that inspire, please and uplift us.

Yet in the modern world, our olfactory sense is the least appreciated and recognized of our five senses. This despite the fact that humans can identify upward of 50,000 discreet odors.

The most beloved of our classic perfumes are composed by artists every bit as skilled as the Vermeers, Hemingways and Mozarts that we put on pedestals. Fragrances such as Jean Patou’s Joy , Guerlain’s Shalimar or Chanel No. 5 have stood the test of time. They are magic elixirs that plunge us immediately into the distant past or conjure up a long-gone lover’s face. Violettes de Toulouse is my grandmother sitting in her embroidered chair when I am eight, leaning in to kiss her papery cheek. Aramis cologne is swoony heartache at age 16, when I’m crushing madly on a suave, blue-eyed boy who smells intoxicating. Comme des Garcon’s Incense D’Avignon is kneeling in a 14^th century French cathedral in winter as the candles flicker and cold stone echoes. I am 20 and backpacking through Europe with a friend. 

Perfume is more than an art form to me, it’s a kind of magic, and I’m glad to see it getting the recognition it deserves.

This evening after I shower, I’ll spritz on a bit of Chanel’s almost extinct Bois des Iles, a lovely luxurious perfume created in the 1920s that mixes iris, rose and sandalwood. (Try it now before they discontinue it).

My mother used to wear it. She was French and Russian and she’s gone now. But each time I spritz this she comes alive like a hologram.

Her lipstick is coral red and her hair is marceled into curls, and she smells fabulous as she leans over the bed to kiss me goodnight before she and my father go out.

The babysitter waits in the living room.

I’ve got my flashlight under the covers and a stack of Nancy Drew novels.

I’m 11 years old, and I’m all set.

Even today, I get flashbacks of visceral pleasure whenever I see old Nancy Drew books at thrift stores and libraries, the ones with the beat-up yellow bindings.

Have you ever noticed how wonderful old books smell? That slightly musty, dusty sweet smell that can approach vanilla? It’s caused by the lignin in the wood molecules of paper breaking down. There are even perfumes that contain this note.

So that brings me round full-circle. Books and perfume. Perfume and books. 

And of course, books about perfume.

My favorite non-fiction one is Luca Turin and Tanya Sanchez’s “Perfumes, the A-Z Guide.” It contains thousands of capsule reviews of perfumes that weave in history, biology, music, art and high doses of hilarious snark.

I don’t really blame them for getting grumpy sometimes after sniffing all those celebrity starlet perfumes.

Here’s their review of Paris Hilton’s Can-Can: “Can it, by all means.”

But don’t write off the art form.

For every fruit floral bomb, there are delicate and haunting and yes, masterful perfumes out there.

I hope you find yours.