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Learn more about Jerry Peill

Jeremy Crossland Peill (Jerry) was first published at the age of sixteen, in a British national magazine. Since then, around a hundred pieces of his non-fiction work and poetry have appeared in newspapers and magazines in New York and Virginia, and he has won a humor award in the Commonwealth of Virginia. The author resides with his wife of fifty-two years, Margaret, at Edgehill Farm, outside the village of Morattico. The couple have a son living in Manhattan and East Hampton, and a daughter living in San Diego.

Jerry was brought up in southern England, where Glyn Grammar school gave him an excellent grounding in the humanities (and put him off chemistry and physics for life). Epsom School of Art gave him the impetus to make new wave modern sculptures from found objects. Both schools inspired his love of color in the world and on canvas.

The Boy Scouts kept his feet on the ground, first motivating him to become a Queen’s Scout, and then Scoutmaster of the 2nd Ewell Rainsters (yes, still in England, where rain is part of life.) Boy, did that make for stories!

Then Her Majesty called him into the British army as one of the last National Service conscripts. Starting as a Royal Engineer (a kind of Scouting for grown-ups), He was co-opted to the Joint Services School for Linguists to add Russian to the French, German and Latin he had learned at Glyn. Graduates like Jerry finished up in the Intelligence Corps. And that’s a story in itself.

His first civilian job generated enough income for him to build his first sailboat, but entailed no work. His “office” was in London, enabling him to explore its endless delights on lunch “breaks” and evenings. These included a year at the London School of Philosophy & Economics. He bailed out of this sinecure on the news that a vast conglomerate was going to take over the company and no doubt put an end to his free ride. Of course he has stories about this surreal period.

Then he found his place in a twenty-one year career with the flavour and fragrance industry, doing advertising and promotional work, then market development in Britain, Canada and America. This business was full of creative people and writing became one of his key roles. History does repeat, and to extricate himself from a second, soul-destroying acquisition, he moved to the Felt and Filter industry, opening up new markets in Europe and around the Pacific Rim. Here too, he has stories to share.

In 1981, out of the blue, America’s best-known clock collector invited him to restore a damaged painting from an old mantel clock door. This work developed into a side business, and he began to collect fine art on his foreign travels.        

When the felt folks laid him off he went full-time into art and frame restoration, then formed American Sourcing, an international trading corporation, to keep his foreign felt and filter clients supplied, as his former employers were making a hash of it.

In 2001, his wife, Margaret, finally got fed up with all the snow in their New York mountain valley and they bought Creek View Farm, on Virginia’s Northern Neck. This unspoiled, historic region inspired Jerry to resume painting, while its colourful people motivated him to start writing essays and poetry about both. Then a Morattico village friend suggested he write a book about a local widow who looked a lot like Agatha Christie's Miss Marple. This became “Q & A: A Morattico Murder Mystery.” Readers encouraged him to keep writing and he chose his own model this time, from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. And so “The Curious Case of the Conjure Woman" came into being.

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