Like many of you, I'm a huge fan of DEANNA RAYBOURN's books. I'm thrilled that she is joining us tomorrow (Tuesday). She has chosen to blog about one of her favorite Agatha Christie books - her autobiographical novel COME TELL ME HOW YOU LIVE. Enjoy!
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Welcome! I am so thrilled to welcome readers to my little corner of the Internet. Here you will find everything you want to know about my Julia Grey series and other upcoming projects. You can sign up for newsletters, peruse the photos, visit my blog, and now—thanks to the creative folks at Two Rock Media Productions—watch a book trailer for Silent on the Moor. (It’s a stunning and atmospheric piece that perfectly captures the moody moors of Yorkshire and the mysteries they hide.) Meanwhile, for answers to your most pressing questions, be sure to check my FAQs page! |
And if you are new to the Julia Grey series, here’s a peek at what you’ve been missing:
“Sex, lies and awesome clothing descriptions” is how one reader described Deanna’s debut novel, Silent in the Grave, published in January 2007. The first in the Silent series, the book follows Lady Julia Grey as she investigates the mysterious death of her husband with the help of the enigmatic private inquiry agent Nicholas Brisbane. From the drawing rooms of the aristocracy to a Gypsy camp on Hampstead Heath, Silent in the Gravedeftly captures the lush ambience of Victorian London.Silent in the Grave won the 2008 RITA for Best Novel with Strong Romantic Elements.
The series continues with the second book, Silent in the Sanctuary (January 2008), a classic English country house murder mystery with a few twists and turns for Brisbane and Lady Julia along the way. Silent in the Sanctuary was nominated for the Dilys Wynn Award and the Daphne du Maurier Award.
In the third installment, Silent on the Moor (March 2009), Lady Julia journeys to Yorkshire in the company of her sister Portia. Determined to settle matters once and for all between herself and the enigmatic Nicholas Brisbane, Lady Julia instead unearths a legacy of malevolence and evil that threatens to destroy them both. Silent on the Moorlanded on the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association bestseller list even before its official release and remained on the bestseller list for eight weeks.
March 2010 saw the release of The Dead Travel Fast, the story of Theodora Lestrange, a young Scottish novelist, and her adventures in 1858 Transylvania. This book reached #2 on the Murder by the Book bestseller list the same week that Deanna received a RITA nomination forSilent on the Moor in the category of Best Novel with Strong Romantic Elements.
The next installment in the exploits of Lady Julia Grey—Dark Road to Darjeeling—will be published in October 2010, and this time the intrepid Lady Julia is bound for India!
See you there!
“Come, Tell Me How You Live”
By Deanna Raybourn
No writer has had a greater impact on my work or my reading than Agatha Christie. Right about the time I finished up with Trixie Belden and Nancy Drew, my grandmother handed me a copy of Death on the Nile and said, “Here. I think you’ll enjoy this.” She was absolutely right. I missed quite a few of the exquisite subtleties the first time through, but with each successive read I found something more to love, and it wasn’t long before I was scouring the library shelves for everything else I could find by Agatha Christie.
Even now, I pay homage to her in each of my books by giving at least one character a Christie name—although I still haven’t figured out how to work Eyelesbarrow into a book! And I think the world can easily be grouped into two camps, the Poirots and the Marples. (I myself am Team Marple all the way.)
But one of my very favorite Christie books was not a mystery at all. In 1946, writing as Agatha Christie Mallowan, she published Come, Tell Me How You Live, the story of her experiences as an archeological wife. (Her second husband, Sir Max Mallowan, was a renowned archeologist and her partner for some forty-five years.) Mallowan was digging in what was arguably a golden age of archeology, the period between the wars when permits were easily granted and labor was cheap. It was a time when Europeans oversaw Lebanon and Syria, Iraq and Palestine, but it was also a time before those areas had been “Europeanized”. The culture that Christie saw and wrote about was largely unchanged for centuries, and it was a culture she celebrated.
Out in the desert, without telephones and importunate callers, Christie wrote, spinning her stories against the peace and quiet of a desert expedition. (Anyone who has ever read Murder in Mesopotamia or Appointment With Death will recognize the hand of experience at work in those books.) But when she was not writing, she was involved in the day-to-day work of her husband’s digs, and it is interesting to speculate that perhaps she found it restful to be the supportive spouse for once. She was already successful when she met and married Max Mallowan, a forty-year old divorcee novelist to his twenty-six year old archeological assistant. Theirs was a happy marriage, strengthened, no doubt, by their mutual interest in how people lived and how they behaved.
From the first scene—a dire shopping expedition to secure just the right clothes for Syria that includes the line, “Is there anything more deadly than a zip that turns nasty on you?”—the book is a delight. It is Christie at her funniest and most charming. It is Christie as you imagine she would be at the hypothetical Dinner Party in Heaven where people often try to seat her with Buddha and Jesus and Hitler. (She would certainly not be at a loss for conversation. She would doubtless chat with Jesus about how Palestine has changed and how difficult she found it to locate a good washed-silk tropical-weight frock in London.)
And most importantly, it is Christie at her happiest, with her beloved Max and among people “who have dignity, good manners, and a great sense of humour, and to whom death is not terrible.” Which, if you think of it, is a rather good description of Christie herself.
