Nita Prose's novella features The Maid characters with a Christmas twist
The bestselling Toronto author discussed The Mistletoe Mystery on Bookends with Mattea Roach
Nita Prose first captured readers with her debut novel The Maid, which has sold more than two million copies worldwide. It features Molly Gray, a hotel maid who struggles with social cues, whose ordinary life is upended when she finds a wealthy guest dead.
Caught up in a web of deception and suspicion, Molly unites with her friends to find out what really happened.
Prose continues Molly's sleuthing adventures in the novel The Mystery Guest and the new novella The Mistletoe Mystery, which includes a personal mystery with a healthy amount of holiday traditions and secrets.
Prose joined Mattea Roach for a special taping of Bookends in the Glenn Gould Studio in Toronto as part of CBC Toronto's annual fundraiser for the Daily Bread Food Bank, Make the Season Kind.
In front of a live audience, they discussed what sparked the idea for The Mistletoe Mystery and how her beloved character Molly navigates the holiday season without her late Gran.
Mattea Roach: What inspired you to write a holiday mystery?
Nita Prose: When the holidays come around, many of us think about those that we remember that aren't with us anymore. That's what happened to me.
One day I was sitting in my office and the holidays were coming. I was thinking of my mom, who I lost many years ago. She was one of those people who brought celebration with her. Everywhere she went, she was the life of the party and Christmas was her favourite time of year. She decorated madly. Everybody was welcome in our home, always. And she made that season so magical, so kind and so bright.
So I was remembering just what a force she was and how she did that with so much naturalness. I turned around on my bookshelf and I saw something, a gift that she'd given me for Christmas many, many years ago when I was just a kid. It was this little heart-shaped box and the top of it was painted — she painted it herself. And on the back of it was the only thing that I have that has her handwriting on it. And it says, "Love, Mom."
I wanted to bring that spirit of forever to Molly in her Gran.- Nita Prose
I picked up that box and I just thought to myself, "She's still here. She's right here. I will never spend a holiday without her." And just like that, the idea for this book came to my mind and I gave Molly a box, a heart shaped box, a little bit different than the one I own, and I thought of how much she would miss her gran at times like the holidays, at Christmas, on her birthday.
I wanted to bring that spirit of forever to Molly in her Gran.
MR: In The Mistletoe Mystery, Molly is in a place of feeling quite insecure in a relationship that's very important to her. She has this boyfriend, Juan Manuel, who she really loves and adores, and he seems to adore her. But perhaps because Molly is not always the best at reading social cues, she sometimes mistrusts her own judgment. You mentioned having a bit of imposter syndrome or insecurity as a writer. I'm wondering whether this book perhaps was a way of working through some of those experiences of insecurity, whether it was in emerging as a writer or perhaps other times in your life that you've maybe felt a little bit unsteady or a little bit unsure of yourself.
NP: It was that — and the fact that I couldn't kill another person in the Regency Grand Hotel. How many murders can we have in one hotel before nobody's going to go there anymore? Would you go to a hotel where there were three murders in the course of three years? I mean, it's not a great place to stay.
I knew I had to, again, innovate the genre, do something different. So in The Mistletoe Mystery, there is no overt crime as such. There is definitely not a murder happening in the hotel. It is a different kind of mystery that has to do with the interiority of Molly's feelings about her developed lack of trust and having to reckon with that in order to actually pursue the fulfilment of important relationships in her life.
MR: How is it that she's able to work through some of those trust issues? And what can readers learn about how she navigates that struggle in her own life?
NP: One of the great gifts that her grandmother gave her was positivity. Gran always talks to her in sayings and those sayings often are those old classics that always are about putting your best foot forward, doing your best thinking on the bright side. While they are clichés for Molly, they have steeped into her personality and she can only act from there.
She discovers darkness within herself. She has doubts, a lot of self-doubt and a lot of doubt about other people around her. But she always tries to get past that and find a way forward, keep moving and move towards the light, towards kindness, towards goodness. And if that is not a message for today, I don't know what is.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. It was produced by Lisa Mathews.
