To Murder and Create

“A spectacularly inventive novel…Reading it is like walking the half-deserted streets of Eliot’s famous poem. It is an unforgettable experience.” 
—Patrick R. Query, author of Ritual and the Idea of Europe in Interwar Writing

“Ashley’s delightfully playful novel reminds us that we are still learning to read the poem that made Eliot famous. She offers us fun, but smart fun.”
—Michael Coyle, Colgate University

To Murder and Create is an extraordinarily creative and engaging historical novel loosely structured around T. S. Eliot’s paradigm-bending modernist poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Set in Boston of 1915, an array of eccentric and eminently charming tenants inhabit a boardinghouse sternly governed by a rule-bound yet likable landlady. They include the retired captain with a secret, the literary-minded cook, the spinster who has all but given up on love, two carpetbaggers who could have sprung from the pages of Mark Twain, the “confirmed bachelor” who stumbles into happiness, and the retired professor who is obsessed with his former student, T. S. Eliot. Star-crossed love, passion, jealousy, and courage take center stage in this captivating glimpse of an authentically rendered bygone world brimming with timeless questions of the heart and mind.

Ardythe Ashley is the author of the novels The Christ of the Butterflies, In The Country of the Great King, and The Return of the Century: The Death and Further Adventures of Oscar Wilde. She is a psychoanalyst and lives in New England.