On the final episode of this series of the Penguin Podcast, Marble Hall Murders author Anthony Horowitz tells us how, when a famous actress asks you to write another novel, you do as you're told! Plus things heat up as we discuss and recommend the best books for summer reading, including the latest Booker Prize winner.
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Episode 6 transcript
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Rhianna Dhillon:
Hello. Welcome back to Ask Penguin, the podcast series from Penguin Books. I'm Rhianna Dhillon, and I'm recording this from the Penguin offices in London, which is genuinely one of my favourite places in the world. Every time I come here, there's a new pile of beautiful-looking books to peruse, and the office is always filled with people who want to talk to me about these books, from the authors themselves to the people who work here who live and breathe books.
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The year is finally turning, and as I'm recording this, we're heading full pelt towards British summer. And whether we're looking forward to balmy weekends spent outdoors or the more traditional rain drenched days which make the perfect excuse for getting through some reading, it's got us thinking about the best kind of books to read as the summer holidays approach. Which stories best lend themselves to summer? Is it a romantasy series, swiftly inhaled while swinging gently in a hammock? And if it is, check out our episode from April on romantic fiction for some suggestions. Or perhaps a fiendishly clever murder mystery to see you through some summer evenings. And if it's the latter, then we absolutely have the guest for you today. I'm really excited to be joined by author, journalist, and screenwriter, Anthony Horowitz. Anthony is one of the most prolific and successful writers working in the UK. He's the author of over 60 books, including the best-selling teen spy series, Alex Rider, which has sold over 20 million copies worldwide. He's been widely praised for his murder mysteries, which include two new Sherlock Holmes novels, The House of Silk and Moriarty, and of course his award-winning novel, Magpie Murders, and its sequel, Moonflower Murders, have been made into a BBC drama starring Lesley Manville as the editor-turned-sleuth, Susan Ryeland. And luckily for fans, we also have a third book in the series, Marble Hall Murders. Anthony, thank you so much for joining us.
Anthony Horowitz:
It's a pleasure.
Rhianna Dhillon:
It's so exciting to have you in the studio. Now, for listeners who have not come across Magpie Murders and Moonflower Murders, where have they been?
Anthony Horowitz:
Indeed.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Or perhaps they might have forgotten some of the specific details. Can they jump straight into Marble Hall Murders?
Anthony Horowitz:
Absolutely. Marble Hall Murders is the third book in a trilogy, but it's a stand-alone novel, and you don't need to have read the first two to understand it. Although I have said in the first page of the new book that if you haven't read Magpie Murders, you should because the secret of that book is revealed in the new one.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Yes, which is quite a massive secret.
Anthony Horowitz:
Well, it's an interesting thing to have done, which is to bring back the killer in Magpie Murders and to look at that person some years later and to have them involved in the new plot - you'll notice how careful I'm being not to give a gender or any clue at all as to who that person is. You know, the whole thing about these books, they're big books, they're quite complicated double murder mysteries in two different time zones, two dimensions and all sorts of things going on, so the last thing we need is any more complexity, any more sort of back referencing or added information you need to sort of have to enjoy the read.
Rhianna Dhillon:
So as you've just mentioned, each book has a book within a book.
Anthony Horowitz:
Indeed.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Within the book. And Susan, an editor, finds herself involved in these real murder mysteries that are somehow connected to the hugely successful murder mysteries that she's editing. So you are planning at least two books in one.
Anthony Horowitz:
Haha. You're making it sound even more complicated than it is, I think, I mean, effectively, it's quite simple. Susan Ryeland is an editor. She has worked for many years with a writer called Alan Conway, who created a character called Atticus Pünd, who appeared in many, many murder mysteries set in the 1950s. And unfortunately, Alan Conway, being a mean-spirited sort of man, hid unpleasant secrets in his books. And when he himself was murdered, Susan had to investigate that death and discover that the clue to his murder was inside the book he had written. That is the general format of all three books. By the time we get to the third book, Alan Conway is now gone and forgotten and not very much missed, I have to say. And his place has been taken by a young writer called Eliot Crace, and what he is writing is a continuation novel, which is something I do know a bit about. And he is replacing Alan Conway, but he too has secrets connected to his own grandmother, Miriam Crace, the greatest children's writer who ever lived. He believes she was murdered, and so he does the same trick as Alan Conway, quite deliberately. He hides the secret of her death inside his book, which leads to all sorts of problems, both for him and for Susan.
Rhianna Dhillon:
I mean, so succinct.
Anthony Horowitz:
I try to be.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Still complicated!
