Get Booked – Get Booked Thriller Mashup 260922

Welcome to today's slightly different Get Booked for Women's and Men's radio station with me, your host, Hazel Butterfield. Today we have a mashup of 4 of our recent shows, all fabulous thriller fiction. We'll be kicking off with A Countdown to a Killing by Tom Vaughan-McCauley, then moving on to Mr. Jones by Alex Woolf, followed by Jim Chambers and his book Urban Scarecrows,, and then finishing off with the incredible Amanda Robson's latest book, The Party Guest. I hope you enjoy. Now joining us on today's show, we will be talking to the author Tom Vaughan-Macaulay with his book A Countdown to a Killing. London, Sicily, Huddersfield, 2016 to 2017. Wen Li is a deeply kind and sensitive 29-year-old British-Chinese woman who suffers from severe obsessive-compulsive disorder, which manifests itself in an incessant overwhelming fear that she might have murderous impulses. Unlucky in love and emotionally scarred, Wen falls for her colleague Lomax, who is in love with a Sicilian young woman he met while working in Italy. He and Wen do share a mutual loathing of their boss, who is struggling too with a toxic relationship and his father's refusal to accept his sexuality. Told through interwoven correspondence, emails, and WhatsApp messages, with the suspense around an impending murder steadily building, Countdown to a Killing is a deep exploration of multiple perspectives and points of view of individuals who are inextricably bound. The key themes of love, sexuality, ethnicity, mental health, and acceptance are sensitively explored in a unique, linear yet multi-layered and metafictional narrative packed with humour, heartache, and a cast of expertly crafted characters. This contemporary take on the epistolary novel will have you laughing and crying in equal measure. Now first I have a bit of a competition to tell you about. The Evening Standard announces the launch of its What's Your Story competition as part of the Stories Festival in association with Westfield London. The What's Your Story competition aims to discover a new generation of voices to encourage and inspire creative talent. So make sure you share this among your writing community. The competition will be supported and judged by esteemed personalities from across the creative industries. The Evening Standard Stories Festival will be held in central London from the 22nd to the 24th of September, bringing to life today's most exciting narrative opportunities from page to podcast. The multiplex to the metaverse, as we hear from publishing, screen, and audio creators. Expect intimate talks, panel discussions, and live event experiences, with the lineup being revealed over the summer. After a successful debut in 2021 that I did attend and thought was incredible, with such a range of contributors that saw thousands of Londoners join the brightest stars of page and screen for 3 days of talks, workshops, and award ceremonies. The Evening Standard Stories Festival is back, celebrating how stories connect us and the new ways in which we can connect with stories. This inclusive initiative gives a platform to upcoming and established voices and is guaranteed to get London talking. The What's Your Story competition, returning for its second year, gives a new generation of creators from the UK the chance to tell their stories in diverse forms and receive industry support. The competition is supported by Westfield London to discover, develop, and champion national talent. Applications opened on the 22nd of June for anyone with an original story about themselves and is ready to tell it in in a fresh and compelling way. This might be a story of childhood, of growing up, of the city, a story of the imagination, anything at all that's your story. This year, reflecting the vibrant array of narrative forms, entries can be written for the screen, the stage, or the page. Applicants can tell their story through dialogue, lyrics, poetry, or prose. Submissions can be written or performed. Each entry must be either up to 1,000 words or a video of up to 2 minutes in length. As I said, the entry is open on the 22nd and close on the 24th of July at 11:59 PM. There will be 2 initial longlisting processes before a shortlist is submitted to a final judging panel, and judges will select the overall winner. There's no fee to enter, and winning pieces will performed live at the festival and published on standard.co.uk, as well as receiving a writing advice session with one of the judges. The panel will be chaired by author and journalist Lottie Jess and includes Jess Loveland, head of the writing community, the contest— vice president of MGM and a founding member of the Whole Kahani, a collective of East Asian fiction writers of South Asian origin. London from the 20th century. Andrew Hunter, the scriptwriter and senior researcher for BBC2's QI, who co-hosts the award-winning podcast No Such Thing As A Fix. As London's most iconic news brand, Evening Standard has always played a role in shaping the creative life of the city. The What's Your Story competition and stories festival is live with encouraging creative talent and discovering new voices After a successful debut in 2021 that I did at North End and in all you could read about with the various links on my Twitter @nutmegandbutter, good luck to all who join the brightest stars of stage. Now, as promised, we have the author of Countdown to a Killing, which is released on the 7th of July. Now, rather than the scene opening with nobody appearing, consuming the search to uncover the killer and their motive. How passé. Uh, we have the buildup to what could indeed happen without knowing whodunit nor who it will be, told via various forms of one-sided emails and WhatsApps from the key characters. And yet what is left unsaid is just as intriguing as the cleverly depicted and intricate mannerisms of each flawed ego. But aren't we all flawed egos? Riddled with dry witticism and irony. I suspect that's a Huddersfield side. A book that challenges perceptions of our own subjectivity via a unique storytelling style, an introspective nature of characterisation, and it's enthralling, detailing the incredible loneliness