I showed no one, because no one wants to read someone else's

else's... novel, right? If a friend of yours is writing a book, you're like, "Oh my God, please don't show it to me." Uh, and I didn't wanna show it to any publishers or anything like that.

I just wanted to write it and finish it just so I'd done it, just so I could prove to myself I'd done it, and I put it in a drawer so many times and gave up on it so many times 'cause I just thought, "What is this?" Uh, but when I finished it, I showed it to, um, Juliet, who's now my agent, and I just said, "What do we think?" Uh, and she loved it, and I just thought, I still worried about that thing of, oh, but people, people think of me as a guy from TV even though I'm not.

I never, you know, I nev- never have been.

But then, um, she sold it in Germany before she sold it in the UK, and I thought, "Oh, good, 'cause they don't know who I am.

They just read the book." Uh, so we sold it in six territories before we sold it in the UK, and I thought, "Okay, that's okay." That gave me the confidence to think, no, it's, it, it's a real book.

And we sold the film rights in the States before we signed the deal as well, so I thought, "Oh, okay, that three years was worth it, and it's a proper book, and it's..." I, I know I'm a writer, but you have to...

How come you are so interested in murders?

Do murderers ever become red herrings during the course of writing the book?

Yeah, because when I start, I never really know who did it, is the truth.

And so I always try in my head to make sure everyone could be the killer at any given time, just to give myself that freedom.

And sometimes, you know, I'll write the final scene where the killer is unmasked, and I think, oh, hold on, actually, it's more interesting if...

Person X was the killer.

And then you go back and you make sure that that makes sense.

But yeah, all the way through, you're just trying to make sure that everyone is a suspect.

Do you feel like an extra sense of pressure from that, in the sense that when you put something out into the world, it's sort of like having the chance to mark the headmaster's essay, you know?

Tell us a little bit about We Chase Shadows.

Yeah.

So, um, you know, the Thursday Murder Club books was my first series, and this new series is called We Solve Murders, and it's, um, it's essentially, it's an ex-cop called, um, Steve, who lives in a village in Hampshire in the New Forest, and all he wants to do is be left alone.

Uh, he's got a cat.

He's got his pub quiz.

He's got his mates at the pub, and he wants a quiet life.

Uh, his daughter-in-law, so it's father-in-law, daughter-in-law relationship, is the exact opposite.

Um, but going back to The Thursday Murder Club and that marriage that you've created of something akin to all creatures great and small and, and a thriller, um, how did you come up with such a thing? Uh, setting your first novel in a retirement home, it wouldn't immediately spring to mind.

This is in southern England and our favourite trio have returned.

They have indeed.

So, you know, I've got the Thursday Murder Club series, obviously, and this is my other series, We Solve Murders.

It's Steve, who's an ex-cop, and all he wants to do is be left alone.

He lives in this beautiful little village in the New Forest.

He's got a cat.

He's got his mates in the pub.

But nobody in Axley cares at all that they're going to see Denzel Washington when they get there.

[laughs]

But I came up with when I, when I was very briefly at Channel 24, and Charlie Parsons, who, who ran that, said, "Oh, uh, we saw Joanna Lumley on a desert island.

Can we do a show on a desert island?" And I went away, and I thought...

And funnily enough, when I was working there, and, uh, that thing I was just saying where there's lots of people there, I thought, "I don't think you know much about TV, uh, and yet you're the, you seem to be the boss." And I was thinking, "I wonder in this room full of people, where there's some really, really, really talented young people, and there's some other people who I think, 'Oh, I don't know if you know what you're doing,' I wonder if every week, if you got around and decided to vote off the most useless person, I wonder what would happen." So I thought, "Oh, well, do that.

Why don't you do that on a desert island?" So you've got a desert island, and you get the big mouth and the loud mouth and the people who sort of want to be in charge of all the meetings, but I bet that the person who can make a raft is more useful to them than that person.

And if you were allowed ever in life to just go, "You know what? We're gonna vote off the most useless person in this office.

We're gonna vote off the most useless person in this island." I thought that, well, that, what a power that would be.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah

I love all the different meals.

I can't play favorites.

And I really think for my children, like, oh, I wanna make them a cake.

I want to do things like, I want to do things like that.

I want to try and do absolutely everything, and do all my work, and make a really big supper, and make everyone a cake.

I'm always awake at 3:00.

And when, whenever my wife and I are separated, she works a- away a lot, and I work away a lot.

[laughing]

I did it in that moment every day.

No, I was writing it for about 18 months.

I didn't tell anyone I was doing it.

I didn't want to, um...

I thought, "I'd love to write a book." I've always wanted to write a book, and I'm a huge crime fiction fan.

Uh, and lots of, you know, uh, celebs write children's books and stuff like that, but I'm a huge crime fiction fan.

Yeah.

Okay

...

some of them were, like, obvious what they were.

There was, like, kidneys and rice or spaghetti bolognese.

Some of the things ca- were called things like chicken in a mess with rice.

[laughs]

Yeah

... and retain its, I mean, the answer of course was, well, it was ultra-processed or whatever.

Yeah.

You have to make the next chapter.

And you finish here with, um, uh, Alan Carey, the detective inspector, who introduces himself so politely.

Uh, he says to Chris Edwards, "Well, I don't think you'll be disappointed at all." We then go on to Chris Edwards saying, "What's the situation down here?" And talks about, you know, his job is never kind of seeing Roswell.

It's always a hoax.

Always something like that.

John, you s- simply swap those around.

[gentle music]

Mm.

Right? And they're gonna stop making new episodes of Escape to the Country, and they're gonna stop making new episodes of, you know, Border Patrol New Zealand.

And those things, daytime television, I just love.

There is not...

If, if I have a spare half hour at any point during the day, I will not meditate.

I will turn on Sky Mix and watch a series of New Zealand Border Patrol officers open a case full of eggplants from Taiwan.

That I love.

Mm.

[laughs]

And you think, yeah, it's working out really, really badly 'cause, you know, I've broken up a family.

I've still got this ridiculous food behavior.

So yeah, it's, it's working, you know, and it's, it's, it's, it's, it's really, really bad.

Um, and so just that dismantling of this insane kind of alternate reality that, that, that, that, that you've built up over the years because you've become two people, very, very hard to break it down because those two people are almost identical.

You know, they are the same person.

Uh, and almost everything about former me is exactly the same as about present me.

What, what sort of things do you say to yourself? What sort of stuff do you have in the toolkit ready to go?

And it sounds like that- I'm not the only one, and that that's resonating with your readers in their, you know, who are younger than the characters.

Yeah.

Yeah, the- the age, the demographics reading this book are insane because they are absolutely, you know, they're about older people, but they're not read, you know, in a dominant way by older people.

There's p- people through all of the age groups reading it.

And I think that there's an element of wish fulfillment to it because there is- there's an epidemic of loneliness amongst older people.

I think there's an epidemic of loneliness, funnily enough, amongst people in their late teens and early 20s now as well, for different reasons.

But there's a quick fix for it, which is, you know, to foster a sense of community.

So what have you learned personally from writing these books as you've gone along? Like, I assume you're now ready to, to charge in and start your own Thirsty Murder group at some point.