Anthony Horowitz:
Well, the thing about these books is, you know, I always say that they're a little bit like a watch. You know, if you were to open the watch on your wrist and look inside it, you would first of all find it, you know, a mass of springs and cogs and wheels and diamonds and zinc and whatever else - it’s quartz, not zinc - inside a watch, and you would never be able to put it back together again because it's so complicated. But glance at the face and you can tell the time in one second. So that is what I hope my novels do, but just by reading them, you just follow the story and don't need to worry about the inner workings.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Oh, absolutely, but from your perspective, as the watchmaker, as the writer, what is the planning process for you? How complex does it get? How do you go about laying it all out?
Anthony Horowitz:
Well, in order to make it an easy read, I spend an awful lot of time structuring and thinking about how the book is going to work, who all the characters are, how they interconnect, where the clues are, you know, the whole development of the book. I probably spend longer thinking about the book and planning it, than I do even writing it, because, you know, everything has to be in its place and I want the clues, for example, to be in the open, I don't want to hide anything. But the reader has every opportunity of solving this crime at the same time as Susan Ryeland or Atticus Pünd, and all the clues are there. I hate books that cheat and don't give you all the information that you need. So, the structuring, it takes the form of a notebook. I don't do post it notes on the walls or cards or other things that some writers do. I just have a notebook which I fill with questions and diagrams and ideas and clues, ingredients. I have a page called Ingredients. This is going to happen. I don't know where it's going to happen yet, but I know that this is going to be part of the story. And then gradually, gradually it all comes together in my head, and by the time I start writing it, something rather marvellous has happened. I've been living with, shall we say, a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, but suddenly I see the picture. And then I can put it all together.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Right. And that's so interesting that you mention the notebook because one of your characters, Eliot, who is a writer, has a notebook, and in that notebook, there are loads of questions.
Anthony Horowitz:
That is absolutely correct.
Rhianna Dhillon:
So you're kind of giving your process to some of your characters?
Anthony Horowitz:
Well, you said earlier that this is a book within a book within a book, three books, and it is true that there is a sort of a Russian doll going on. We have at the very core of it, a fictitious character created called Atticus Pünd. And he is created by another fictitious character called Eliot Crace in this instance. But both those characters have actually been created by a third character who is me, and I am the outside doll, if you like, and there are lots and lots of aspects of my life sort of concealed inside or outside the books, and I'll give you a couple of examples; Susan Ryeland has a flat in Crouch End in North London, where I lived for 16 very happy years. She's just come back from Crete - I spent an awful lot of time in Crete and know it very, very well. The publishing house is a little bit like our Cornerstone. It's a little bit like, you know, where we're sitting now, and some of the characters in the book do have a certain vague similarity to some of the people who work with me, though in a benign way, not in Alan Conway way.
Rhianna Dhillon:
I was going to say, how flattering!
Anthony Horowitz:
No, no. So you're right to say that some of my own, my life and my own ideas and thoughts and how I write are also part of the story because I am the third doll on the on the very outside. The readers need not worry. I make no appearances, unlike in the Hawthorne books where I'm actually a character.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Yes, exactly. So, what about tone then when you are writing from, I mean, we are seeing the sort of the whole of the book from Susan's perspective, but then of course, we go into Eliot's writing and another character's writing as well. So how does your tone change depending on who is authoring at that time?
Anthony Horowitz:
Well, I very much enjoy writing as Susan Ryeland, and the majority of the book I think is in her voice and her attitudes, and it's very liberating, I find, to write as a woman and as an editor, and so she informs an awful lot of the tone of it. When we get into Eliot's book, the difficulty there is that Eliot is said to be not a great writer, but I cannot write poorly, it has to be well written. So, in a sense, I'm cheating when I deal with Eliot and his book, because it has to be good effectively. There isn't actually an awful lot of it in Marble Hall Murders, it only takes up, I think, about one third of the total page count in the book, but generally the tone is sort of…I love writing, and I believe that writing should be elegant and should be, you know, well-crafted and, so generally speaking, I very much shy away from any writing that is bad or boring or over descriptive or unnecessary. I'm quite rigorous in just sort of making sure that there's always a flow.
Rhianna Dhillon:
I'm really fascinated by the way that you give Susan as an editor, this voice, she sort of picks apart the books that she's editing as she's supposed to and how that might affect a reader if they're sort of almost being taught by you to think from an editor perspective when they're reading your books. Are you inviting them to critique your writing as well?