and desperation that can develop in personalities and affecting their mental well-being. Many of us just want love in different ways, which is not always conveyed the most succinctly, but oh, how complicated can late-made life be? I thoroughly love this book. It is quite unique, and it's one of those ones that you just kind of read walking down the street because you don't want to stop until it's finished. Tom Ron Macaulay, hi! Thank you for joining us on Get Booked. Hi, thanks very much for having me, and the introduction there as well, I liked it very much. Oh good, I'm glad. Tell us a little bit about yourself. An overall winner. Yes, so I'm, um, 42 years old, I'm a solicitor, uh, and I live in London, uh, family with two kids, and I've lived in Italy several times in the past, so 3 years— sorry, 3 times now I've lived for long stretches in Italy and speak fluent Italian, um, and because I did languages at uni, but, um, I've always been very keen on, you know, focusing on my literary aspirations alongside the law, so I'm very pleased to publish this second novel, finally. So you're still in law and writing and just juggling the two while also being a father of two very young children. Yes, it's been a busy year, that's for sure, and as you'll know well, you know, it's very busy being a But also combining any sort of aspiration beyond the sort of day job is busy but definitely worth it because, you know, I think it's important that people follow their real vocations and aspirations alongside professional sphere. Well, Get Booked, it's got a very strong theme of mental health and mental well-being, as are all the shows on women's radio station and men's radio station, and I think fulfilling your passions is such an important element of maintaining good mental well-being, and the nature of writing is so cathartic anyway, especially when you're able to share certain parts of yourself, you know, with it being based in Palermo, and was it Palermo that you lived in? Well, no, actually, I wasn't in Palermo, but yeah, I totally take what you say about the catharsis of writing. I think that's, you know, and some people of course don't enjoy it and feel that writing is a very solitary activity and a bit monastic, etc. And I've always felt that it gives me a tremendous sense of achievement and satisfaction, whether you're writing to get published or not, but just a day's writing for me, for whatever reason. But writing can be, it can be a solitary exercise. People can write just to kind of order their thoughts. And just to kind of get down on paper sometimes. I kind of see it like a lot of my friends who struggle with sleep, I say to them, literally just write down what's going in your head. Nobody has to know, you know, keep it like a diary if you want. It just helps order your thoughts and kind of like a brain dump in a way, just kind of get it all out there. Yes, and I think that often writing things down clarifies things to you yourself better than it would have done if you hadn't. So it's fascinating for whatever reason. You know, making these patterns on a screen actually clarifies one's own thoughts. It's strange but true, yeah. Yeah, and I think helping reading about other people as well, especially because of some of the topics you cover in A Countdown to a Killing. It kind of covers lots of different issues that people have, and, you know, we're all different personalities, we all perceive things differently, and also we do have Wen who has obsessive-compulsive disorder, and we have the whole nature of just hearing one-sided conversations, which is so prominent in real life. I was reading the book and just going, right, he's just got this message, but we— he's just sent this message, but we never really know the other side of how it has been received. And I just kept on thinking, you know, I made it up in my mind. I mean, I must say, one of the main characters, his best friend, who he just constantly incessantly wrote to, I already know what she's wearing. I know what she thinks about him. I was just as exasperated as I'm sure she was. I, you know, I gave a lot of, like, loads and serious thought to, to how to present this book. And obviously, um, as you say, it's, you know, it's very important in the modern— it's, you know, because I think even Jonathan Franzen, that that, you know, the great novelist was saying that TV certainly was getting— is getting so good, and new media is getting so good, that the novel is in some ways under threat unless it embraces the, you know, innovative ideas. And it just seemed to me that actually there were two things there. So one is modern forms of expression. So taking WhatsApp, for example, I don't think that WhatsApps are being used in a way that we've really thought through. And I believe, it's only my personal opinion, that in 50 years, 100 years, people will look back and say, oh my God, they were so— everybody was so naive and innocent because they wrote down in this sort of permanent form thoughts that really are there for oral expression, you know, because they're just how you're feeling at that moment. So, you know, you might say about your best friend, oh, I hate that I hate that sod, or I hate that man. And if you just say it orally and I'm listening to you and I understand that, you know, Hazel's just emotional, not that you mean I hate him, but if you've written it down in a message, if that person finds that in 5 years, it will look very hurtful. And it made you think, no, if there were a leak of all messages, you know, how many people haven't written a message that sort of would offend or hurt virtually everybody they love? And so I thought that was important to explore, this sort of permanence. But what's interesting is it does give rise to someone's real thoughts in a sort of real-time way, which never used to happen because it used to just be oral. So it's fascinating to see how people are talking about other people from their own personal perspective. And that's why I thought it was important to produce, you know, different people's perspectives, but not in conversations, just them talking to others so that you're literally seeing as if it were like from a camera, you