Mrs. Why & Mrs. Right are pen names. The friendship is real.
We are two friends who live in Italy, where summer is less a season and more a test of character. Some people cope with fans and shutters. We built ourselves an English village instead — grey-skied, permanently jumper weather, with one pub, one post office, one library, and a jam competition that has been quietly devastating local friendships since 1987.
We called it Greywhistle. Then we hid a thirty-year secret in it, wrote 80 word searches around the secret, and put the whole thing in a book. One of us wrote the puzzles and the sentences; the other drew every teacup, every silhouette, every gentle little corner. That is, broadly, how we divide all labour:
Mrs. Why asks the questions. Mrs. Right knows the answers.
Why the pen names? In a village like Greywhistle, everyone knows everyone’s business. We’d rather they didn’t know ours. Everything else here is true — the friendship, the kettle 🫖, the deadlines, the heat ❤️.
What you’ll get, twice a week:
Tuesdays — a letter. Sometimes it’s a Dispatch from Greywhistle: what the village clock is doing, who is feuding over marmalade, what Nora has written in her notebook. Sometimes it’s a Postcard from the Real World: the market, the seventh attempt at drawing one teacup, the day the deadline moved. No names, no addresses. Everything else true.
Saturdays — a free hand-built word search. Themed, illustrated, printable.
The books: The Village Fête Secret (The Greywhistle Mysteries, Volume One) is on Amazon.
Subscribers get The Case of the Missing Marrow — a free prequel case — the moment they join.
Written from a hot kitchen in Italy. Posted from a cool village in England.
Tea recommended. Wine acceptable. Pen non-negotiable