Anthony Horowitz:
Oh, definitely not. I hope, I just want them to enjoy it and I wouldn't like to think that my books are in any way of some kind of didactic exercise in how to write a book. No, I mean, you know, Susan Ryeland was originally based on an editor of my initial Orion books, a very famous editor called Susan Lamb, and there's a joke in that incidentally. It's sort of a typical Alan Conway joke with that Ryeland is a breed of lamb. So that's where she came from. But now I'm edited here at Cornerstone by Selina Walker, who is a brilliant editor and whom I love working with, and a lot of her voice is suddenly in the book because she says things to me about my work and I sort of note it, and I nearly always, I'd say 99.9% of the time, do what she wants and make the changes. I live in fear of her, of course. As does every writer with their editor. But then her voice is very strongly in there too. But the books are not an exercise in how to write. I think that would be awful. I mean they're just simply, they do look at the world of murder mysteries and why we read them and the sort of how they're created and the sort of the difficulties of writing them, but in a very sort of quiet way, but the story, the murder, the characters, that's what this this is all about.
Rhianna Dhillon:
And you kind of have this tongue-in-cheek thing which you've already mentioned about this being a continuation because Eliot is writing essentially trying to use the voice of Alan Conway.This is something that you have had experience with yourself. So, tell us about your experience working on, like, those big properties.
Anthony Horowitz:
Well, I mean, the first one was Sherlock Holmes, The House of Silk, which came to me, I think it must be about 15 years ago now. I can't actually remember, but it was a long time ago when I was asked to do it. And it was a wonderful job to do, because I would only write a continuation novel about or follow in the footsteps of a writer whom I really admired, and Conan Doyle is up there very high. I was given The Complete Sherlock Holmes when I was 17 years old, and it told me, you're going to write crime. You've got to write crime because this is the world you want to be in, and the books are still masterful. They're brilliantly, brilliantly written. And my job when I wrote the book was to do a new story, but to do it very much in the voice of Doyle, to ventriloquise. You know, that's the secret of writing a continuation novel. It's the opposite of a novel because in a novel, the author is egocentric. It's all about me, it's my book, my voice, my world. I think when you're writing a continuation of it, it's the exact opposite of that. I am in the shadow of a writer who is much, much better than me, and all I can do is raise my game, look at how that writer works, what his method is, what sort of language he uses, what his tricks are, the tricks of the trade, and try and emulate them. But never ever tear the envelope, never do anything that Doyle would not have done himself.
And then I moved on, of course, to James Bond, which I did three continuation novels in that world, and the same held good, you know, Fleming, although people know the films now much better than they do the books, the books are wonderful. They are superbly written, he's a great action writer, and just as Doyle encapsulates the 19th century Edwardian London, you know, with the smoke and the Stradivarius and the cobblestones and the Growlers and all that, Fleming absolutely captures this country, the United Kingdom, just after the war with the sort of, the echoes, the glory of the war, of winning the war and the heroism and the sense of self-worth, self-importance, self-importance and yet the knowledge that it's beginning to slip away, that we are actually sort of declining now and that I think is why Bond is instantly such a powerful figure because he exemplifies the United Kingdom, Britain, you know, at its very best.
Rhianna Dhillon:
The location, Marble Hall, the Crace estate: how important do you think, I think especially in British murder mystery, how important is the location?
Anthony Horowitz:
Location is extremely important to me. I mean, not only location but milieu. When I was thinking of doing the third book, which happened very quickly when Lesley Manville, the star of the series, said she wanted to do a third TV series, so I had to write a book to adapt. That's how it all started.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Does that normally happen?
Anthony Horowitz:
No, it's very, very rare, and it's an extraordinary thing because when a star of that magnitude says she's going to do a third season, everybody gets excited and the finance falls into place and you basically get the green light. But my problem was, not so much, you asked about the situation, sort of where it was going to be set, but in what world was I, what was I going to write about, because murder books aren't just about murder. Murder is in effect boring, but what is interesting is where all the people live, where they are connected, what they do, who they are. And I spent a lot of time, like three or four weeks, sort of wandering around with my dog, who is my, sort of whenever I need to think of an idea, I take the dog for a walk and so the dog has had some very, very long walks at the start of this process, trying to work out what the milieu would be and suddenly it occurred to me that I had worked with various literary estates. We've talked about Ian Fleming and Conan Doyle, but I also have worked with the Agatha Christie estate, and I've had connections with the Roald Dahl and even the Hergé estate for Tintin. So I suddenly thought to myself, what an interesting milieu to be the family, the descendants, of somebody who was massively famous, sort of an Enid Blyton or an Agatha Christie or a Dahl, you know, these gods of literature, what must it be like to be their grandson or granddaughter, their great nephew, their great niece, to be sort of two generations removed, but still carrying the torch for them, for somebody you may never have met and may not even have liked, but you cannot dare to say these people were horrible because everybody loves them. So I thought that was a really interesting milieu and that unlocked Marble Hall Murders.
