Amanda Chapman--Mrs. Christie at the Mystery Guild Library

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.”

 

DEBS: MRS. CHRISTIE AT THE MYSTERY GUILD LIBRARY is out on the 26th, but I recommend you preorder so you can get it in your hands soonest, and you can do that here!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Karin Salvalaggio--Pilgrimage to Greenway

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Karin Salvalaggio is one of the rising stars of the last couple of years in crime fiction. Karin is a bit of a cultural mish-mash--born in the US, she had a peripatetic childhood thanks to her military family. She's now lived more than twenty years in London, but she sets her books in Montana. (And you thought I was confused!)  She's  also my London tour guide, pub crawl buddy, and Thames Walk task master (I swear she broke my Fitbit when I was there in January...) Her books are riveting and evocative, bringing her detective, Macy Greely, and small-town Montana to brilliant life. I was not at all surprised to find that she was inspired by none other than Agatha Christie. And she's promised to take me to Devon to see Greenway! If you're not jealous yet, you will be when you've read about her own visit.

KARIN SALVALAGGIO: Pilgrimage to Greenway

‘I never had a definite place which was my room or I retired especially to write … All I needed was a steady table and a typewriter.’

– Agatha Christie, An Autobiography, 1977

Agatha Christie’s words seem to stand in stark contrast to Virginia Woolf’s assertion that a woman must have ‘a room of her own if she is to write fiction’ but I would argue that Christie actually takes Virginia Woolf’s premise to a whole new level. In Greenway, her historic holiday home overlooking the River Dart in England, Christie created not only a room of her own, but a world of her own. It is where she found inspiration, solitude and a comfortable space to spend time with her family and friends. Greenway is a truly idyllic hideaway that plays a part in at least 2 of her 66 detective novels – as Nasse House in Dead Man’s Folly and Alderbury in Five Little Pigs. With surroundings such of these and a typewriter at the ready there was no reason for the world’s most famous crime writer to confine herself to a room. 

The Georgian house was built in the 19^th Century, but there have been homes on the same site since the 1500s. Now a National Trust property, the home is a time capsule filled to the brim with all that Agatha Christie and her extended family held dear. The visitor gets much more than a glimpse into Christie’s private life. It is a place bursting with artefacts belonging to five generations of a family of avid collectors. The gardens and surrounding woodlands have been carefully tended for hundreds of years. In all 2700 plant species can be found there.

Greenway is a short ferry ride away from the town of Dartmouth, a historic port on the south coast of England. Full of tradition, the Britannia Royal Naval College still sits smartly on the hillside overlooking the river and the seafaring town. The tall ships that protected English sovereignty and transported Pilgrims to America have given way to sailboats, ferries and pleasure cruisers of all shapes and sizes. During the summer the town is chalk full with visitors and locals jockeying for space on its maze of streets and in the many pubs, bars and restaurants. A steady schedule of sailing regattas, music festivals and food festivals keep the area buzzing well into the autumn.

I am fortunate enough to have friends in Dartmouth who own a home that overlooks the inlet so I visit often. Last summer I went to the town’s quay and climbed aboard a charming twin-decked passenger ferry called the Christie Belle and sailed inland for about twenty minutes to Agatha Christie’s former summer home. From the River Dart I had views of the property’s gardens, boathouse and eventually the house itself. Greenway is a very grand white fronted Georgian residence that radiates out from the verdant hillside like a beacon. The ferry drops you off on a modest patch of ground across the river from a lovely village called Dittisham where a couple of excellent pubs can be found. 

As a crime writer I viewed my journey to Greenway somewhat like a pilgrimage. Though the guidebooks stress that this is a space shaped by not just Agatha Christie but 400 years of history, you can’t help but be swept up by the thrill of knowing that she once inhabited this place. There is the chair where Agatha sat, the piano where she played, the living room where she read her unpublished manuscripts aloud to family members, the gardens where she wandered, the dining table where she celebrated her 80^th birthday and the boathouse where she drank hot chocolate while plotting a murder scene that would play out in Dead Man’s Folly. 

Writing novels requires so much more than a room of one’s own. In this day and age we are often on the road. Our writing space may be an airplane seat one day, a café the next and a kitchen table on another day. We need to be flexible as we work around our family commitments and increasingly hectic schedules. There is something special about being able to carve out one’s own room whatever our circumstances. I’d like to think that Agatha Christie was a pioneer of sorts. This was a woman who wrote 66 novels and 14 short story collections. If she says all that is required is ‘steady table and a typewriter’, I’m inclined to listen.

 

Karin was born in West Virginia in the 1960s. Her father was career military and her mother was a homemaker. Karin has fond memories of her nomadic childhood - the hours spent on the road, the anticipation of a new life, the unpacking of the old one. She’s lived in places as climatically diverse as Alaska and Florida and as culturally distinct as California and Iran. Karin attended the University of California Santa Cruz, graduating in 1989, but aside from two years in Italy, she has lived in London, England since 1994. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Birkbeck, University of London. Her short story “Walleye Junction” was published in the Mechanics Institute Review in 2011. Her novels featuring Montana detective Macy Greely include Bone Dust White and Burnt River. Walleye Junction will be available May 10th, 2016.

DEBS: Here's more about Walleye Junction:


When outspoken radio talk show host Philip Long is kidnapped and murdered, Detective Macy Greeley leaves her young son in the care of her mother and heads up to remote Walleye Junction, Montana to take charge of the investigation. It is initially believed that Long’s murder is the result of a controversial radio show he’s done on the rise of far right militias in the state. Within days the two kidnappers are found dead following a massive heroin overdose, and the authorities are hopeful the investigation is finished. But there are too many discrepancies for Macy to settle for obvious answers. The kidnapper’s bodies have been moved, their son is on the run and a series of anonymous emails point investigators toward the murky world of prescription painkiller abuse. Macy soon finds herself immersed in small town intrigues as she races to find who’s really responsible for Philip Long’s murder.

Meanwhile, Philip Long’s daughter Emma is dealing with her own problems. It’s been twelve years since she left Walleye Junction after her best friend died from a drug overdose. Emma finds that little in Walleye Junction has changed in her absence. She is also becoming increasingly uneasy as the familiar surroundings stir up memories that are best forgotten.

DEBS: And I particularly love this last photo of Karin at Greenway, doing what any writer would do...

REDS and readers, would you make this pilgrimage? Just seeing the photos gave me goosebumps.

And how do you feel about "a room of one's own"?