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.