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 19th 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 80th 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...
And how do you feel about "a room of one's own"?
