Peter Mayle
Peter Mayle was an English author born in Brighton in 1939, best known for his engaging works that explore French culture and lifestyle. After a fifteen-year career in advertising, he shifted to writing, producing children's educational books before achieving fame with his 1989 memoir, "A Year in Provence." This book details his experiences renovating an old farmhouse in rural Provence, capturing the joy and challenges of his new life in France, and quickly became a beloved classic, earning him the British Book Award for Best Travel Book in 1991. Mayle continued to write about Provence and French cuisine in follow-up works like "Toujours Provence" and "Encore Provence." He also ventured into fiction, creating novels such as "Hotel Pastis" and "A Good Year," the latter adapted into a film starring Russell Crowe. His writing is characterized by a blend of humor, rich descriptions of French life, and a lighthearted approach to crime fiction in his Sam Levitt series. Mayle was honored with France's Legion d'Honneur in 2002 for his contributions to culture. He passed away on January 18, 2018, leaving behind a legacy of delightful explorations of life in France.
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Peter Mayle
- Born: 1939
- Birthplace: Brighton, England
- Died: January 18, 2018
- Place of death: Lourmarin, France
Biography
Peter Mayle was born in Brighton, England, in 1939. For the first fifteen years of his career, he worked in advertising in both London and New York, first as a copywriter and then as an executive. In 1975, fed up with the politics of advertising, Mayle left the business to write educational children’s books, including works about sex, puberty, pregnancy, and divorce. He is the author of novels, nonfiction works for both children and adults, and several collections of humorous essays, his most famous being A Year in Provence (1989).
Mayle wrote A Year in Provence after he and his wife moved from London to Provence, in the rural south of France, in the 1980s. There they bought an old stone farmhouse to renovate. The book chronicles their joyful discoveries about the region—the sun, cuisine, and landscape—as well as their struggles with contractors, the weather, and the French language. Critics like Publishers Weekly found that Mayle possessed a “stylish verve” that breathed life into the pages of his work. Mayle followed A Year in Provence with several nonfiction works on French culture and cuisine, including Tourjours Provence (1991) and Encore Provence (1999). A Year in Provence earned Mayle the British Book Award for the Best Travel Book of the Year in 1991 and was adapted as a television miniseries that aired in 1993.
Mayle’s first novel, Hotel Pastis: A Novel of Provence (1993), fictionalized his own exodus from the rat race in the character of Simon Shawn, a mid-forties, divorced advertising executive who escapes to the south of France. Shawn decides to turn a run-down police station into a luxury hotel but not without the complicating factors of a beautiful French mistress and a second-rate bank heist. Mayle also delved into the genre of mystery fiction, beginning with his novel Chasing Cézanne (1997), in which he tells the story of Andre Kelly, a freelance photographer who discovers an apparent high stakes art forgery. Interestingly, even in his fictional work, Mayle could not resist immersing his characters in the richness of French life. San Francisco Chronicle critic Regan McMahon called Chasing Cézanne “another delightful blend of crime and cuisine.” For his contributions to French culture, Mayle was awarded the Legion d'Honneur, France's highest order of merit, in 2002.
A Good Year (2004), also set in Provence, follows Londoner Max Skinner, who has lost his job as a financial agent, only to find that he has inherited a French vineyard, Le Griffon, from his late Uncle Henry. Max borrows money from his friend and ex-brother-in-law, Charlie, to get the estate running again. Although the rundown vineyard produces foul-tasting wine, several other characters have a seemingly inexplicable interest in it. The vineyard’s ownership is complicated by the arrival of Henry’s daughter, Christie Roberts, from California, as well as the return of Charlie and the appearance of a delicious, expensive, and mysterious Bordeaux, Le Coin Perdu. A Good Year was adapted by Marc Klein as a 2006 Ridley Scott film starring Russell Crowe, Albert Finney, Marion Cotillard, Tom Hollander, and Freddie Highmore.
