I Want to Review My Taling With Elly Yesterdat Not Kelly

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Prepare for a proficient mystery to distract you from the news cycle? United states too!

Enter The Postscript Murders, which opens with a 90-yr-old woman — with a heart status — found expressionless.

Sad for her friends and loved ones, but hardly newsworthy. Except that it turns out her bookshelves were stuffed with a remarkable number of criminal offense novels, each of which includes a postscript, "PS: For PS." (The dead woman'south name was Peggy.)

So, the authors of those novels start dying too. And author Elly Griffiths says the mysterious postscripts point Peggy's connexion to those authors: They hired her to think upwardly murders. "I slightly got the inspiration from my own aunt," Griffiths says. "She would ring me up and say, 'Oh Ello, honey, I've idea of another expert murder for you,' and I started to call back, what if there was such a thing as a murder consultant?"

Interview Highlights

On her aunt's best murder

She came up with a very good plot twist for one of my Dr. Ruth Galloway books that involved a stair-elevator. And I do recall the book was reviewed in the Financial Times in a really prissy review, but they also said "it contains 1 of the nastiest uses of a stair-lift that I've ever heard of." And I cut that little article aunt for my aunt, and she was so happy that she framed information technology, she was and so proud of her stair-elevator murder.

On the appeal of a murder mystery

It is a foreign thing, isn't it? Information technology is a foreign thing that lots of people — and me absolutely included — do find reading virtually these murders quite comforting, actually. And of course, there'south absolutely nothing cozy about murder, simply I retrieve we do similar that sort of puzzle, and unlocking the puzzle. And in this volume, the respond to the puzzle lies in books, it lies in gilt age mysteries, it lies in readers and in writers. So I hope that will make it, sort of, I don't know, a comforting and intriguing book to read.

On our detectives — official and unofficial — taking a road trip to Aberdeen, and whether there'southward something most Scotland's climate and scenery that lends itself to crime fiction

I remember there might well be — you think of those wonderful Scottish law-breaking writers like Ian Rankin and Val McDermid and Denise Mina — and also, you know, Scandinavian noir. So I think there might be something about the cold, well-nigh the light. Only Aberdeen is a wonderful metropolis, actually, because it'southward known as the Granite City, but it's also called the Silver City, and yous can see both sides of it. You know, information technology's granite, it'south hard, information technology's tough, information technology'southward uncompromising, only in a sure light it'southward silvery and beautiful and the coast is just lovely. And the characters practice observe themselves in a very dangerous safe house on the coast there.

On how her aunt feels near having inspired a character who gets murdered

I think she's okay near it. And I think she likes the whole idea of a murder consultant ... Peggy might have been dispatched in the early stages, but she does kind of loom over all the book, and they talk almost her a lot. And I think I did draw upon not just my Aunt Marge, simply also my mum besides, those characters that seem to know everything. People in the book ask themselves, "How did Peggy know that, how could she have known that, she didn't travel to those places," but she knew it all through reading. Both of them were great readers and seemed to acquire all this knowledge through reading, so I retrieve it's also a book well-nigh reading, really, and the ability it gives you.

This story was edited for radio by Justine Kenin, produced past Mia Venkat and adjusted for the Web by Petra Mayer.

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Source: https://www.npr.org/2021/03/10/975699769/books-hold-the-key-to-the-postscript-murders

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