Robbed the actor of his life
He fell a-bleeding with no sound
Lay ’neath the bookshelves, on the ground
The sanguinary scene was fraught
A peaceful Christmas it was not
But when the evil crime was solved
A sweeter tale of love evolved
Owl Park’s now home to splendid news
This aunt shall have a darling muse!
With love,
Your Best sister,
Aggie C. Morton
SOURCES
MANY OF MY SOURCES for this book, second in the Aggie Morton series, are the same as for the first. I re-read and listened to dozens of Agatha Christie’s detective novels and stories, as well as mysteries by other crime writers, especially those who had created young sleuths, like Alan Bradley and Martha Grimes. I read Christie’s autobiography another time, spent one million hours online, and looked at hundreds of pictures, building a landscape of mischief and murder. I visited Charles Dickens’ house and Dr. Samuel Johnson’s house, both in London, and Chawton House in Hampshire. While in London, I saw performance number 28,057 of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap, the longest-running play in the world.
Some of the books I found useful are listed here:
Christie, Agatha. An Autobiography. London: Collins, 1977.
Curran, John, ed. Agatha Christie’s Complete Secret Notebooks. Glasgow: HarperCollins, 2016.
Flanders, Judith. Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England. New York: W.W. Norton, 2004.
James, P.D. Talking About Detective Fiction. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009.
Lethbridge, Lucy. Servants: A Downstairs View of Twentieth-century Britain. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013. Kindle.
McDermid, Val. Forensics: What Bugs, Burns, Prints, DNA, and More Tell Us About Crime. New York: Grove Press, 2014.
Moran, Mollie. Minding the Manor: The Memoir of a 1930s English Kitchen Maid. Guildford, CT: Lyons Press, 2014.
Thirkell, Angela. Three Houses. London: Moyer Bell, 1998.
Tinniswood, Adrian. The Long Weekend: Life in the English Country House, 1918–1939. New York: Basic Books, 2016.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NEVER-ENDING THANK YOUS to Lynne Missen, Tara Walker, Margot Blankier and Shana Hayes for invaluable insight, relentless nitpicking, countless catches, and apparently true love.
Rhapsodic thank you to Isabelle Follath for the lovely, spooky cover, the perfect chapter illustrations, and a new gallery of highly suspicious characters. One of the best days of my year was the one spent with you.
Thank you to my dedicated agent, Ethan Ellenberg, and to everyone at Tundra Books who has worked so hard to introduce Aggie Morton to the world.
Thank you to Dr. Lee Myers and Dr. Andrew Hussey for medical guidance—any errors concerning stabbing and blood spatter are my own.
Thank you to Mahtab Narsimhan for your careful reading.
Thank you to my beta readers. You know who you are.
And thank you to Agatha Christie, for an endless source of murderous inspiration.
More adventure,
more mystery,
more murder…
COMING SOON IN THE NEXT
Peril at Owl Park Page 25
