Blog Tour: A Place to Die (Guest Post)

Welcome to Proud Book Nerd’s stop on the tour for A Place to Die by Dorothy James. I have guest post for you today. This tour is brought to you by Tribute Books.

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Why Did I Write a Murder Mystery?

A murder mystery, I thought, that’s what I’ll write, now that I’ve stopped being a college professor and can do what I like. I’ve always read murder mysteries for fun—though with a bit of a bad conscience – how, when you really think about it, can murder be fun?

But I wanted to escape the academic straitjacket and write something that would entertain me and other people. I wanted to escape from myself, and write something that was distinctly not autobiographical. The freedom of an open-style novel was not yet for me. I have always liked the constraints of form in poetry; I could never write free verse. And a murder mystery has a form, it has conventions, it has certain set patterns that drive the plot forward, that discipline the writer and even develop the characters. So a murder mystery it would be.

But why then “A Place to Die?” I visited the mother of my dearest friend in an old people’s home, and I thought, an ideal setting for a murder mystery: A group of people confined in one place, all with long lives behind them, many motives for murder, past and present, many reasons to love and to hate, many intertwined stories. And so it began, old people living together in a place to spend the rest of their lives, or, one might say, in a place to die.

I was living in Vienna at the time, a wonderful city for stories rooted in the past. I had a small apartment on the edge of the Vienna Woods. It had a balcony with flowers in the spring and summer, but in the winter snow, the big black rooks from the surrounding vineyards used to come and perch on the railings. The “House in the Woods” of the novel, set in Vienna, began to take shape.

Then, soon after I began to write, my own father in Wales began to die. I went home, and his dying took many months, and the murder mystery that was started for fun, to escape from myself, became an exploration of growing old, of slowly, slowly facing the passing of time and the inevitable end of life. One way to preserve dignity in this daunting phase of life is to face up to it with humor, with irony, with the ability to laugh at oneself. And so it was that I did after all write a murder mystery for fun, a place to find my own laughter, to catch my own tears.

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Great post! I have had similar thoughts when I tell someone I enjoyed a murder mystery I read. LOL I know exactly what you’re saying. Thanks for the post!

About Dorothy James

Dorothy James was born in Wales and grew up in the South Wales Valleys. Writer, editor, and translator, she has published short stories as well as books and articles on German and Austrian literature. She has taught at universities in the U.S., England, and Germany, makes her home now in Brooklyn and often spends time in Vienna and Berlin.

She wrote A Place to Die in her attic apartment on the edge of the Vienna Woods. She has travelled far from Wales, but has not lost the Welsh love of playing with language; she writes poems for pleasure as does Chief Inspector Büchner, the whimsical Viennese detective who unravels the first mystery in this new series of novels.

Dorothy James can be found on her website, her blog, Facebook, and Twitter.

About A Place to Die

Eleanor and Franz Fabian arrive from New York to spend Christmas with Franzs mother in her sedate retirement home in the Vienna Woods. Their expectations are low: at best, boredom, at worst, run-of-the-mill family friction. But when the wealthy, charming Herr Graf is found dead in his apartment with an ugly head wound, the Fabians are thrust into a homicide investigation.

Some residents and staff have surprising connections to the dead man, but who would have wanted to kill him? Inspector Bchner tracks down the murderer against a backdrop of Viennese history from the Nazi years to the present day. Witty, suspenseful, lyrical, this is a literary whodunit that will keep you guessing till the last page.

Links to buy: Amazon | Barnes & Noble
E-book links: Kindle | Nook | iBookstore

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FTC Disclosure: All items reviewed were either obtained by me for my own enjoyment or sent (from the author, publisher, publicist, via tour sites, etc.) in exchange for an honest review. I receive no monetary compensation for my posts. All opinions expressed are my own.

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