were seeing other people's experiences through their words. I think with WhatsApp, though, there is this immediacy. People can see your typing, so you kind of are under pressure to respond quicker, more often, even more so than text, whereas you also cover emails as well in 'Countdown to a Killing,' and that is generally perceived to be something that's more well thought out. But yet, paradoxically, I mean, I annoy a lot of my friends with my WhatsApps because I do voice notes. First of all, it's quicker. Most people will have about 30 WhatsApp groups going at one particular point, as well as getting in touch with friends and family and work and whatnot, and it's just— there's so much and it's hard to keep up. And I do voice notes because then I know that the intonation's coming across properly, and it's completely eating up people's storage. So this is, you know, a complete apology to anybody who's listening who gets WhatsApps from me, but I do try my best to do voice notes because I just think it's less open to subjectivity, and it's quicker. Now today we have the author Alex Woolf, and we're going to be discussing his book that was released in January of this year, Mr Jones, and what an absolute joy this was to read. One of those books that you think is leading you in a particular direction and then another, but you know you're a huge book fan and you read so many books that you can't kind of think you have a bit of an intuition for these things, and yet you are still completely in the dark as you carry on reading. And Mr. Jones is a great combination of an incredibly drafted enigmatic folk tale of Mr. Jones, set in what is a suburban normality where such things are just silly tales for playground gossip beyond any comprehensible reasoning. And yet there's an undeniably something crazy going on, something happening. And then sometimes the unexplainable can get you questioning your own sanity. When you get to a point where you finally admit that the only answer is explained by your own psychosis, potentially. Life can send us crazy. And that is what Mr. Jones is all about. Alex, thank you for joining us here on the show. Hello, how are you? I'm very well, thank you. Thank you for having me here. You are very, very welcome. It's one of the joys of my job is reading books like Mr. Jones and then knowing full well I'm going to be speaking to the author and going into so much more detail. It's a great book. I did actually say to your PR people, I was chatting to them the other day and I was like, "Yeah, I got some funny looks the other day because I was in a traffic jam and I had to carry on reading while I was in the traffic jam because it was at one of those points where I was going, 'I just need to know what's happening.'" thriller. It's fantastic. It is quite different to anything that I've read recently. And before we get stuck into more about Mr. Jones, why don't you start by telling our listeners a little bit about yourself? Right, well, I have been an author for about 20 years now. I started off as a writer of children's non-fiction, because that was my background. I was in publishing for a long time, editing books, but not quite having the nerve to try and write them myself. And then at some point I just decided that I could do better, a better job, let's say, than some of the authors I was editing. So I just decided to give it a go. And I had been writing fiction for pleasure since my teenage years, but I had never had the confidence to believe that I could make it as a fiction writer. So this was like a way in. I knew with non-fiction I was on safe ground. I wasn't holding myself up to great sort of criticism. As long as I did my job right, and I wasn't revealing too much because I'm a fairly private person, and I feel sometimes with fiction one is revealing quite a lot of one's own self. So yeah, so non-fiction was a good way in, and I did that for about 10 years. And then I— while I was doing that, I was writing a short story actually about a sort of time-traveling young, young man, set in the 22nd century. And I— this story just grew and grew and grew into the size of a novel. And I, I thought, I thought it was pretty good. I didn't know what to do with it. And one of the publishers that I work with, worked with regularly with my non-fiction, happened to be starting a fiction list for young adults and I thought with a bit of tweaking I could make this book work for the YA audience. And I showed it to him and he agreed, and that was the beginning of my fiction writing career. And I've been doing that mainly, I have to say, for, yeah, well, for young adults since about 2011. But I've also been writing for adults, short stories for magazines, that sort of thing, and a few novellas for very small independent publishers, but I'd not written a sort of full-length novel for adults until Mr Jones, so this is a bit of a new departure for me. Yeah, I mean, you've written over 200 books, haven't you? Yes, it sounds like a hell of a lot. It does. I have to say that a lot of these books were very short. They were sort of 32 pages long and, you know, not too many words, and they didn't take me very long. I am quite a quick writer anyway, but I did them sort of, you know, they didn't take too long to write. And also, I have been doing this for 20 years, so, you know, you do build up quite a few books in that time. You do, you, and I suppose the more you do it, you get a rhythm and it's somewhat, I wouldn't say easier, but you, well, the more you do it, the more you practice, I guess. I do love it that it's described in your crib sheet that you have written on a vast range of subjects including I like this, right? Aliens, chocolate, asteroids, sharks, Tudors, flying reptiles, soap, bees, and acne. I mean, that's quite a list, isn't it? Well, it's— but it's all true. And, you know, I, I, I thought when I was sort of writing the crib sheet, I thought, um, I need to just look at, you know, the whole range of what I've written and try to find the most diverse and odd juxtapositions of titles, and that's what I came up with. But yeah, I've written on all those things and many, many more. Wow. Do you know what's quite interesting with