The Body under the Piano
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Agatha Christie was in her twenties when World War One began. Many thousands of Belgians sought temporary asylum in England when the Germans occupied their homeland. When Agatha later began to write mysteries, she dipped into her own memory of these refugees to create her famous sleuth. I have given her a friendship with Hector Perot a few years earlier than that.
It was no surprise to the Victorians that people from other countries were eager to come to glorious England, but newcomers then (as now, all over the world) were often greeted with suspicion or condescension, even by the well-intentioned. With the status of outsiders and the common label of “foreigner,” refugees, or immigrants like Hector, ached to be safe and welcome in their new home. By using authentically thoughtless language—that we might consider unacceptable today—I hoped to emphasize the loneliness of a boy far from family and familiar surroundings.
As a writer, I know that ideas sit for a long time in the cobwebbed corners of the brain. A chance encounter, an odd phrase, a funny incident, a half-heard conversation…the observations of an ordinary day are jotted down, photographed, recalled—or misremembered—and take on new shapes weeks or years later as part of a made-up story. Some of the challenge and much of the fun in writing The Body under the Piano was placing such seeds in the path of my heroine. A chance encounter could be reinvented as the excuse for an alibi, the half-heard murmurs a lesson in eavesdropping. That odd phrase might inspire a book title. I like to imagine that my Aggie Morton will grow up to become a writer herself one day.
SOURCES
I HAVE READ AND LISTENED to more mysteries than I could ever name, each one contributing to my stash of tropes and trickery. I cannot claim to have read every story ever written by Agatha Christie, but I’ve given it a good try!
Alongside Christie’s novels, and innumerable websites and movies about murder and Victorian England, here is a selection of other books used for research:
Christie, Agatha. An Autobiography. London: Collins, 1977.
Curran, John, ed. Agatha Christie’s Complete Secret Notebooks. Glasgow: HarperCollins, 2016.
Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Complete Sherlock Holmes. London: Longman, 1979.
Farjeon, Eleanor. A Nursery in the Nineties. London: V. Gollancz, 1935.
Flanders, Judith. Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England. New York: W.W. Norton, 2004.
Flanders, Judith. The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime. London: HarperPress, 2011.
Fry, Stephen, John Woolf, and Nick Baker. Stephen Fry’s Victorian Secrets. Read by Stephen Fry. Audible Studios, 2018. Audiobook.
Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.
Thompson, Laura. Agatha Christie: An English Mystery. London: Headline Review, 2007.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THANK YOU to Tara Walker, Margot Blankier and Shana Hayes for an elevated editorial process, a balance between delighted applause and scrupulous attention to detail.
Thank you to my steadfast agent, Ethan Ellenberg, and to the loyal support team at Tundra Books.
Thank you to Isabelle Follath for the gorgeous cover and witty portrait gallery, as well as the dozens of clever spot drawings throughout. Your pictures are everything I hoped for.
Thank you to my wise and wonderful early readers and story consultants, Judy Blundell, Hadley Dyer, Sarah Ellis, Vicki Grant, Deb Heiligman, Margo Rabb, Martha Slaughter, Natalie Standiford and Rebecca Stead. You offered insight, brutal truths, and love.
Thank you to my darling daughters.
And thank you to Agatha Christie for a thousand hours of reading pleasure and the inspiration for Hector Perot and Aggie Morton.
More adventure,
more mystery,
more murder…
COMING SOON IN THE NEXT