Suzanne Beecher

Dear Reader,

Paul, my grandson and baking buddy since he was six years old, left for college yesterday. I'm going to miss him. But after he gave me a hug and kiss goodbye he whispered, "Don't worry Grandma when I come home to visit, I'll make sure we find the time to bake together."

But just to make sure we found some time to spend together I told Paul that every time he came home to visit, he should bring his laundry along. Grandma would wash, dry and fold--and bake!

Enjoy today's old column. It's one of my favorites about my grandchildren.

I don't know how they do it, or what's even more of a mystery to me is how we used to do it. 

My husband and I raised four children, but after this week I think it's truly a miracle if people who have kids can find the time to get anything done. Our two adorable grandchildren visited us last week and they were on their "mom-would-have-been-proud" best behavior, but I was dragging trying to keep up with them. I really think 8-and-10-year olds should still be taking naps in the afternoon. I know I could've used one. 

I was nervous that the kids might find our lifestyle boring, so before their visit, my husband and I came up with a list of 40 things to do to entertain the grandchildren. But I shouldn't have been so concerned, because doing things that come naturally--like baking cupcakes and cookies with Grandma--seemed to be the biggest hit of all. 

Our daughter had given me a verbal list of rules to follow when the kids were visiting. I neglected all of them, except one--making sure they brushed their teeth. It seems that instead of brushing, my mischievous grandchildren just run water over their toothbrushes and spit a couple of times in the sink, so it sounds like some real teeth hygiene is going on in the bathroom. Maybe some things really are in the genes, because I used to pull the same brushing scam when I was a kid. 

This prior dental-delinquent grandma knew that the "on-your-honor- system" wasn't going to work. So twice a day I corralled my husband, (who had a "room for improvement" checkup the last time he went to the dentist) and my two grandchildren, lined them up side-by-side in front of the sink, stood over them and announced, "Let the brushing begin!" 

Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends. 

**You don’t need to be a writer to enter my annual Write a Dear Reader Contest. The contest is writing for fun. Write about your pet peeve. (Mine is a sticky refrigerator handle. I grab the handle to open the door and Yuck, something is stuck to the back of the handle!)

I’d love to read your entry. Write about anything, but start writing. To read last year’s winning entries and information about rules, deadlines and cash prizes, click here.

Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.

Suzanne Beecher
Suzanne@firstlookbookclub.com

P. S. This week we're giving away 10 copies of the book Mrs. Christie at the Mystery Guild Library by Amanda Chapman. Click here to enter for your chance to win. 

PROLOGUE

"DO YOU KNOW, WHEN I WAS A CHILD, IT WAS THE LAVATORY TO which I retired for quiet meditation."

I froze. The voice behind me, British and unmistakably posh, had come out of nowhere. But this was impossible. There had been no one in the library when I'd locked up. And surely no one upstairs in the Christie Room when I'd hurried in, grabbed my book from its shelf, kicked off my shoes and thrown myself full length on the nice cozy couch for a little me time.

"I would close the heavy, mahogany, shelf- like cover and sit on it," the voice—high and fluting, slightly breathless—continued, "giving myself up to reflection. I think Mr. Wright catches that sense of retreat rather well."

When this remarkable statement had concluded, I sat up, carefully closed the volume I'd been perusing (which, yes, just happened to be Lawrence Wright's charming Clean & Decent: The Fascinating History of the Bathroom and the Water-Closet) and turned my head toward the speaker.

It was a woman. A woman sitting a bit behind me and to my left in the alcove of the Mystery Guild Library's Agatha Christie Room, entirely at home on its gold velvet–upholstered armchair. I supposed that I must have missed her in my beeline for the couch, though there was something about her that was, well, unmissable. Not to look at, exactly. She was fairly unremarkable in appearance and could have been any one of the interchangeable New York matriarchs who so generously fund the library. A woman of late middle age with what might be described as an interesting face-a mouth that looked quick to smile and a long nose below heavy-lidded eyes that nonetheless sparked with humor. A hat like a deflated velvet soufflé was perched on her waved grey hair, and sensible, well-polished brogues encased her feet. She was wearing the kind of boxy tweed suit that had gone out of favor at least threequarters of a century ago, though the cut and the material told me it was bespoke. On the floor next to her, waiting like a patient puppy, was a black patent leather handbag that I immediately pegged as by Launer, handbag makers to the late Queen Elizabeth II. Also, I was quite sure the five strands of pearls around the woman's neck were the real deal.

My guest looked familiar. Was she one of the library's patrons? Someone I'd met only briefly? But those eyes—from which shone an unmistakable intelligence—also held a hint of mischief, and I had never sensed even a glimmer of wit in any of those pillars of our institution. This woman was different. She had real presence. There was something, well, irresistible about her. Not that I didn't try to resist. She might well be contemplating a nice fat donation to the library, but that didn't mean she could make herself at home after hours in the Christie Room. I stood, and using my sternest 'I am the librarian' (which I am not) tone of voice, said, "I'm very sorry, but the library is closed for the day."

"Lovely," my visitor responded, waving one beringed hand gaily. "I've always been a bit shy. Especially when I'm on the lam, so to speak."

Oh, good lord, I thought, 'the woman's made a break from whatever loony bin her family has convinced her is just a "rest home."' Probably the same one where my great-aunt Doris, who has frequent spells where she imagines herself to be a goldfish, sometimes "rests."

"I'm leaving now myself," I lied. "But I'm happy to walk you out, Mrs ...?"

"Mallowan," the woman replied. "Mrs. Max Mallowan." I froze again. Mrs. Max Mallowan.

"Although you probably know me as Agatha Christie."

ONE

"Do you think it might be beyond the realms of possibility that I might get a drink?" —Mr. Venables, The Pale Horse

MY NAME IS TORY VAN DYNE. I AM A BOOK CONSERVATOR AT New York's Mystery Guild Library, and until that rainy late-September evening when a woman claiming to be the Queen of Crime first materialized in the library's Christie Room, I'd been working very hard at living a safe, sane, sensible life. A life shielded from the eccentricities of my Old New York family (including a grandfather given to penning naughty limericks and the aforementioned great-aunt), the antics of my socialite/actor cousin Nicola (popularly known as one of the three Belles of Broadway), and my own particular brand of crazy (about which, I'd always felt, the least said the better). I lived instead a quiet life. A safe, sane, sensible life.

Later, when I'd had a chance to process our little encounter, I realized it made a kind of weird sense that if my guest was indeed Agatha Christie (which I did not believe for a minute), and if she had indeed decided to visit New York City some fifty years after she'd been airlifted to the Great Beyond ('which I also did not believe for a minute'), she might indeed choose New York's Mystery Guild Library as a home base. Even in the After Life, she would surely have heard about the library's Agatha Christie Room, a very close replica of British mystery novelist Agatha Christie's personal library in Greenway House, her holiday home in Devon, England.

The Christie Room had been a labor of love masterminded by my grandmother Margaret Jane Van Dyne in what was at the time her home on Washington Square North and which now houses the Mystery Guild Library on the first two floors and Yours Truly on the two floors above. The house is one of the dozen or so remaining Greek Revival redbrick, marble-trimmed town houses in what is known as "The Row" overlooking Greenwich Village's Washington Square Park, and it is still as covetable an address as it was in 1880 when Henry James limned the life of the wealthy in his masterpiece, 'Washington Square'. I had always loved the park. It is small, no more than a few square city blocks, and I loved its intimacy, its shaded benches, its great round fountain in the central plaza. And, like all good New Yorkers, I loved its monumental Washington Arch, the park's official entrance at the foot of Fifth Avenue. Grandmother's house on Washington Square North was a mere half block to the west of Fifth, and from my tiny Juliet balcony on the third floor, I had enviable views across to the park and the arch.

Grandmother, one of the last of the New York Montagues (railroads and coal), had brought the house to her marriage to Tyler Anson Van Dyne (finance and real estate) in 1947. But Margaret Jane had been a smart cookie. She knew whom and what she was marrying ("a Van Dyne, yes, but a devil with women and a damn fool with money"). And so she had held on to her girlhood home as her plan B, leasing it at an exorbitant rent to "the right sort of people." By which she meant her sort of people.

Her foresight paid off. When my grandfather finally chased one extramarital skirt too many, she'd shocked her social circle by divorcing him. "I could overlook it in his younger days," Grandmother had sniffed. "But in a man of sixty, what had been merely a failing now began to look like bad taste." She'd then given her bewildered tenants exactly thirty days to remove themselves from her house and betook herself from the Van Dyne mansion on Upper Fifth Avenue all the way downtown to Washington Square. There she lived quite happily with her extensive collection of Agatha Christie first editions, spending the last twenty years of her life absorbed in re-creating as closely as possible Mrs. Christie's library at Greenway House.

And when I say as closely as possible, I am not kidding.

The Christie Room had been carved out of Grandmother's second-floor drawing room overlooking the park. It was not only an architectural replica of the Greenway library—including faithful reproductions of its wonderfully eclectic furnishings—it also housed copies—hunted down over years by my grandmother—of many of the more than four thousand volumes on the Greenway library shelves. These, of course, included Dame Agatha's own sixty-six mystery novels (every one of which I had read, and in many cases reread, much to Grandmother's delight), nineteen plays and two memoirs.

The room itself was a comfortable space, large but quietly informal, with cream walls and white bookshelves and a down-filled blue damask couch facing the fireplace. That couch fairly begged you to pick up one of Mrs. Christie's mysteries (maybe 'The Body in the Library') and curl up for a good read. Or you could browse the offerings in its cozy alcove, where a collection of barge ware teapots shared space with a well-stocked bar cart, an armchair upholstered in dull gold velvet with an intricate design recalling Egyptian hieroglyphics, and a navy velvet settee edged with gold-embroidered trim. There you might want to pick up one of the six romance novels the author had also written under the pen name Mary Westmacott.

But the most interesting volumes, at least to Grandmother-whose goal was to plumb Mrs. Christie's very mind—were the books used by the writer in her work, including, of course, Martindale's Extra Pharmacopoeia, with its vast compendium of poisons. Or you could while away an hour or two with some other delight from Mrs. Christie's rather eclectic collection. Perhaps a treatise on Buddhism or D. M. C. Prichard's Commentary on the Laws of Croquet. Or, if you were one of the library's younger readers—and we have a surprisingly large number of them—a copy of one of the many books Mrs. Christie had read herself as a child and lovingly saved. Perhaps Frances Browne's Granny's Wonderful Chair and Its Tales of Fairy Times, which had been given to the young Agatha Miller by her own grandmother. I, though, was partial to ephemera like the first edition of Robert Vermeire's 1922 classic Cocktails: How to Mix Them, which I happened to know had cost Grandmother a cool couple grand.

I loved the Christie Room. The truth is, over the past several years I'd become out of necessity a fairly solitary creature, and I often retreated to its soothing quiet when unwelcome memories invaded. On those days, after I'd finished my work and ensured that all of the library's patrons had left for the day—or, as on that evening, after an interminable Sunday-afternoon dinner with the family—I would lock the heavy oak front door and take shelter in the Christie Room. There I would pull out a volume at random from the shelves and, with a grateful sigh, sink into the soft cushions of the couch and lose myself in whatever subject had once caught Mrs. Christie's attention. Like water closets.

(continued on Tuesday)

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