Mr. Jones is I came across your book in the writing community. I think I actually saw a picture on Twitter, and I was absolutely thrilled that I knew your PR people, and I was like, right, this is the book that I need to read because The actual cover itself is quite intriguing. You must be so impressed with the book design. Yeah, I was absolutely thrilled. It was a very talented young guy called Callum Hood who, I have to say, did a superb job. I described to him, you know, what I had in my mind for the COVID And he came up with this, and it was even better than what I'd had in my mind. So yeah, all credit to him, uh, it's a great cover, and a lot of people have commented on it and have said it's really drawn them to the book, which is, which is what you want with a cover. So yeah, fantastic. And how did the concept of Mr. Jones emerge? Because in my opinion, there's quite a bit of apparent life imitating art in a way during the book, but what about reality? Well, it had a bit of a strange genesis, to be honest, and, you know, I, to this day, I sort of struggle to work out exactly where it all came from, but it was a number of elements all happening at the same time. My daughter was 8 years old when I started writing the book, which is the same age as the little girl in the book, Imogen, and I would walk her to school every day through this overgrown park near where we live with this rather sort of horrible pond that was covered in algae. And this, I suppose, was— that was the setting I had in mind when I was— when I was writing, when I started writing the book, and I remember one morning, it was a very, very hot summer as well, and I just remember one morning her asking me, "What could possibly live under the algae in that pond?" And it just sort of got me thinking, and I probably said something, you know, quite reassuring like, "Oh, nothing, nothing under there," you know, but at the same time I was sort of thinking, well, yeah, um, that is a bit of a sort of scary thought that something could be living under there. So that was, that was one thing. And then, um, I guess, uh, I was also generally, um, a bit of a paranoid parent, I suppose you'd say. I was sort of worrying about crime and, um, sort of stranger danger, that sort of thing, and, and wanting to protect her. And, uh, I guess those two things sort of came together and sort of percolated through my mind for a while. I don't think I had a very clear idea of the plot at the beginning. I just had this sort of setting and I had this situation and I knew that I wanted to write about something strange and, you know, slightly sinister going on in this, in this park. And, and I don't know where the idea of Mr. Jones himself came from. It might have been from a nightmare, I don't know. It does feel that way. Yeah, to this day, the idea of this normal-looking man but with a panda mask just gives me shivers. So yeah, it was a sort of just the idea of it. I thought, yes, that is something I want to write about. But as I say, I didn't really know where it was going, so that the first sort of quarter of the book, I would say, was sort of written in a kind of a fever, um, where I, um, was, you know, the words were rushing out and it all felt like it was flowing really well, but I didn't really have any clear idea of where it was going. Um, so yeah, I, I, I realized after about writing 25,000 words that, um, it was, you know, it was— I was— I'd enjoyed it, but you know, what now? And I actually, I came up with an idea for how to conclude it, which I'm very glad I didn't follow through with because I don't think it would have worked as well. And I actually decided that I couldn't think of a good way to continue the story, so I put it aside. I just left it for about 6 and a half years. Wow. I think with me there's always, there are always ideas bubbling around, so it wasn't as if I just stopped writing. I had lots of other projects on the go, so it was just that I had other ideas that were, that seemed more, that had a clearer structure and I knew where I was going with them. So it was only in the second lockdown in December 2020 that I went back to it and I looked at it because I was looking for something to write. And I just thought, this has got so much energy and so much potential. It would be so sad if it was just to sort of, you know, I was never going to do anything with it and finish it. So I started thinking again, and I came up with a new kind of ending for the story. And I thought it worked really well, but it did cause a few problems because there would be a hell of a lot of new explanation I'd have to provide at the end. And I hate reading books where you get to near the end and suddenly there's pages and pages of what they call exposition. Where the author simply tells you everything that the narrator didn't know. Because obviously when you're dealing with an unreliable narrator like Ben, the main character in the story, there's a hell of a lot that he doesn't know about what's going on. And that's part of the fun, that's part of the mystery and the suspense. But at the same time, it does lead to problems in that, you know, at the end you've got to explain it all. So then I came up with a solution, which was to introduce a second character called Roy. Who would narrate his own story. Every 3 chapters he would have a little bit of his own, and at first the reader won't have a clue what the connection between Roy and Ben is. They wouldn't know why this story is being interwoven with Ben's, but hopefully it'll mean that when it comes to the resolution at the end of the book the reader will be slightly ahead of Ben and they will know a little bit more, so it won't take as much exposition, if you like. Well, that's what I was saying. I kept on thinking that I was, you know, I read so many books, I must, I can see where this is going, and then I just kept on getting it wrong. But that was the pull of it. That's basically why I've been stopping in the middle of the street and just kind of reading for a bit while people pass. I actually miss I missed my connection. I was actually standing on Hammersmith Station at one point waiting for my train back to Richmond, and it went straight past me. I didn't— well, it stopped, and I just carried on reading and didn't even realize it was there. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, I was 30 minutes late home after that. Now on today's show, we're going to be talking to the author of Urban Scarecrows, Jim Chambers. Jim Chambers is originally from Derby in the East Midlands, the eldest of three, born to Dick and Barbara Chambers. His working-class roots have been a source of pride, his father an enduring point of the person he most admired in life. But the life of a butcher was not for him. Instead, he followed a developing interest in business, subsequently enjoying a career in and around the education market. Now with more time on his hands, he follows his twin passions of walking and writing, self-publishing a novel, Paradigm Shift, in 2013, and which foretold the Brexit outcome years before any referendum. The Hope Affair was published in April 2021, and his latest novel, Urban Scarecrows, was published in May this year. He's a family man, having been married to Barbara for 45 years. He has 4 grown-up children: Nicola, Andrew, Christopher, and Elizabeth, and at last count, 4 grandchildren. So a busy guy. Jim has a talent for really making you think about things in the world of politics and telling a great and gripping story amongst it. The Labour Party election victory of 2019 ushers into power a radical socialist government which swiftly mutates to a British form of totalitarian Marxism in its quest for social justice and equality. Dominic Green, the main character in Urban Scarecrows, a Labour Party activist and celebrity chef, is caught up in the economic and social crisis as the country lurches towards civil war. Taunted by the jibes of his volatile Spanish wife Rosa, he moves from denial to acceptance, to opposition, and becomes a totemic media figure in the struggles. His marriage is in terminal decline. Rosa cannot forgive his philandering in— or his support of the government. His family falls apart as Rosa leaves him, and one son is incarcerated while the other attempts to liberate his sibling. Labelled as a turncoat terrorist, he is hunted by the brutal SNPS State Police, whose attempts to subjugate the population includes urban scarecrowing. Who can he trust as he goes on the run whilst assisting the resistance movement? Will Rosa forgive him as she tracks his public pronouncements and his efforts to free their son? Will Dominic escape the clutches of the SNPS as the net closes. Will international outrage translate into military intervention as sections of the armed forces rebel, and can Dominic survive and recover his relationship with Rosa and their surviving son? An absolutely fantastic book, and I am so looking forward to chatting to Jim. Right, it's now time for us to introduce you to today's guest, the author of Urban Scarecrows, Jim Chambers, a a dystopian novel with the added twist of retrospect. What if the 2019 UK governmental elections brought in a new dawn of a Labour government focusing on creating a totalitarian Marxist society dressed up as egalitarianism propelled by extreme force and agendas? Human rights abolished in the name of forming a new path. The result: a civil war with catastrophic and brutish consequences. Can a celebrity chef save the day, of all people? This is such a fantastic, in-depth work of fiction, and yet you can't help but let the reality of a doomsday potential perspective seep in. How it all takes 'Just a few dictators to plunge a country into turmoil, garnering support through coercion and fear. This is not such an alien concept in everyday life.' Jim, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Hazel, and thank you for the intro. I mean, I shall— I should— you, you do it so much better than I do, so I listened intently to that. Do you know what, I can't wait to chat to you about this book because the thing is, it seems incredibly dystopian and we see all these ridiculous kind of concepts on Netflix and yet it's happening already in other countries and the way— the knowledge you have of the whole process, as I said in my intro, just makes it sound that much more believable and, you know, we're only ever one choice or two in the government, over suddenly just having to deal with some sort of doomsday. It's scary, isn't it? Yeah. You know, my wife and I were debating this. We've been married for, well, we're coming up to our emerald anniversary, and it's obviously a condition of our ongoing marriage that she reads my outpourings, so We had the 'it could never happen here, could it?' and 'let's hope for goodness' sake that it couldn't.' But then you don't have to go that far to, to look at sort of outrageous things happening, you know, in the continent of Europe, you know, in Ukraine, I mean, or over in America, in the free world, you know, the shooting of innocent children in school. And you don't have to go back very far into history to see the all manner of dastardly things were perpetrated in the United Kingdom as well. Oh yeah, I mean, there's a fantastic book out there about— and I'll change the title of the book slightly to make it more radio-friendly— and it's '52 Times the British Were Complete Silly Sausages. And we kind of gloss over the fact that, you know, Britain was the one making horrific and brutish decisions, very similar to urban scarecrows, but we seem to have glossed over it and focus on other countries that seem to be doing things that are more captured in mainstream media. And do you know what, I mean, it's— I've been talking to so many people about urban scarecrows because, you know, it does feel like something out of a movie, and yet people talk about, um, oh, The Handmaid's Tale. Have you seen that? I haven't actually, um, my wife has, she's a fan. Yes, and it's incredible. You sit there with complete and utter outrage at what's happening to everyday people in modern-day life, and then you go, well, actually, no, this exact thing is happening in some countries in the world today, and we just seem to gloss over it because sometimes we just can't cope with the reality of what's going on. But this is what I found so riveting about this book, and I must say