A Research Rabbit Hole: A Guest Post by Marie Benedict
Five of the cleverest women in all of London are faced with an impossible case — and they’re just the people to solve it. Sharp, witty and puzzling, this is a glittering locked-room mystery we can’t wait to solve. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Marie Benedict on writing The Queens of Crime.
Hardcover $29.00
The Queens of Crime: A Novel
The Queens of Crime: A Novel
In Stock Online
Hardcover $29.00
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Mystery of Mrs. Christie—a thrilling story of the five greatest women writers of the Golden Age of Mystery and their bid to solve a real-life murder.
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Mystery of Mrs. Christie—a thrilling story of the five greatest women writers of the Golden Age of Mystery and their bid to solve a real-life murder.
Dorothy Sayers? Where had I heard that name, I wondered as I was pouring through old newspaper articles about Agatha Christie’s disappearance and her fellow mystery writer friend who’d been enlisted to find her, while researching an earlier novel, The Mystery of Mrs. Christie. Then I remembered how I’d first come across Dorothy Sayers; my beloved Aunt Terry had gifted me Dorothy’s wonderful mystery series, alongside Agatha’s, during the Christmases of my youth. In the months and then years that followed, I found myself curious about more than the intricate puzzles at the core of Dorothy’s novels. I became intrigued by the woman who wrote these whip-smart mysteries, particularly when I learned she’d undertaken a murder investigation of her own.
How did I learn that Dorothy had acted the part of detective herself? Well, I’d gone down a research rabbit hole — my favorite place to be! — specifically into a collection of Dorothy’s letters. There, amidst letters to her Oxford friends, her cousin Ivy who kept Dorothy’s biggest secret (revealed in the pages of my book), and other writers, including the female mystery authors dubbed the Queens of Crime, I stumbled across a fascinating letter from Dorothy to her mother. In it, she described a trip to France with her journalist husband to investigate and report on the murder of a young English nurse. When I dug even deeper, I discovered articles about the disappearance of Nurse May Daniels, who vanished in a locked-room mystery evocative of Dorothy and Agatha’s own novels. I delved further into the coverage of May Daniels’ murder, in which salacious speculation over the poor young woman abounded and she became linked to the highest levels of the British government.
There, Dorothy seemingly hit a road block, as did the resolution of the May Daniels case. My research into this incredible confluence of a bestselling crime writer helping solve a real-life, locked-room murder came to a halt along with it. But did it have to? Perhaps I had other, less conventional avenues of research at my disposal. I found myself rereading Dorothy Sayers’ fabulous novels, hunting for insights about the woman herself and this investigation. And there, in the pages of her books, Dorothy had left behind a trail of clues; in Unnatural Death, for example, she included a locked-room disappearance, uncannily similar to the one that happened to May Daniels, and proposed a resolution. I realized that Dorothy hadn’t allowed the investigation into May Daniels’ murder to die along with the poor young nurse, but instead had pursued it in the pages of her books.
Could I do the same — for May and for Dorothy? What if I followed the crumbs scattered by Dorothy’s novels as clues and paired them with my own research into these women’s lives to find an “answer” to the riddle of May’s murder? And what if I set Dorothy off on this path, not alone this time but working alongside her close friend Agatha Christie and her fellow Queens of Crime? In THE QUEENS OF CRIME, I did exactly that. By utilizing the wondrous gift of fiction, the Queens of Crime and I solved the mystery of May Daniels’ murder, discovering the power of female friendship to secure long-awaited justice.
Photo credit: Anthony Musmanno