Heaven in the Hamptons: Round Swamp Farm

Elizabeth Zelvin

An unassuming exterior

From the first pat on the shoulder from matriarch Carolyn Lester Snyder (“How are you today, honey?”) to the smile from sisters Dianna and Claire as they ring up my luscious purchases faster than the speed of light (“Put your basket right up here, honey”), the ladies of Round Swamp Farm in East Hampton, the best farm market and then some on Long Island or maybe anywhere, make their customers feel right at home.

Liz at Round Swamp Farm

When I told Carolyn I was blogging about her, she wouldn’t let me take her picture but insisted on snapping one of me.

The family has been on their land for more than three hundred years, and those babies everyone is cooing over are the twelfth generation of “farmers of land and sea.” The three or four next latest generations are the bustling, cheerful flock of mostly redheads who prepare, arrange, and sell the perfect fruits and vegetables, today’s catch of fish and seafood and corn picked only an hour or two ago, delectable baked goods, and ever increasing variety of delicious prepared dishes for summer people who are too blissed out to cook when they get back from the beach. Just walking in there makes me feel cheerful, even when it’s hours till mealtime and a chance to taste all this gorgeous food.

A sumptuous display inside

The impact of weather shows the produce is really home grown.

The Round Swamp folks don’t need a plug from me. Martha Stewart has featured the market on TV. Hillary Clinton wrote them a warm letter after she visited. One day I heard Carolyn telling whoever had answered the phone that she didn’t have time to talk to The New York Times about an article or interview. “We get all the business we need by word of mouth,” Carolyn told me. Word of mouth indeed. The phrase is apt, because I’m only one of many loyal customers—I keep wanting to say “visitors”—who can’t say enough about Round Swamp’s poems for the mouth: their lobster salad, their crabcakes, and their New England clam chowder, to name only a few of the perfect 10s and not to mention the cookies, muffins, and pies, which I spend a lot of energy resisting. Their breads are so good I’ve been known to freeze some for the winter, when they’re closed. Their quiche, their granola, and their cheese sticks are the best I’ve ever tasted. In the last couple of years, they’ve had great success with more ambitious main dishes, such as firepit barbecue pulled pork and buttermilk fried chicken breasts.

In the fall (they’re open through Thanksgiving weekend), it’s time for whipped sweet potatoes, pecan and pumpkin pies, ginger snaps, and split pea and pumpkin soups as well as the superb chowders. But what keeps folks like me coming back, even if I can only get there on Friday afternoon or Saturday morning, when (especially between Memorial Day and Labor Day) there’s a line of shoppers that winds through the store and sometimes out the door, is the way Carolyn and her relatives and staff make me feel like part of the family. I love being called “honey.”

Doing Research

Elizabeth Zelvin

I’ve never been fond of doing research. I majored in English back in college because it meant I got to read novels. Decades later, when I went back to school for a master’s in social work, I always felt slightly over my head in the university library. The Internet made things easier. When I don’t know something, I google it. But the systematic hunt for facts still scares me. I’d much rather make it up.

As a mystery writer, I’ve learned that there are things I’m allowed to make up and things I’m not. It seems unfair that writers for television are apparently allowed to get everything wrong, while novelists get scolded via email by their readers for the smallest error in fact. But who said life was fair? I can—in fact, I must—make up my characters and the situations I put them in. I may make up the settings of my stories, if I choose. But forensics, police procedure, and any kind of technical detail had better be accurate.

I didn’t know this when I wrote the first draft of Death Will Get You Sober. But when I started sending the manuscript out and networking with other mystery writers and readers, I soon learned that I couldn’t afford to ignore this stuff. To some extent, I could bypass it. I chose as my setting a milieu I know well: the world of alcoholism treatment programs and recovery from addictions and codependency. As a professional, I had published in the field. I didn’t need to look much up, and writing quirky characters and snappy dialogue instead of clinical prose was fun. I also chose to make my protagonist an amateur sleuth. My recovering alcoholic and his two sidekicks get suspicious about a death that’s fallen through the cracks in the system and make their own investigation. The convention of the traditional whodunit—mine is too gritty to be called a cozy—allowed me to do this. If I’d tried to write a police procedural, a PI novel, or a technothriller, I’d have had to research it. So I didn’t.

