DEBORAH CROMBIE: I have been so excited to share this book with you all. This is the debut in a new series by Amanda Chapman, AKA our good friend Amy Pershing!! Just to show you how much I loved this book, here's what I wrote when I was lucky enough to read an early copy:
"Amanda Chapman's MRS. CHRISTIE AT THE MYSTERY GUILD LIBRARY has everything a reader could want in a mystery, including the ghost of Mrs. Christie, the queen of puzzle solvers. Add a whopping good mystery, engaging characters, a little romance, glamorous New York, and you have the perfect cocktail. It's a sparkling, witty gem with heart, and I can't wait for the next installment!"
I predict that MRS. CHRISTIE is going to be one of the standout hits of the year. I asked Amanda/Amy how she came up with such a clever idea, and now I think I love it even more.
MRS. CHRISTIE AT THE MYSTERY GUILD LIBRARY by Amanda Chapman (aka Amy Pershing)
In Which the Author Tries to Justify Her (Over-) Imagination
Nobody picks up a book like MRS. CHRISTIE AT THE MYSTERY GUILD LIBRARY without wondering where this, shall we say, uncanny idea came from. So, a little background…
I blame my grandmother. With love, of course. But still, it’s all her fault.
My grandmother, Margaret Jane Pershing, was a woman of her generation. She dutifully raised three very obedient children while serving as wife to a not-very-obedient lawyer husband. But this was a woman who today -- with her drive and intellectual curiosity and (let’s be honest) bossiness – would be running a Fortune 500 company.
Instead, my grandmother turned this drive and intellectual curiosity (and probably the bossiness) toward becoming one of the foremost Emily Dickinson collectors of her day. In fact, her extensive collection of original manuscripts, letters, and other Dickinson ephemera are now housed in the special collections department of Princeton University’s Firestone Library. But that’s not the best part.
Margaret Jane was a collector with a twist. She made it her business to search out as many of the books in Dickinson’s personal library as she could in order to – as she explained it to her bookish nine-year-old granddaughter — “understand the poet's mind." In my (over) imagination (with which I am still blessed/cursed), I pictured her sitting down for little chats with Emily over lovely cups of tea, surrounded by the books treasured by the poet. That image never left me.
So when I turned my hand to writing “detective stories” (as Agatha Christie liked to call them), I thought, "What would happen if someone were to recreate Agatha Christie's personal library from her holiday home, Greenway House, and unwittingly opens a portal through which the Queen of Crime comes visiting?” (Or at least attracts a person claiming to be the Queen of Crime.)
Well, in MRS. CHRISTIE AT THE MYSTERY GUILD LIBRARY, someone does just that – a certain Margaret Jane (of course) Van Dyne, grandmother (of course) to our book conservator heroine, Tory Van Dyne. Granted, Margaret Jane does just that in New York City, but as it happens, Mrs. Christie’s father was born and raised in New York, and it was a city she had great affection for. So the city itself would certainly be an attraction. And the Christie Room? Well, here’s how Tory describes our (possible) portal:
The Christie Room had been carved out of Grandmother’s second-floor drawing room overlooking the park. It was not only an architectural replica of the Greenway library, including faithful reproductions of its furnishings, it also housed copies—hunted down over years by my grandmother—of many of the more than four thousand volumes on the Greenway library shelves. These, of course, included Dame Agatha’s own sixty-six mystery novels (every one of which I had read, and in many cases reread, much to Grandmother’s delight), nineteen plays and two memoirs.
But the most interesting volumes, at least to Grandmother—whose goal was to plumb Mrs. Christie’s very mind—were the books used by the writer in her work, including, of course, Martindale’s Extra Pharmacopoeia, with its vast compendium of poisons. Or you could while away an hour or two with some other delight from Mrs. Christie’s rather eclectic collection. Perhaps a treatise on Buddhism or D. M. C. Prichard’s Commentary on the Laws of Croquet. I, though, was partial to the first edition of Robert Vermeire’s 1922 classic Cocktails: How to Mix Them…
But cocktails aside (and, yes, cocktails play a large part in our story), would the Christie Room be enough to induce Agatha Christie to return to the land of the living?
