Elly Griffiths' Books

Biography

Elly Griffiths is the pen name of Domenica de Rosa. Born in London in 1963, her family moved to Brighton — where she still lives — when she was five. Griffiths followed a textbook career path to become an author. As an eleven-year-old, she wrote her first book, a murder mystery, and then at secondary school, she wrote episodes of Starsky and Hutch for her friends. She read English at King’s College London and, after graduating, worked in a library, for a magazine and ultimately as the Editorial Director for children’s books at HarperCollins.

De Rosa wrote and published her first book, The Italian Quarter, whilst pregnant with her first child. It is “A delicious, affectionate depiction of a British Italian family, in all its glorious complexity.” Not my cup of tea. Fortunately, her career in romantic literature took a crooked turn when her husband decided to give up a job in banking and retrain as an archaeologist.

The Birth of Ruth Galloway

“We were on holiday in Norfolk, walking across Titchwell Marsh, when Andy mentioned that prehistoric man had thought that marshland was sacred. Because it’s neither land nor sea, but something in-between, they saw it as a kind of bridge to the afterlife. Neither land nor sea, neither life nor death. As he said these words, the entire plot of The Crossing Places appeared, fully-formed, in my head and, walking towards me out of the mist, I saw Dr Ruth Galloway.” (Elly Griffiths)

After sending the manuscript to her publisher, they told her that her real name wasn’t suitable for the turn her writing had taken.

“My agent said, “This is crime. You need a crime name”. I decided on Ellen Griffiths, my grandmother’s name. My publishers decided that Elly looked ‘younger’.” (Suffolk Libraries)

So Elly Griffiths and Dr Ruth Galloway were born. The series — which includes The Chalk Pit — is currently thirteen books long. It is unlikely to end there; Griffiths claims to be too superstitious to complete a series on number thirteen. In 2016 The Crime Writers Association awarded Griffiths the Dagger in the Library Award – for being the author of the most enjoyed collection of work in libraries.

Colloquial Style

Griffiths’ style is light and conversational compared to her British crime writing contemporaries. Whilst nowhere near as irrevocably dark as, say, Val McDermid, her books draw out a sense of place and the characters who live there, more often than not with a middle-class, middle-aged eye for satire.

“You know how thick I am. I don’t even eat yoghurt because it’s got culture in it.”
Elly Griffiths, The Janus Stone

“Major Karl von Kronig,”’ he reads. ‘“Oberstleutnant Stefan Fenstermacher, Obergefreiter Lutz Gerber, Gefreiter Manfred Hahn, Gefreiter Reiner Brauer, Panzerfunker Gerhard Meister . . .” Bloody hell. No wonder they didn’t win the war with names like that. Take them a year and a half to do the roll call. What the hell’s “panzerfunker” when it’s at home?”
Elly Griffiths, The House at Sea’s End

Other Series

Elly Griffiths’ Books aren’t limited to stories about the archaeologist Ruth Galloway. She has also written the Brighton Mysteries. In the most recent, Now You See Them, a detective and magician investigate a string of kidnappings in the swinging 60s.

“I’ve always wanted to write about my grandfather, who was a music hall comedian. Grandad appeared on the bill with a famous magician called Jasper Maskelyne, who had been involved with a wartime espionage group called The Magic Gang. This gave me the idea for a series which would combine magic, crime and vaudeville.” (The Reading Room)

Her recent standalone novel The Stranger Diaries was hailed as Crime Book of the Year by The Times and won the 2020 Edgar Award for best novel.

Advice From a Lecturer

Griffiths teaches creative writing at West Dean College in Sussex when not writing. Her advice to would-be authors is, like her fiction, chatty, down-to-earth and to the point.

“Don’t wait for inspiration. Start writing today.”

“If you write 1000 words a day, eventually you will have a book.”