Mrs. Christie at the Mystery Guild Library - Softcover

Chapman, Amanda

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593818822 ISBN 13: 9780593818824

Verlag: Berkley Publishing Corporation,U.S., 2026

Inhaltsangabe

"Fans of classic detective fiction are in for a treat." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

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.

A 2026 Edgars Lillian Jackson Braun Award Nominee

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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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Amanda Chapman is a lifelong mystery lover and wordsmith.  An enthusiastic fan of traditional mysteries and of New York City she found herself wondering, "What if someone recreated Agatha Christie's personal library -– even to the furnishings and architecture -- in New York City? What would happen in that space?" And thus MRS. CHRISTIE AT THE MYSTERY GUILD LIBRARY, the first in a new series, was born.

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One

"Do you think it might be beyond the realms of possibility that I might get a drink?"

-Mr. Venables, The Pale Horse

My name is Tory Van Dyne. I am a book conservator at New York's Mystery Guild Library, and until that rainy late-September evening when a woman claiming to be the Queen of Crime first materialized in the library's Christie Room, I'd been working very hard at living a safe, sane, sensible life. A life shielded from the eccentricities of my Old New York family (including a grandfather given to penning naughty limericks and the aforementioned great-aunt), the antics of my socialite/actor cousin Nicola (popularly known as one of the three Belles of Broadway), and my own particular brand of crazy (about which, I'd always felt, the least said the better). I lived instead a quiet life. A safe, sane, sensible life.

Later, when I'd had a chance to process our little encounter, I realized it made a kind of weird sense that if my guest was indeed Agatha Christie (which I did not believe for a minute), and if she had indeed decided to visit New York City some fifty years after she'd been airlifted to the Great Beyond (which I also did not believe for a minute), she might indeed choose New York's Mystery Guild Library as a home base. Even in the After Life, she would surely have heard about the library's Agatha Christie Room, a very close replica of British mystery novelist Agatha Christie's personal library in Greenway House, her holiday home in Devon, England.

The Christie Room had been a labor of love masterminded by my grandmother Margaret Jane Van Dyne in what was at the time her home on Washington Square North and which now houses the Mystery Guild Library on the first two floors and Yours Truly on the two floors above. The house is one of the dozen or so remaining Greek Revival redbrick, marble-trimmed town houses in what is known as "The Row" overlooking Greenwich Village's Washington Square Park, and it is still as covetable an address as it was in 1880 when Henry James limned the life of the wealthy in his masterpiece, Washington Square. I had always loved the park. It is small, no more than a few square city blocks, and I loved its intimacy, its shaded benches, its great round fountain in the central plaza. And, like all good New Yorkers, I loved its monumental Washington Arch, the park's official entrance at the foot of Fifth Avenue. Grandmother's house on Washington Square North was a mere half block to the west of Fifth, and from my tiny Juliet balcony on the third floor, I had enviable views across to the park and the arch.

Grandmother, one of the last of the New York Montagues (railroads and coal), had brought the house to her marriage to Tyler Anson Van Dyne (finance and real estate) in 1947. But Margaret Jane had been a smart cookie. She knew whom and what she was marrying ("a Van Dyne, yes, but a devil with women and a damn fool with money"). And so she had held on to her girlhood home as her plan B, leasing it at an exorbitant rent to "the right sort of people." By which she meant her sort of people.

Her foresight paid off. When my grandfather finally chased one extramarital skirt too many, she'd shocked her social circle by divorcing him. "I could overlook it in his younger days," Grandmother had sniffed. "But in a man of sixty, what had been merely a failing now began to look like bad taste." She'd then given her bewildered tenants exactly thirty days to remove themselves from her house and betook herself from the Van Dyne mansion on Upper Fifth Avenue all the way downtown to Washington Square. There she lived quite happily with her extensive collection of Agatha Christie first editions, spending the last twenty years of her life absorbed in re-creating as closely as possible Mrs. Christie's library at Greenway House.

And when I say as closely as possible, I am not kidding.

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 wonderfully eclectic 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.

The room itself was a comfortable space, large but quietly informal, with cream walls and white bookshelves and a down-filled blue damask couch facing the fireplace. That couch fairly begged you to pick up one of Mrs. Christie's mysteries (maybe The Body in the Library) and curl up for a good read. Or you could browse the offerings in its cozy alcove, where a collection of bargeware teapots shared space with a well-stocked bar cart, an armchair upholstered in dull gold velvet with an intricate design recalling Egyptian hieroglyphics, and a navy velvet settee edged with gold-embroidered trim. There you might want to pick up one of the six romance novels the author had also written under the pen name Mary Westmacott.

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. Or, if you were one of the library's younger readers-and we have a surprisingly large number of them-a copy of one of the many books Mrs. Christie had read herself as a child and lovingly saved. Perhaps Frances Browne's Granny's Wonderful Chair and Its Tales of Fairy Times, which had been given to the young Agatha Miller by her own grandmother. I, though, was partial to ephemera like the first edition of Robert Vermeire's 1922 classic Cocktails: How to Mix Them, which I happened to know had cost Grandmother a cool couple grand.

I loved the Christie Room. The truth is, over the past several years I'd become out of necessity a fairly solitary creature, and I often retreated to its soothing quiet when unwelcome memories invaded. On those days, after I'd finished my work and ensured that all of the library's patrons had left for the day-or, as on that evening, after an interminable Sunday-afternoon dinner with the family-I would lock the heavy oak front door and take shelter in the Christie Room. There I would pull out a volume at random from the shelves and, with a grateful sigh, sink into the soft cushions of the couch and lose myself in whatever subject had once caught Mrs. Christie's attention. Like water closets.

Now, looking back to that night-that rainy Sunday night in late September when a woman wearing well-polished brogues, sensible tweeds, five strands of big, fat pearls and a hat like a deflated soufflé introduced herself as Agatha Christie-I wonder if I somehow knew then that my safe, sane, sensible life was as dead as a body with a knife in its back in one of Dame Agatha's own mysteries.


What I certainly did know at the time was that I was sitting in the same room with a woman who thought she was Agatha Christie. Tread carefully here, Tory.

What really worried me was that my guest knew enough about her alter ego to be aware that after Agatha Christie's divorce from her first husband, Archie Christie, the author had continued to write mysteries under her married name-even after her later marriage to archaeologist Max Mallowan in 1930. This knowledge on the part of my visitor argued for a certain amount of obsessiveness on her part.

Oh well, I comforted myself, at least she doesn't think she's a...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Berkley Publishing Corporation,U.S.
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593818822
• ISBN 13: 9780593818824
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 384
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar