1 This young lady dined with the family of her friend Amelia and her brother Joseph, newly back with a liver complaint from India, where he had been the collector at Boggley Wollah. Dinner was a spicy curry. He offered her a chilli, which she accepted, mistakenly thinking it would cool the fire of the curry.
2 The seed of the aromatic Mediterranean aniseed plant was sprayed on the hind wheel of Leslie Armstrong’s brougham carriage. This sleuth then used a tracker dog called Toby to follow the carriage in search of a missing Cambridge athlete the day before a crucial match against Oxford.
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3 A desert planet was the only source of mystical melange spice. Its mind-altering properties made it the focus of religious rituals and it enabled navigators to find their way through space. When his father, the ruling duke, was assassinated, this young man took common cause with the secretive desert-dwellers to gain control of the spice trade and reclaim his inheritance.
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4 Held prisoner in a Barbary palace, this young French woman was friends with an elderly gardener, also a captive of the Berbers. One day, he collapsed and died in front of her — with his dying breaths, he remarked on the virtues of a heavily spiced broth, identifying the various spices and claiming pepper was the best spice of all
5 Travelling to the Mediterranean from London in 1792, this lady playwright with Indian connections provided an extensive list of the necessary spices and condiments to take on the journey. They included “essence of anchovies, curry-powder, ketchup, soy, mustard, cayenne pepper, ginger, nutmegs and a rhubarb grater”.
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6 The reclusive Viscount Davenport received an urgent call to the family estate, to be faced with the disappearance of both his younger brother and a family heirloom rumoured to carry a strange curse. To solve the mystery, he was compelled to seek the assistance of this independent-minded spice trader with good connections on the shadier side of clandestine commerce.
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7 This old man had a head “adorned with a wreath of lobsters and spice, pickled onions and mice”.