Between 2009 and 2015, Mayle published the Sam Levitt books, also known as the Caper series, a quartet of crime fiction novels featuring American expatriate and private investigator Sam Levitt, a former lawyer who loves wine. The Vintage Caper (2009) concerns a wine theft that brings Levitt from the States to investigate in Paris, Bordeaux, and Marseille. In The Marseille Caper (2012), Levitt returns to Marseille to bid on a coastal development project on behalf of an anonymous client. The Corsican Caper (2014) centers on Levitt’s billionaire friend, Francis Reboul, and the efforts of Russian capitalist Oleg Vronsky to obtain Reboul’s villa on the Corsican coast. The Diamond Caper (2015) brings Elena Morales, a Los Angeles–based insurance-claims investigator and Levitt’s girlfriend, to Nice to investigate the theft of a socialite’s prize diamonds. Reviewers have characterized the series as “downright frothy,” thin on plot and characterization, but full of delightful descriptions of French food and scenery, as well as Mayle’s pithy observations of French culture.
Mayle moved from Provence to Long Island in the 1990s. When he later moved back to Provence in the late 1990s, he kept the exact location of his new home secret in order to avoid the influx of well-intentioned fans who had come to visit him at the Ménerbes farmhouse made famous by A Year in Provence and who disrupted life for Mayle and his neighbors. Mayle died on January 18, 2018, at a hospital near his home in the south of France. He was survived by his third wife, Jennie Mayle; three sons from his first marriage, to Pamela Mayle; two daughters from his second marriage, to Nicola Mayle; and several grandchildren.
Bibliography
Aldridge, Alan. “The English as They See Others: England Revealed in Provence.” Sociological Review, vol. 43, no. 3, 1995, pp. 415–434. Academic Search Complete, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=9508225680&site=ehost-live. Accessed 28 Mar. 2018.
Crace, John. “A Year in Provence, 20 Years On.” The Guardian, 10 Jan. 2010, www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jan/11/year-in-provence-peter-mayle. Accessed 29 Mar. 2018.
Cury, James Oliver. “Spin the Bottles.” Review of The Vintage Caper, by Peter Mayle. The New York Times, 18 Dec. 2009, www.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/books/review/Cury-t.html. Accessed 29 Mar. 2018.
Fletcher, Connie. Review of The Diamond Caper, by Peter Mayle. Booklist, 15 Sept. 2015, p. 31. Literary Reference Center Plus, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lkh&AN=109432958&site=lrc-plus. Accessed 29 Mar. 2018.
Genzlinger, Neil. “Peter Mayle, Who Wrote of ‘A Year in Provence,’ Is Dead at 78.” The New York Times, 18 Jan. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/01/18/obituaries/peter-mayle-who-wrote-of-a-year-in-provence-is-dead-at-78.html. Accessed 28 Mar. 2018.
Peter Mayle, Peter Mayle, 2017, www.petermayle.com/. Accessed 28 Mar. 2018.
Review of A Good Year, by Peter Mayle. Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2004, p. 289. Literary Reference Center Plus, /search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lkh&AN=12902473&site=lrc-plus. Accessed 29 Mar. 2018.
Riding, Alan. “TELEVISION; For Peter Mayle, It’s a ‘Year’ That Never Ends.” The New York Times, 21 Mar. 1993, www.nytimes.com/1993/03/21/arts/television-for-peter-mayle-it-s-a-year-that-never-ends.html. Accessed 28 Mar. 2018.
Schudel, Matt. “Peter Mayle, Who Found Publishing Gold in his ‘Year in Provence,’ Dies at 78.” The Washington Post, 25 Jan. 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/peter-mayle-who-found-publishing-gold-in-his-year-in-provence-dies-at-78/2018/01/25/0660caf6-01e7-11e8-8acf-ad2991367d9d‗story.html?utm‗term=.266d1021d0a0. Accessed 29 Mar. 2018.