congratulations because it is fantastic, but it does just feel like a couple of wrong decisions in government veering off into a particular path. We're only a couple of decisions away from something like this happening. It's scary, absolutely scary, and by the way, I'm going to sign you up because I think you make a great advocate. Have you got so much feedback? I mean, it was released in May, wasn't it? Yeah, yes, that's right, end of April, beginning of May, so we've been going through, to be honest with you, the phase that I most dislike, which is the promotion of your work. You know, I've worked in business all my life, so promoting products and companies and all of that is not alien to me, but when you produce your, you know, your own work in a book, it's so personal. So I've really loathed doing that, if I'm honest, and I'm not very good with social media, and I've had to— I've been on a sharply steep learning curve. So I'm not at the top of that, but I've made some progress. Well, this is your third book, isn't it? Is it your third? It is, yeah. The first one was really, really, it was, I got a bit more time on my hands, so I just ploughed on and did what I wanted to do, despite my daughter saying, "You really ought to learn a few tricks of the trade, you know, Dad." Can't she do it for you? Yeah, well, she is a marketeer, and she's, so she has me, she has has her uses for sure. But after that I worked with a writing coach in Derbyshire who was wonderful. She was, you know, she was very, very taxing to work with but also inspirational, very talented lady. Well, how did you come up with the idea of this concept? Because what struck me through this book, obviously with it being published in May. You finished this book a while ago, and yet you were kind of foretelling Putin and certain things that are happening within the Chinese government about how they would support this ridiculous issue that's happening in Urban Scarecrows. And it's like you kind of pinpointed who would be supporting who already, and it's like Do you study politics? Do you have a little bit of a love of possibly predicting just how dangerous and dodgy people in government are and those who run the country? I've met a few ministers in my time and I'm often sort of just amazed by how how ignorant they often are about whatever their department is they represent, and the arrogance, whether they're blue or red, you know. So I've done that, and I just take an interest in politics. And to be honest, you know, we all know that roll on a few years, there'll be another Putin, or, you know, or another Trump, dare one say. You know, history just has a way of repeating itself. It does, doesn't it? And we were all up in arms and incredibly shocked about what Trump managed to get away with, and it somehow ended up being a form of entertainment. And yet he was one of the most powerful people in the world. I mean, I think that's how Boris Johnson will be remembered as well, somebody who did a few extraordinarily difficult things that possibly only he could have done. But who conducted himself in an outrageous manner that offended large portions of the population, right? So, but we are also a nation of, especially, well, the British, we like to get offended by anything and everything, don't we? And none of us believe in the same thing, so we're all, there's always going to be outrage somewhere. Now, are you talking about the greater British public or about the media? Because it does strike me that media is sort of inculcated with this need to redefine history, with this leaning towards soft left, ultra-liberal in their attitude, and this book was written slightly in reaction to that because I'm a character who likes to row against the tide a little bit. Well, I think a lot of what we hear about politics is based on moral panic and selling, you know. I constantly have to deal with, like, I have an early, well, a preteen and a 15-year-old, and he is constantly telling me how woke he is and how he knows about all these political issues. But he gets all the information from inaccurate sources, but they tell it in a way to make you want to listen. And to like and subscribe and to follow and to be influenced by these people that either haven't got a clue or are just saying what people want to hear. And it is incredibly scary. And I mean, I did have the argument the other day with my 15-year-old, and he came out with completely incorrect facts about politics. And his statement was, "You adults, all you want to do is pretend that we just don't know anything." 'Maybe things on the internet are real, Mum.' And I said, 'No, they are, but you have to know where to find the information. There's so much incorrect and skewed information out there, and you can find, in theory, the proof of anything on the internet if you look hard enough. It's just where you're looking.' It's scary how the media can focus on whatever it chooses to. Absolutely, and as a father of four, I think it's really important we listen to our young people, but also recognize we were young once and once had views that we've probably modified somewhat as we've— years have slipped by, dare I say. And I have to say, you know, my daughter and my son, they've got sons and daughters they're bringing up, and I don't envy their task nor yours in the world of social media and some of the pressures and some of the things they're exposed to. It just scares me, to be honest. Oh yes, and they don't— I understand it. Do you know what, when I was 15, my source of information wouldn't have been the BBC, and the Daily Mail definitely used to be a, you know, a source of entertainment 10, 15 years ago, no matter how incorrect it was. But getting teenagers to want to read proper news outlets just it's not geared towards them, so they're getting their information from people who have found fame and an influential platform from doing Love Island, which, you know, does not give them a theoretical knowledge of politics or the world. No, absolutely, and I think if you roll on a little bit, it's really quite, quite disturbing, quite distressing how free speech seems to be in short supply in British universities and American universities. And, you know, that's exactly where, you know, it's one of the institutions that should absolutely be a vehicle for young people speaking their mind but being tested by alternative viewpoints in the world. And yet, paradoxically, what in theory saved humankind in Britain, in urban scarecrows, was influencers and celebrities and the media used properly. Yeah, I think that's absolutely fair observation, but, you know, the other big thing to my mind, and I think this is very, very true today and has been, is one of the things that saves our country, I think, from the sort of extremism and that is the great silent British majority. Because you know what, most people simply want to bring up their kids, they want them to have a good education, they want to have good health, they want them to have opportunity, and we as a generation always want the next generation to do a little bit better than we did. Yeah. And common decency and common sense is what imbues the vast majority of people. Right, today's guest, we have Amanda Robson, the author of recently released The Party Guest. One dream holiday, four guests, one party to die for, and a birthday to remember, but would they rather forget? Ralph is turning 45 and the only gift he wants is his ex-wife. Gemma, his trophy girlfriend, or more of a holding-place girlfriend, won't let anything ruin her plans for an engagement. Sarah, the ex-wife, has agreed to attend Ralph's party with her new man in tow, and Jack, her partner, will stop at nothing to keep Sarah out of her ex-husband's clutches. Sounds complicated already. However, it is a celebration like no other. Planned to a tee. However, the whole extended family, hangers-on, those trying to fit in, those with access to Grind and past grievances threatening to be aired and realized, all in one villa on the beautiful Amalfi Coast. What could possibly go wrong? But by the end of the trip, two people will be dead. At this birthday party to remember, will anybody unwrap the truth? And sometimes the truth is hardest Digest. 2 weeks, 4 guests, 1 party to die for. The Party Guest. Amanda, thank you for joining us on Get Booked. Oh, thank you, it's lovely to be here. You are the don of domestic noir, in my opinion. Well, thank you, that's a very nice thing to say. I love this book. I remember when, because you've been on Get Booked a few times, I remember you saying that the next one was going to be set somewhere differently. Somewhere different to usual, and I was like, oh no, I love it that it's all based around Twickenham and Richmond and whatnot, but there was still that kind of edge of Twickenham in there, and there was still just all of your usual traits that are just so incredibly hypnotic, and I just, I couldn't put it down. It's definitely your brand, it's just, I love it. You must be So pleased with it. Yeah, no, I enjoyed writing it and it's lovely that you take the time to read all the authors' books because, you know, a lot of journalists just, they don't have time, they don't read before they interview you. So I think it's wonderful that you take such care of reading all the authors' works. Oh, thank you. I do love it. It's the second I see on Instagram you've got a new book coming out and I'm like, "Manda!" No, no, I'm glad. I'm really glad you enjoyed it because I did find it quite tricky actually this time because is slightly different from my other books because, at least writing it was, because my— every character I had to write as if they could have done it. So usually I do have a few characters that you think might not have done it, or it could just usually be between, say, two characters. But this time, all I've written is if any of the characters that are still alive could have done it. And I found that quite complicated at times and quite a challenge, but I enjoyed it. Also, with it being set— the crime's actually set in Italy, so that was quite a challenge really with me. I had visited the area and I had actually stayed in the villa that I've set it in, but obviously I'm not as familiar with the police procedure side of things and the court procedure and stuff, so I found that quite tricky. I was quite intrigued to figure out how much you did actually know of incarcerated, what it's like to be incarcerated over in Italy, because you do go into detail a little bit on that, and it sounded horrific. And I was thinking, yeah, no, it did. I was shocked. I have, I hate, I have to admit, but because I've not done one thing or another, I did have to do all my research online. Unfortunately, I had visited the area where it was set and stayed in that villa on the Amalfi Coast just before lockdown, you know, the summer of 2019. But when it came to the prisons, that I had to just do a load of reading on the internet, and I was absolutely horrified by what I found about the prisons in Italy going back not so long ago. I was— so I— it is based on facts, but it's from internet research. But I thought it was horrendous, the conditions that the prisoners were having to live in. Oh, and I mean, even though my character's a real baddie, while he was in prison, I felt sorry for him when I was writing it. There are different kind of baddies, and I know that sounds quite controversial, but there are people who are affected by crimes of passion, and there are people who just go out there to cause as much pain and inflict as much misery and destruction as possible. And we shouldn't, you know, murder's murder. But it's— I don't know, there was still that element. I can't say too much without giving away kind of too much of the storyline. But, you know, we all have our own past that affects how we behave, I guess. And you must have had fun with the characterization of such— you know, there was quite a lot of different people stuck in this villa. And how much fun did you have creating these different characters? Oh yeah, no, I enjoyed it very much. I enjoyed the girlfriend Gemma because I thought, you know, I enjoyed writing her because I thought she was rather spoilt and vain. And I, you know, I have met people like that. So I rather liked her. And Janice, poor old Janice, that's the main, one of the main protagonists daughter who's rather unhinged, and