Ellen Crosby--The French Paradox

DEBORAH CROMBIE:  I adore novels that interweave a contemporary mystery with an historical thread, and my friend Ellen Crosby is a master (or mistress!) of the form. Her Virginia wine country mysteries have intertwined the rich heritage of Virginia with the complexities of a modern-day vineyard in fascinating ways, but in her latest novel, THE FRENCH PARADOX, I think she's outdone herself! Jackie Kennedy! Paris! "Old Mistresses" paintings! I couldn't wait to pick this one up! Here's Ellen to tell us how she put it all together.

ELLEN CROSBY:  It still surprises me to realize that THE FRENCH PARADOX is the 11th book in my Virginia wine country mystery series, mostly because I never planned to write more than one book: THE MERLOT MURDERS. Sixteen years later, I am almost finished with book #12 due out in 2022 and the series has moved to its third publisher: Severn House in London. It seems right to have come full circle and to be back in England because that’s where this series began. I had written my first book, MOSCOW NIGHTS, a standalone loosely based on my time as a foreign correspondent in the former Soviet Union, while I was living in London. My UK literary agent wanted to know what was next and had been intrigued by my tale of a day trip to a couple of Virginia vineyards on a summer holiday back in America.  In fact, she was so intrigued she thought a vineyard would be the perfect place to set a new book. When I explained that I wanted to write something with a foreign setting after living overseas for many years, she said to me, “Ellen, you live in London. Virginia is a foreign setting.”

While I have learned more than I ever expected to know over the last twenty-plus years about the fascinating business of growing grapes and making wine—and how wine and murder seem to go together like, I dunno, wine and cheese—what has really hooked me about writing this series is history. Kirkus Reviews, one of the major trade reviewers, once very kindly wrote that my series “often pairs fascinating historical mysteries with clever modern ones.” I am admittedly a history nerd and it just so happens that my adopted state of Virginia has history galore, dating all the way back to our colonial days and the Founding Fathers. As Kirkus wrote, I like the idea of taking a significant event that happened long ago and weaving it into the present-day life of Lucie Montgomery, who owns a small vineyard near the little town of Middleburg, Virginia. With, of course, a murder thrown in.

Virginia wine country

What fascinates—and occasionally frustrates—me is solving the puzzle of how to connect two unrelated events. Invariably it involves research to get the history right, but that’s fine by me because as a former journalist I’m also a research junkie. My one hard and fast rule is that the solution I come up with has to be organic and logical.  

THE FRENCH PARADOX was one of those books where figuring out that connection was more challenging than usual. I had long ago planned to write a book about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who had been coming to Middleburg to ride and foxhunt since John F. Kennedy’s presidency in the 1960s. (There is a small garden with a pavilion dedicated to her just off the main street in town). Then an artist friend who is a member of the Advisory Board of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. suggested I might consider writing about the “Old Mistresses”—female artists who were contemporaries of the Old Masters, but whose paintings were never exhibited in museums precisely because they were women. What I couldn’t figure out—my husband has lost count of how many times he has heard me moan about this with every book—was how I could combine Jackie and the Old Mistresses to come up with my plot. 

Just when I was beginning to think I’d pushed the envelope too far this time, Ann Mah, an author friend, wrote a travel article for The New York Times on Jackie’s junior year abroad in Paris in 1949. Where she studied art history. 

And just like that everything fell into place. It wasn’t hard to imagine that Lucie’s French grandfather, who had appeared in earlier books, had met Jackie seventy years ago when she came to France and maybe they fell in love and maybe he took her to all of Paris’s wonderful museums and art galleries on their dates. And maybe Jackie bought some paintings by one of the Old Mistresses in a Parisian bookstall for a few francs because in those days the artist was a complete unknown.

And now Cricket Delacroix, one of Jackie’s school friends who inherited those paintings and lives in Middleburg, is about to celebrate her 90th birthday by donating the paintings—which are now worth a fortune—to the National Museum of Women in the Arts. 

So things are going along just fine until Parker Lord, a prominent landscape designer who is designing the garden for Lucie’s upcoming backyard wedding, is found dead in her vineyard where he was inspecting some ailing vines. While Parker’s death might be related to a controversial book he wrote on climate change, it turns out he also knew Jackie long ago. 

Now Lucie is starting to wonder if Parker’s murder had something to do with Jackie and those paintings. She’s also worried that her grandfather, who is flying to Virginia for Cricket’s birthday, might be involved. And she has a few questions for him as soon as he arrives in Middleburg.

Beginning with how he managed to keep an affair with one of the most glamorous, iconic women of the twentieth century a secret for seventy years.

Because Lucie is dying of curiosity.

Who wouldn’t be?

 In 1949, during her junior year abroad in Paris, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis bought several inexpensive paintings of Marie-Antoinette by a little-known 18th century female artist. She also had a romantic relationship with Virginia vineyard owner Lucie Montgomery’s French grandfather - until recently, a well-kept secret.

Seventy years later, Cricket Delacroix, Lucie’s neighbor and Jackie’s schoolfriend, is donating the now priceless paintings to a Washington, DC museum. And Lucie’s grandfather is flying to Virginia for Cricket’s 90th birthday party, hosted by her daughter Harriet. A washed-up journalist, Harriet is rewriting a manuscript Jackie left behind about Marie-Antoinette and her portraitist. She’s also adding tell-all details about Jackie, sure to make the book a bestseller.

Then on the eve of the party a world-famous landscape designer who also knew Jackie is found dead in Lucie’s vineyard. Did someone make good on the death threats he’d received because of his controversial book on climate change? Or was his murder tied to Jackie, the paintings, and Lucie’s beloved grandfather?

 ELLEN CROSBY is the author of the Virginia wine country mystery series; her latest book, THE ANGELS’SHARE,has been longlisted in the fiction category for the 2020 Library of Virginia Literary Awards. THE FRENCH PARADOX, the next book in the series, will be released on the UK on January 29, 2021 and in the US on April 6, 2021. Her books have also been nominated for the Mary Higgins Clark Award and the Library of Virginia People’s Choice Award; THE RIESLING RETRIBUTION won the 2009 Gourmand World Cookbook Award for Best US Wine Literature Book. Crosby has also written two mysteries featuring international photojournalist Sophie Medina and MOSCOW NIGHTS, a standalone mystery. Previously she worked as a freelance reporter for The Washington Post, Moscow correspondent for ABC Radio News, and as an economist at the U.S. Senate. Learn more at http://www.ellencrosby.com. 

 

DEBS: Oh, I know so well the frustration of trying to fit those disparate pieces together--and the elation when they click.

 

Do follow the link to Ann Mah's piece in the New York Times on Jackie Kennedy's time in Paris. It sets the stage perfectly for this story! 

 

 REDS and readers, were you fascinated by Jackie, too?