True, Rich, 68, seems to have discovered the heroine of her recipe-laced thrillers—The Cooking School Murders and The Baked Bean Supper Murders (E.P. Dutton)—in the mirror. But there's no evidence to suggest that Rich has witnessed anything like the savage killings that occur in her mysteries. In Cooking School, which takes place in a small town in Iowa, a young woman's throat is slashed with a kitchen knife, setting off a string of deaths. In Baked Bean, three residents of a small Maine village are swiftly and cleverly murdered. While trying to solve the crimes, Mrs. Potter is menaced but eludes the killers just in time to present a tidy solution to a homey, food-filled plot. It is tempting to compare Mrs. Potter, a widow, with Agatha Christie's Miss Marple, but Rich claims that, unlike Miss Marple, Mrs. Potter is not a very good detective. "She has no official position," Rich says, "just a need to protect a friend or herself."
She is, however, a fine—if somewhat straightforward—cook. Despite an occasional nod toward the well-chilled martini and wine-poached chicken in puff pastry, Mrs. Potter sets a simple table: molasses cookies washed down with milk, fresh peach pie with cottage cheese, bean soup, pink slices of baked ham, fish stew, blueberry buckle, succotash in butter and cream, lobster pie, garden peas, apple sauce, corn bread. "I think everybody likes to read about food," says Rich. "It's also a way of describing people. What meals people plan are an even more personal statement than the clothes they choose." Rich's descriptions are startlingly vivid. "My books are about how things smell and look at certain seasons," she says. "There is no Harrington, Iowa, but the streets and houses are real. I write about places I know down to the soles of my feet. I don't know how the CIA works or about police espionage."
Certainly not. As the wife of a wealthy businessman—Raymond Rich was the chief executive officer of U.S. Filter Corp.—Virginia has led a life of noblesse: a 17-acre home in Philadelphia's Chestnut Hill and summers on Nantucket while daughter Susan, now 40, and son John, 39, were growing up, mansions in Manhattan, houses in Maine, a 24,000-acre Arizona cattle ranch with its own mountain range, a castle in Austria. In 1980, however, after a second heart operation, Virginia suddenly chose to seclude herself at their oceanfront cottage near Corea, Maine, with summers spent at the Arizona ranch—her husband commutes to both homes from his New York office. "After my operation I began to think what do I really want to do," she says. "I didn't really want to spend the rest of my days going to cocktail parties, traveling across the country or being a very proper grandmother [she has six grandchildren]. I always thought I was a writer, and it became important to me to focus on writing. Turning out a novel every year is a full-time job."
To get things rolling, Ray, whose company then owned the Maine Central railroad, gave his wife a Christmas present—Eagle Bay, a sumptuous, 82-foot private railroad car outfitted in pink and beige brocades. "It was an affirmation that I would get well," says Virginia. "In the beginning I thought I'd streak around the country and sign autographs from the back of the Eagle Bay, but then I said I can't go about learning how to live another existence." She has not taken even one ride in Eagle Bay, which is now up for sale. Instead she spends mornings at home writing in longhand on yellow legal pads, afternoons revising on "a fancy, go-to-hell display typewriter." Rich has finished the third book in the series, The Nantucket Diet Murders (yes, there are diet recipes), scheduled for publication in the spring of 1985, and is well along with the fourth book, which takes place in Arizona.
Rich was born and raised in Sibley, Iowa (pop. 3,051) and majored in journalism at Iowa State, where she wrote a weekly Depression-induced column suggesting ways that men undergraduates could eat cheaply. After college she wrote the Mary Meade food columns for the Chicago Tribune.
Marriage to Ray, then a G.E. engineer, meant a move to Schenectady, N.Y. and a stint as a radio writer and an actress on an early morning NBC program. She became food editor for Sunset magazine after moving to San Francisco. Rich turned down a wartime advertising job in New York to be with her children while her husband was a lieutenant in the Navy, and she didn't write again for nearly 40 years. When she finished her first mystery in 1981, she sent it off unsolicited to a New York literary agent her daughter had met 20 years earlier and got an immediate acceptance, a rare occurrence for an unknown in publishing. Obviously, the agent was an astute judge of food mysteries; both books are in second printings, the first has just come out in paperback, and Viacom has optioned the TV-movie rights to Cooking School.
Adding culinary details to mystery stories is not news—Rex Stout put them in his Nero Wolfe novels—but Rich's, or Mrs. Potter's, concoctions have met with quick approval. Rich has received hundreds of happy comments about Grandmother Andrews' green tomato pie, one of 14 recipes listed on the end papers of Cooking School. Her paean to mashed potatoes found its way into Thomas Middleton's latest book of double-crostic puzzles: "...mountains of dear, lovable, delicious mashed potatoes, their generous craters filled with the liquid gold of melting butter or overflowing with the rich lava of good brown gravy..." (A few critics feel that Rich's prose is sometimes overblown and her plots are too cutesy, but never mind.) This is all pure grist for Virginia. "The response is unbelievable," she exclaims. "I'm hugging myself with joy. And I'll give you a clue, I'm never going to use food to poison someone."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
