Like many mystery fans, once I outgrew Trixie Belden and The Three Investigators, Agatha Christie was the first adult author I picked up. Miss Marple remains one of my favorite detectives, and her ability to sniff out a murderer using keen observation skills and sad knowledge about the worst of human nature remain unmatched.
Author Amanda Chapman has brought Agatha Christie into the 21st century with her debut mystery, Mrs. Christie at the Mystery Guild Library. In it, the 20th century British author appears in modern New York City to help book conservator Tory Van Dyne to catch a killer and come out of her shell.
Tory Van Dyne, offspring of a wealthy and eccentric New York family, lives in the Mystery Guild Library, a converted rowhouse left to her by a relative. She’s such a devoted Agatha Christie fan that she had remade one of the rooms in the museum to be an exact replica of Christie’s home library in England. Still, she’s shocked when the Grand Dame herself appears in the flesh, bored with the Great Beyond and wanting to help solve a mystery. Soon, one presents itself: Tory’s cousin Nicola, a Broadway actress, watches in horror as her agent, Howard, is pushed in front of a subway train and killed. Soon, other folks in Nic’s circle start dropping… and Tory is terrified that Nic might be next. With a cast of characters including a hot detective, a gay library assistant, a precocious 10-year-old girl, and a yappy dog or two, Tory and Mrs. Christie—whomever she may really be—have plenty of help in pulling apart this who-dun-it.
Chapman has the pacing and twists of a Christie novel down pat. Every Monday night, the team meets in the library to talk about the case and its latest complications, and Mrs. Christie—often quoting her own fictional detectives—asks questions and adds insight. The final reveal is straight out of Christie’s playbook.
The protagonist, however, isn’t Mrs. Christie but Tory, and Tory is a worthwhile narrator, caring and curious. But neither character is Miss Marple, and the story unfolding for weeks across New York City doesn’t hit the same way that a three-day garden party at an English country home might. The reader hardly knows the victims, making it hard to care about their deaths or feel a sense of urgency in reading the pages. The story engages intellectually, like a crossword puzzle, but not emotionally, which many contemporary mystery fans want.
Still, the novel is fun, and Agatha Christie fangirls will love all the references to her books. We can learn a lot about human nature by paying attention to people as closely as Christie’s detectives did… even if some of what we learn isn’t so good.
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