Brits love potato chips. They call them “crisps” and consume 10 billion bags (packets, in their lingo) of the things per year. They go in for crazy flavors: prawn cocktail, chicken tikka masala, Marmite, slow-roasted lamb with mint, Cajun squirrel, or Builders Breakfast, which are supposed to taste like eggs, buttered toast, bacon, and ketchup. This national habit must have something to do with pubs. My English friend Janet says, “A pint is too wet without a packet of crisps.”
Pandemic snacking on crisps generates appalling quantities of litter in the form of discarded crisp packets. I know this because nearly every British crime novel that I have read contains a scene of desolation or depressing banality featuring… empty crisp packets. Packets blowing in the wind, lying in the gutter, sitting crumpled in the pathetic debris of a murder victim’s apartment. I started noticing this 20 years ago, but it was no passing fad—the trope is just as popular today. Here are a few cases:
- The Halo Parade, by Bill James
- In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner, by Elizabeth George (an American writing in the British style)
- Strip Jack; Tooth and Nail; Dead Souls, all by Ian Rankin
- In a Dark House, by Deborah Crombie (a Texan)
- Bad Traffic, by Simon Lewis
- The Red Dahlia, by Lynda LaPlante
- Ice House, by Minette Walters
- Rumpole and the Angel of Death, by John Mortimer
That is too funny. I’ll have to keep an eye out for the wandering crisps next time I read a British mystery.
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