A New Mystery Brings Agatha Christie Back to Life, and All I Can Think Is: My Mother Would Have Loved This
Mrs. Christie at the Mystery Library | Amanda Chapman | Berkley (368 pages)
When a new book brings a beloved author back to life, it can feel like a reunion. For me, reading Amanda Chapman’s pitch-perfect new novel, Mrs. Christie at the Mystery Guild Library , didn’t just conjure the spirit of Agatha Christie, the Queen of Crime. It brought my mother back too. She was the one who first introduced me to Christie’s work; specifically the decidedly unglamorous yet entirely unbothered amateur sleuth Miss Jane Marple.
I was six when my mother first took me to see Murder She Said. Rutherford’s Miss Marple captivated me instantly: stout, gray-haired, with a loose jawline and a voice that made you listen. She had an unassuming authority and observed the worst of human nature reflected in the small-town gossip of St. Mary Mead.
Looking back, did I love Margaret Rutherford’s sharp-eyed portrayal? Or did I love that my mother loved her? Probably a bit of both. This clip produced by Rabbit & Snail’s Margaret Rutherford is Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple series reminded me exactly why: Rutherford sticks her tongue out at a child in a passing train (the child started it!), witnesses a strangulation in horror, then turns to the camera with perfect comic timing to break the fourth wall and make sure we’re all paying attention to the murder. The score is pure ’60s charm: brisk guitars and bright strings mimic the clatter of a train, with harpsichord and flutes adding a playful, witty lift.
Hollywood today tends to give us the “elevated cozy.” Daniel Craig with a drawl, lush interiors, sweeping train shots. Fun, but not quite what I fell in love with. What Hollywood sometimes misses, Chapman’s novel gets completely right. Set in a painstaking reconstruction of Christie’s private library in Greenwich Village, this book doesn’t just pay homage to the author; it brings her (maybe literally) back to life. And in doing so, it brought my mother, with her library card always in her purse, sweetly back to life too.
I’ll admit: I almost gave this book a hard pass. The premise felt a little too whimsical. The protagonist, Tory Van Dyne, is a New York book conservator working in a painstaking reconstruction of Agatha Christie’s private library from Greenway House, Christie’s beloved holiday estate in Devon. (Visiting the actual Greenway is now firmly on my to-do list.) The library has been recreated inside the Mystery Guild Library (and the Manhattan home of Tory’s late grandmother) on Washington Square North.
I couldn’t think of another example quite like it. Not the Hemingway House in Key West or the Sherlock Holmes Museum in London, but a fictional narrative that imagines a real author’s private space recreated across the Atlantic.
When I read the description of how it came about, it somehow becomes plausible. The Christie Room had been a “labor of love masterminded by my grandmother,” explains Tory, in what was the Mystery Guild Library on the first two floors of a townhouse. Tory inherited the townhouse. Her workshop is in the basement, her living quarters on the top two floors.
Okay. And then things get even stranger: one day, a woman walks into the Christie Room and introduces herself as Agatha Christie. She wants a cocktail. She’s got questions about a murder. Although no murder has taken place. Yet.
The “Mrs. So-Called Christie” (as Tory thinks of her) requests a Satan’s Whisker — equal parts brandy and crème de menthe, a shake of red pepper, “guaranteed to put some pep in you.”
Is she a ghost? A deluded fangirl? A sophisticated cosplayer exploiting hidden passageways? Chapman never entirely confirms, and that’s part of the fun. What shouldn’t work somehow does. Reading Mrs. Christie at the Mystery Guild Library felt like paging through something familiar and new at once. The novel brought me back to the reason I read mysteries in the first place: the structure, the clarity, the justice, and the pure joy.
The Cozy Goes Cosmopolitan
Despite my initial skepticism, the novel hooked me. Yes, the cast is large. There’s Tory’s glamorous, slightly maddening cousin Nicole; a precocious 11-year-old tech genius; a handsome NYPD detective who commits the sartorial crime of ( shudder) brown suits; a wry, skeptical librarian; and a dog. The tech genius’s widowed father happens to look like Colin Firth. Chapman also weaves in a believable romantic subplot that adds warmth without overshadowing the mystery. She manages all these characters with a deft hand.
When a poisoning occurs, Tory and “Mrs. Christie” must team up to solve it, and in doing so navigate theatrical ambitions, old-money secrets, the complicated web of family. The victim is Nicole’s not-so-lovable agent, Lyle Crawford, and Christie (or the woman claiming to be her) offers genuine insight, psychological acuity, droll observations that would make Miss Marple proud.