I tried to imagine the author -- with her fertile imagination, her love of carefully working out whodunit -- lounging around in the Great Hereafter where everything is known. And all I could think was, “The woman would be bored to death.” But what if her fertile imagination was needed to help a reclusive book conservator solve a murder (or two)? How could she resist?
Well, as it turns out, she can’t.
Here’s Tory being her initially skeptical self about her unexpected visitor:
Mrs. So-Called Christie leaned toward me. “I do realize, you know, that this is not actually my library.”
Well, hallelujah, I thought. Not totally crackers anyway.
“No?” I said neutrally.
“Of course not, my dear Miss Van Dyne,” she said. “This is merely a remarkably good approximation of my library at Greenway House.”
But still pretty crackers. We needed to move on. I was ready to get off the bus to Bonkersville. “Excuse me if this seems rude, Mrs., um, Christie,” I said, “but why are you here?”
“Not rude at all, my dear,” she responded graciously. “I’m here, of course, to help you solve a mystery.” So definitely still on the Bonkersville bus.
I took a deep, calming breath. Which again totally did not help. I had to ask. “What kind of mystery, Mrs. Christie?”
She didn’t miss a beat.
“Why, my dear Miss Van Dyne, a murder mystery, of course.”
“But the fact is, I don’t have a complex murder for you to solve.” I very carefully did not say “help me solve.” If she wanted to solve a murder mystery, fine. But leave me out of it.
“Oh, but you will,” Mrs. So-Called Christie returned. “That much I do know. You most certainly will.”
And so MRS. CHRISTIE AT THE MYSTERY GUILD LIBRARY was born.
DEBS: And luckily for us readers! I do think Amanda should come back to talk to us about the vintage cocktail recipes! I was fascinated by the vintage fashion, too.
Amanda Chapman is a lifelong mystery lover and wordsmith who estimates she has read all 66 detective novels written by Dame Agatha Christie, many of them more than once. (This is absolutely possible if you have been reading Mrs. Christie since you were ten.) After graduating from Bryn Mawr College, she moved with her husband to New York City, where she worked as a book editor and occasional fashion reporter before taking on employee communications at a major financial services firm. But when the writing bug hit, she cheerfully waved goodbye to Wall Street to write mysteries full time, including the Cape Cod Foodie mysteries under the name Amy Pershing. MRS. CHRISTIE AT THE MYSTERY GUILD LIBRARY is the first book in her Agatha Inc. mystery series.
Here's more about MRS. CHRISTIE:
Book conservator Tory Van Dyne and a woman claiming to be Agatha Christie on holiday from the Great Beyond join forces to catch a killer in this spirited mystery from Amanda Chapman.
Tory Van Dyne is the most down-to-earth member of a decidedly eccentric old-money New York family. For one thing, as book conservator at Manhattan’s Mystery Guild Library, she actually has a job. Plus, she’s left up-town society behind for a quiet life downtown. So she’s not thrilled when she discovers a woman in the library’s Christie Room who calmly introduces herself as Agatha Christie, politely requests a cocktail, and announces she’s there to help solve a murder—that has not yet happened.
But as soon as Tory determines that this is just a fairly nutty Christie fangirl, her socialite/actress cousin Nicola gets caught up in the suspicious death of her less-than-lovable talent agent. Nic, as always, looks to Tory for help. Tory, in turn, looks to Mrs. Christie. The woman, whoever or whatever she is, clearly knows her stuff when it comes to crime.
Aided by an unlikely band of fellow sleuths—including a snarky librarian, an eleven-year-old computer whiz, and an NYPD detective with terrible taste in suits—Tory and the woman claiming to be her very much deceased literary idol begin to unravel the twists and turns of a murderer’s devious mind. Because, in the immortal words of Miss Jane Marple, “murder is never simple.”
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