The police crept into the next two manuscripts, Death Will Improve Your Relationship and Death Will Help You Leave Him, which will appear in due course provided the first book does well. I contrived to keep them more or less in the background. But now I’m working on the fourth, Death Will Extend Your Vacation, and the moment of truth has arrived. My amateur detectives take shares in a group house in the Hamptons and find a body on the beach. The problem is not so much a case of Cabot Cove Syndrome (How can Jessica Fletcher manage to find so many bodies in one small town?) as that there’s no way the group can go on with its summer without police involvement. One of their housemates is dead. Sure, my protagonist and his buddies can snoop. But trying to get the story going, I quickly found myself stuck. I needed to know what the police were doing. Hence: research.

So one morning I waltzed into the headquarters of the Town of East Hampton Police Department, introduced myself as a mystery writer, and said the magic words (courtesy of writer Robin Hathaway), “I want to get it right.” As she’d predicted, they were glad to help. In minutes, I was seated across the desk from a handsome young sergeant with a gold shield pinned to his blue uniform.

“How do I know you are who you say you are?” he asked.

“Here’s my card,” I said. “And my bookmark.” (Better than a passport, with my picture and bio on one side and my book title and blurb on the other.) I showed him the Malice Domestic pad I’d brought along to take notes. I also mentioned my former affiliation with POPPA as a clinician doing outreach to NYPD officers on the subject of post-traumatic stress.

“It’s set in an imaginary Hampton,” I began.

He grinned and gestured at the room around him.

“This is it,” he said. I can imagine that policing in the Hamptons must be stranger than fiction some of the time.

I proceeded to describe my scenario and ask what the police would be doing at every point along the way, especially where they would necessarily be interacting with my characters. The sergeant generously gave me an hour of his time. He not only answered all my questions, but told me a few facts I didn’t even know I didn’t know. For one thing, group houses are illegal anywhere in the Town of East Hampton (from Wainscott to Sag Harbor to Montauk). Oops. Luckily, it’ll be the landlord, not the renters, who get in trouble when the murder bring the house to the law’s attention. Best of all, in explaining why the police and the medical examiner must be called to the scene of any death, the sergeant uttered one line so good that I absolutely must use it in the book.

“It’s against the law to die in the State of New York.”

Saying Good Morning

Elizabeth Zelvin

I’m spending the summer out on the East End of Long Island. To tell the truth, I’m in East Hampton, but we usually try to avoid the H word, which gives people the wrong idea about our income bracket and lifestyle. Even our modest neck of the woods is very beautiful. It combines the best of beach, farmland, and country and offers clear air with the kind of light that attracts artists. It’s a great place to work on a book. When I raise my eyes from the computer screen, I see the green of the garden, the brilliant purple and yellow of irises just coming into bloom, and the usual suspects—cardinal, nuthatch, woodpecker, and tufted titmouse—hanging out at the bird feeders.

Sitting on the deck with a cup of coffee every morning quiets my maternal introject for a while. That’s shrink speak for my mother’s voice in my head, which says, “It’s a gorgeous day—you should be outside.” But I also go running. No gyms or treadmills for me: I want scenery when I run. I want water. And out here, I want—and get—people to say hello to. Back in the city, when I run around the reservoir in Central Park, I get a warm greeting from the Mayor of Central Park and a nod from one or two others who see me all the time. But most runners in the city avoid eye contact and attend strictly to business. One of the joys of the country for this city girl is that out here, people actually say, "Good morning."

I usually run on Gerard Drive, a narrow peninsula located between Springs and Amagansett that’s one of the most beautiful places in the area. It’s 1.7 miles long (3.4 miles round trip), a narrow road with Accabonac Harbor on one side and Gardiners Bay on the other. Its wetlands are home to herons, egrets, ospreys, and other water birds as well as clams. (Don’t try to dig any up without a shellfish permit—the Marine Patrol takes its job seriously.) Gerard Drive is a secret known to many people. I have it mostly to myself before Memorial Day. But once the season starts, I meet an endless parade of runners, walkers, bike riders, bikers, rollerbladers, folks with kids, dogs, and bicycles built for two. And every one of them says good morning as we meet.

I’ve developed a set of greetings that cover most situations. If it’s before noon, I say, “Good morning.” If it’s after noon, I say, “Hello” or “Hi.” “Good afternoon” feels a little too formal for Gerard Drive. If they respond, I may follow it up with, “Gorgeous day, isn’t it!” Sometimes they say it first. I run so slowly that I seldom pass anybody going in the same direction. But if I do catch up to a slow walker or someone whose dog is dawdling, I say, “Believe it or not, I’m running, not walking.” That’s a good ice breaker. So is “Gerard Drive traffic jam!” when two cars, a bicycle, and a runner converge. I always get a smile, a laugh, or a greeting that sends me on my way with a big smile on my face.