Peter Mayle: R.I.P.

From the New York Times:

Peter Mayle, an Englishman who started a writing career in his 30s with sex-education books for children before making a spectacularly successful switch to the travel memoir genre with “A Year in Provence,” his 1989 best seller about relocating to Southern France, died on Thursday at a hospital near his home there. He was 78.

His death was confirmed by Paul Bogaards of Alfred A. Knopf, which has published Mr. Mayle’s books since “A Year in Provence” was released in the United States in 1990.

Mayle and his wife, Jennie, moved to Ménerbes, a village in the Provence region, in 1987, with Mayle intending to write a novel. But with renovations to the 18th-century stone farmhouse they had bought in full swing, he kept getting distracted. His agent finally told him to shelve the novel and write about the distractions.

“Everything catastrophic became useful,” he recalled in a 1993 interview with The New York Times. “Up to that point, I had kept a halfhearted diary. After that, I took copious notes, and the chapters more or less wrote themselves.”

Read the rest of the obituary HERE.

Peter Mayle also wrote a series of crime novels:  The Vintage Caper, The Marseille Caper, The Corsican Caper,  The Diamond Caper featuring Sam Levitt, a former corporate lawyer, crime expert, and wine connoisseur.