The mystery itself honors the Christie tradition: closed circle of suspects, emotional motives, clever red herrings, a satisfying solution. But the novel’s greatest trick is transposing the coziness of the English countryside into the precisely and lovingly described landscape of Greenwich Village and making it feel real. Chapman (who also writes as Amy Pershing) gets the details right. The stately townhouses on Washington Square North, the casual name-dropping of Rag & Bone and vintage Chanel, the precise geography of subway lines and Madison Avenue buses (the M5). It’s a Greenwich Village that feels lived-in, not Instagram-filtered.
Christie Knew Some Things Can’t Be Explained
IfChapman leaves the question of Christie’s return deliberately hazy, it’s worth remembering that Christie herself had a talent for the inexplicable. She frequently explored the paranormal. I just went back and reread The Last Séance: Tales of the Supernatural, a collection that showcases her gift for eerie restraint.
Stories like “In a Glass Darkly” are unsettling in their acceptance of ambiguity. A mirror that shows a tragic future, a man who can’t explain why.
“I’ve no explanation of this story I’ve no theories about the why and wherefore of it. It’s just a thing that happened,” the narrator says.
That line kept echoing as I thought about Chapman’s novel. Is the woman in the library really Agatha Christie? Does it matter?
The characters, after initial speculation and shock, decided just to go with it. Sometimes, we don’t need explanation. We just need presence. I, too, decided to sign up for the ride.
The Marple Method
The enduring power of Miss Marple lies in her unassuming authority and an ability to observe keenly while never drawing attention to herself. Like Marple, my mother had a sharp mind and a deep love for trying to understand people. (After dissecting someone’s quirky personality, she would give a nonjudgy benediction: “He’s a breed unto himself, like we all are.”)
My mother owned nearly all of Christie’s 66 detective novels and reread them constantly. In the senior community, well into her nineties, she enjoyed watching CNN (I smiled when doctors, testing her cognitive skills, asked her to name the president. She could name the Under Secretary of Housing and Urban Development) as well as TCM (marking up the schedule to make sure not to miss a Cary Grant movie) from the couch. She was imperious and exacting as Violet Crawley on Downton Abbey.
Yet the staff loved the diminutive gray-haired woman with the striking green eyes, always in her never-ending supply of colorful turtlenecks and matching headbands. The aides dropped by during their breaks to catch an Angela Lansbury movie or to help her with a crossword puzzle. (“35 Down, Five Letters,” she would say, not giving the actual clue.) They accepted, and oddly appreciated, that she had a strong will and high standards even if they were the ones who had to do her bidding. She did go to activities (live music, yes; bingo, are you crazy?) and meals in the lovely dining room where she mentally graded the fresh flower arrangements, but was happy in her own company.
During lockdown, she said “I was built for this” and fondly remembered when she and her sister were quarantined for whooping cough. Somehow, without ever resorting to gossip, she knew exactly what was going on with staff, fellow residents, their visitors. Ailments, doctor appointments, especially flirtations and romances, of which there were many. She did not approve of Trip flirting with a comely med tech. At all.
The Inheritance Wasn’t Furniture
Our shared love of books (and people-watching!) didn’t stop with Agatha Christie. My mother was a reader through and through. She was someone who loved not just stories, but the physical presence of books: their weight, the way they add warmth and color to a room, the satisfaction of arranging them just so.
She worked as a librarian after college, volunteered at libraries throughout her life, eventually took over the one in her senior living community, where she regularly (and dryly) complained that people were donating far too many biographies of Winston Churchill.
I, too, now find myself in a library: volunteering at the sweet yet bustling village library on Fire Island, where we spend summers. Just last week, I found Barbara Kingsolver shelved in the middle of the Stephen King section and spent longer than I care to admit restoring order. My mother would have done the same, with that same mix of satisfaction and mild exasperation.
In her final years, as memory loss began to creep in, mystery novels became an anchor. Friends had died, Miss Marple remained constant. She’d reread A Caribbean Mystery or Death on the Nile, then jot the date in the front flap so she could read them again later without remembering the ending.
“It’s perfect,” she laughed. “I get the satisfaction of the solution every time.”
In the acknowledgments, Chapman credits her grandmother as the inspiration for the recreated library. Of course. Some inheritances come in the form of jewelry or furniture. Ours came as a habit: the weight of a book in your hands, the satisfaction of the final page, the knowledge that you’d share it with someone who’d understand exactly why it mattered.
Reading Mrs. Christie at the Mystery Guild Library, I experienced a bittersweet, profound wish: that my mother was still here to read this specific book. Not in a maudlin way, but for the sheer fun of it. For the immediate, joyous, shared understanding of the plot’s cleverness, the pleasure of seeing a beloved figure again.
When I checked and saw it will be published in large print just in time for the holidays, I smiled. She would have appreciated both: the large print (she was too vain to wear reading glasses, so aging) and a new mystery to unwrap on Christmas morning.