After enjoying the extraordinary adventures of Molly Gray, a chambermaid who is anything but ordinary in the international bestseller The maidNita Prose fans can now dive into The mystery guest. This time, Molly Gray finds herself in a chaotic situation after a famous crime writer drops dead in the tea room of the sumptuous Regency Grand hotel. Molly embarks on a colorful investigation that will take her behind the scenes of the literary world.
Nita Prose’s new novel, The Mystery Guest, is published in French by Calmann Levy.
© Calmann Levy Editions
Molly Gray, a smart, detail-oriented woman with a mastery of social codes and good manners, has risen through the ranks of the Regency Grand. When the J.D. Grimthorpe affair arises, all employees are suspected and the hotel’s reputation is threatened.
Molly realizes that she has a connection with this writer: as a child, she accompanied her grandmother to the mysterious Grimthorpe manor. Memories come flooding back.
Nita Prose, currently writing her third novel, took pleasure in imagining and describing Molly’s tribulations in The mystery guest.
“I didn’t plan for it to be a series. But when the first novel became popular, my literary agent asked me if I wanted to write another one. I thought about it. At first, I had no idea. But I was on a promotional tour in London when I had a real epiphany,” she says in an interview.
A visit to a castle
“I took a day off to visit a small town near Brighton, Lewes, which has a castle built in the 1600s and a museum. There were some strange things in a cabinet of curiosities, including a mummified rat and a silver spoon. I was in this beautiful place and I thought: what is this?”
“On the placard I read that it was an artifact dedicated to the memory of a servant girl who had been thrown out on the street after being accused of stealing a piece of silverware. Many years later, when they restored the castle, they opened the wall and discovered the remains of a rat and, next to it, a silver spoon.”
Reading this, Nita Prose felt like a story had just been delivered to her on a silver platter. “I immediately imagined a scene from the past that could tell a completely different story that happened before Molly, which concerned her grandmother. I really felt how unfair the work of servants could be.”
“It also opened up a new world for me The mystery guest, where the investigation takes place in the present moment, but also in the past. The story transports us to a mansion, several years ago.
Nita Prose truly felt that by putting herself in receptive mode instead of desperately searching for a new story, she had found the subject of the second book she had been dreading. “Sometimes you have to relax and let things happen to you instead of pushing.”
A bond of the heart
This story provided an opportunity to describe the powerful heart connection between Molly and her grandmother. Nita Prose, for her part, drew on her own relationship with her mother to describe this connection.
“My mother was the kind of woman who loved those close to her deeply and unconditionally protected her family members. I wanted to explore this relationship more because I wanted Molly to be different from women her age, because she had grown up with a woman who was from a different generation. This is reflected in the way she thinks, the way she speaks, the way she acts. “She’s special in so many ways.”
The mystery guest
Nita Prose
Calmann Levy Editions
380 pages
- Nita Prose was an editor at Simon & Shuster before becoming an internationally successful writer.
- Son premier roman, The maid, became an international bestseller translated into 28 languages. It is currently being adapted for audiovisual purposes.
- Nita Prose’s parents were from Quebec; they moved to Ontario sometime ago. Her father was a Pronovost from Drummondville and her mother, a Côté from Lac-Saint-Jean.
- She is still in contact with her relatives in Quebec.
“It was a bright, sunny day when I left our apartment at seven this morning. It was not an ordinary morning for two reasons. For one, it was the day that internationally renowned best-selling author JD Grimthorpe was due to make his big announcement at a press conference at the hotel. Second, my boyfriend, Juan Manuel, with whom I have lived in domestic bliss for over three years and worked with at the Regency Grand for even longer, was not home. He has been away for three whole days visiting his family in Mexico.”
– Nita Prose, The mystery guestÉditions Calmann Levy
• Read also: Behind the scenes of a luxury hotel
