To stamp down anxiety, I put my head down and worked. I had a draft of Death at Greenway when the COVID-19 forced cancelation of three months of promotions for my 2020 book, The Lucky One. Of course the real obstacle to getting this story told ended up being something none of us predicted. I expected someone else to come along any minute and tell it. As a person who is quite research-averse, actually, I wasn’t certain the story was mine to tell.

As an American, as an author of contemporary novels, not period ones. Research was daunting but so was overcoming my own doubt. I researched the house and its lands and the communities up and down the Dart (in person-sometimes research is fun), and Agatha Christie herself. Then as I discovered the real people who had undertaken the mission of bringing ten children to Greenway and those who populated the isolated rural region of South Devon and the Greenway estate, more topics revealed themselves: the evacuation of the Channel Island Jersey, what happened to Victorian-era children whose parents were sent to the workhouse. To tell Greenway’s war story, I had to learn about the war, about England, about England’s experience of the war versus that of Americans, about English phrasing, slang, and regional dialects, about nursing. When I learned that Greenway had been used in World War II to harbor children evacuated from the Blitz, I immediately imagined a crime story featuring those harbored under Greenway’s flat Georgian roof. It must have been a glorious place to restore one’s nerves before going once more into the breach of another novel.

It is situated on more than 30 acres of lush, verdant land criss-crossed by paths down to a boathouse on the River Dart and back up to a hilltop from which one can see, on a clear day, the estuary all the way to Dartmouth and the English Channel. Greenway is, in Christie’s words, a perfect house, a dream house. Once drafts were turned in and contract obligations were met, Christie happily retreated from vocation, withdrawing to her beloved holiday home, Greenway, in an area known as the English Riviera. But she never would have written a craft book-not about writing, which she considered a job, one at which she worked hard but put away gladly.

As the greatest-selling author of all time, in line behind only Shakespeare and the bible, Agatha Christie undoubtedly has a good deal to teach writers of mystery and suspense.

Autobiography of agatha christie