I enjoyed writing her, and some of her angst is based a little bit on some of my own angst I've had over the years, and not in such an extreme form, but— Not murderous thoughts then? No. Although your writing would depict otherwise. Yeah, no, no, no, I did have a lot of fun. I had a lot of fun, and I liked my main character Sarah. I thought she was nice. She was my favourite. I thought she was supposed to be nice, but you know, often I haven't, I don't actually find it very easy to read my reviews because if people criticise me I get quite upset. So I'm a bit of a coward about reading reviews. I know some authors read all their reviews and they really take note. But I, but in the past when I have read my reviews or sometimes I've been quite surprised with a character that I thought was a really nice character that was supposed to be the goodie and someone said, "Oh, I hated that particular character." So I don't know. I'm not sure the writer is always the best judge of what other people make of their characters, but I liked writing Sarah. She was my rock. She was my goodie, really. Oh, she was a goodie. And I kind of, because she doesn't live in theory too far away from me, I kind of imagined her being in half the cafes that I've been in. And to be honest, I think you've probably amalgamated about 20 people I've seen just walking down Church Street. Definitely. I would get back to Twickenham at the end, wouldn't I? After all the problems, she comes back to live in Twickenham. The lady lived in Twickenham in the first place, so yeah, I always sort of come back to Twickenham somehow. I'd have been bereft if you hadn't. Yeah, well, I do, I do love Twickenham. It's so beautiful, such a lovely place to live. It's so friendly. Yeah, it was so friendly, and yet there's so much that's going on underneath the surface.. And I do find that quite interesting because there's, it's real places. But rather bizarrely, as I was reading The Party Guest and you were talking about one of the characters being the head teacher of the Richmond School, and I'd just been to an open day with my son to the Richmond College, which is obviously just a stone's throw away, and I was like going, ah, I see. And I was walking around thinking, hmm, they were both working here, but they're not, obviously. But do you know, you just I mean, I absolutely love your writing. There's something about reading books where you're talking about Sandy's the fishmonger's, which is real, and you're talking about this particular school and how she decided to go to another school, and then you're talking about a certain pub at the Old Meeting, which I know is one of your favorite pubs in Twickenham anyway. It all just kind of brings it round, and I was actually, I was walking with a really good friend of mine the other day, and he went, "Oh, that house is nice." I went, "Do you know what? I'm pretty certain that's the house where one of them— where one of the books was set, because I've always imagined that that's where it is because of where— of how you've described it." And there's something quite nice, I mean, about being able to kind of involve yourself in what you kind of actually know is a little bit more real, the real places. They're real shops, they're real streets, they're real houses, they're real schools. Is there a reason why you go straight for that? Does it help with your imagination, or is there another reason? I don't know, I just, I like to have a place in my head when I'm writing. I like to be able to see it. So obviously it helps if you know it, really. So, but I mean, I haven't only just written about Tokyo. I mean, you know, when I wrote about the Amalfi Coast, it was outside Priano. I had had a few weeks there. The only thing is about that, it had to be loosely based on that because the cliff walks for all the terrible accidents. I think actually the villa we stayed in, I don't think the cliff walks were quite so dangerous as I made out. It was just loosely based, but I'm not sure it matters too much. But I think it's good to have a clear idea in your mind when you're writing of what the scene would look like. So, I mean, quite a lot of writers do write about their own area or what they know, don't they? Well, they do, and some fantastic writers out there. You sometimes, you read books and you don't actually know whether you've seen the movie or not because the writing is so good. So add into that when you actually know the area and you just feel so incredibly involved. I must say that I love reading about the Amalfi Coast. I'm going to Italy in the summer and whatnot, but it was like the mentions of— there's something about when your area is mentioned as well that you just kind of feel, oh, warm and cozy. I did a guest last week actually on GetBooked. He'd set the book in Italy, in London, and in Huddersfield, and Huddersfield is my hometown. And again, I was just like, oh, I've got like quite a few weeks of just reading books about places where I'm extremely familiar with. And it's weirdly quite heartwarming and good for your well-being. It kind of just makes you feel a little bit more close. The only problem is if you write about somewhere that you think you know and someone says, oh, that's not like that or something, I don't know. But I suppose because I've lived in Twickenham for like 40 years, so I'm not likely to get that wrong, but you know. But it's also fiction, so it would be right if you got it wrong because it's completely down to poetic license. Yeah, well, I've got one close friend and I've known— well, she lived next door to— in the house next door to me when I was a baby and she was a little girl. And I've known her forever, so she visits all my house, she knows everything. So when she reads my books, she sometimes says, "That house, that's a mix of the house you lived in when you were in your 20s and the house you lived in." And she knows every little bit. She goes through my books guessing, you know, she's great fun to talk to. But she— sometimes I forget, you know, I forget what I've written, and then she suddenly reminds me that, you know, I base something on something that she remembers me doing or whatever. It's quite funny.