This month for Murder Monday, Sisters in Crime’s Jacq Ellem speaks to best-selling UK author, Elly Griffiths, who has three different series and various standalone mysteries under her belt.
Click below to view:
Elly is on record as saying she did all the right things to become a writer: she read English at King’s College London, worked in a library, then for a magazine, and then as a publicity assistant at HarperCollins. She eventually became Editorial Director for children’s books and all this completely put her off writing! It wasn’t until she was on maternity leave in 1998 that she wrote what would become her first published novel, The Italian Quarter.
Three other books followed, all about Italy, families, and identity. Then came an epiphany when Elly was on holiday in Norfolk with her husband Andy had just given up his city job to become an archaeologist. Andy mentioned that prehistoric people had thought that local marshland was sacred. As he said these words, the entire plot of The Crossing Places appeared, fully formed, in Elly’s head, and walking towards her out of the mist, she saw Dr Ruth Galloway. Her agent told her that her new novel was crime and she needed a crime name. So Domenica de Rosa became Elly Griffiths.
Since then, Elly hasn’t wasted any time. She now has 15 novels in her Ruth Galloway series, seven Brighton Mysteries, four in the Girl Called Justice series, and two standalone novels.
In 2017 Elly was the Programming Chair for the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival. She won the 2020 Edgar Allan Poe Award for best novel for The Stranger Diaries. In 2021, The Postscript Murders was shortlisted in the Gold Dagger category at the Crime Writer’s Association Awards,
Her next novel in the Brighton series, The Great Deceiver, is out fairly soon with Quercus.
More info here.
Murder Monday interviews are available on Sisters in Crime’s YouTube channel at 6 pm once a month on a Monday.