But then you do start thinking about the physical locations and obviously it was going to be London. I had decided that I'd done enough of Crete and for Susan to be investigating a murder she had to give up the hotel and come back home to Crouch End. So that was going to be part of it. But then I have a 1950s story, the Atticus Pünd story, and I wondered where that would be set, and I decided it would be the south of France because the south of France gave me images that I could sort of have in my head; the sunshine burning off the Mediterranean, palm trees and beaches, men in sort of, you know, those Panama hats and white linen suits and cocktails and lawns and old chateaux, all that stuff and as soon as you begin to feel that and to see that and to live inside that, it's much, much easier for the mechanics of the book, the murder, who did it, the clues, etc. to come to the surface.
Rhianna Dhillon:
And how does class play into that? Because you have these grand mansions and we're often in the sort of like the upper echelons of society. And we kind of, we see that repeated a lot through kind of historic murder mystery writers. And why is that such at the heart of these sorts of books?
Anthony Horowitz:
It's a very good question. One I haven't been asked before. So let me extemporise, if I may; I think that first of all, Agatha Christie is very much the sort of the template here, and one of the things that I don't like about her writing, or rather like less about her writing, because I admire her very, very much, is the fact that, you know, the characters, sort of the retired colonel, the actress, the secretary, the businessman, they're all quite, sort of from a very narrow walk of life. And I think the truth is that murder of a sort that you read in these books, does tend to be quite specialised. I mean, you know, people who actually sit down and think about how they're going to kill somebody and plan it and go through the machinations of it are quite likely to be sort of quite middle to middle upper class because they've got the time and the energy. These aren't murders that are committed in shall we say, a crime novel where, I don't know, somebody picks up a knife in a pub and stabs somebody else or smashes a bottle and kills them or whatever, or has a fist fight. So, it's a very interesting question, is murder class oriented? I mean does murder itself belong to a social class, and are there different types of murder that different types of people do? And I think that it's a dangerous area because I'm not suggesting that people who work in a factory are less clever or less or…people who live in a smart house are more evil than other people, but it is certainly an interesting area, one I might explore in another book. Good question.
Rhianna Dhillon:
I'm delighted. I hope I'm acknowledged.
Anthony Horowitz:
No royalties.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Marble Hall Murders particularly does force you to think about what is a great murder mystery, what is a great crime thriller? Because you question it within the book. You sort of, you talk about the idea that people only, again, perhaps quite tongue-in-cheek, people only read them for the ending. Do you think that that's true? And also, how does that impact the writing? You talked about structure earlier?
Anthony Horowitz:
I don't think you're being quite fair with that summary of what I'm saying in the book. I don't think people read crime fiction just for the ending, but it is a genre in which the ending is hugely important. I mean, more important than in any other genre, because if you come to the end of a crime novel, and this one has 550 pages, Marble Hall Murders, if you get to page 550 and you suddenly realise that actually it was impossible that that person was the killer, and if that person was the killer, then you weren't really given enough clues or that the writer has not played fair with you or it was too obvious the other way around, or, you know, you guessed it on page 10 so why have I bothered reading the other 540 pages? I think then that is a very, very major disappointment, and it somehow negates the whole journey of the book, all the pages that lead to the end. And I can't think of any book, I mean, you know, John Fowles' The Magus is a book where many people say the ending is a terrible let down and that is my memory of it, but it is still a brilliant book. It's a wonderful book, which I, you know, recommend to anybody who hasn't read it. Set, of course, in Greece. So a romance, many books can disappoint in the end, but you can still enjoy the journey. But I think a crime novel without a satisfactory solution is dead in the water.
Rhianna Dhillon:
I hesitate, I mean, I haste to say that it was a character, I think, that I was quoting there from the book. I wasn't…
Anthony Horowtiz:
…no, no, but you were implying that I share my character's views. Often I don't. I mean, everything Alan Conway ever said or did I think was terrible.
Rhianna Dhillon:
I love the idea that people might think that you are like Alan Conway.
Anthony Horowitz:
Well, I think that sometimes I do get my books quoted back at me; did you really mean this? I say, no, it wasn't me, it was a character.
Rhianna Dhillon:
But, of course, you wouldn't mean it because otherwise why would you spend your life writing them if that's really what you thought?
Anthony Horowitz:
Writing has been my love and my life and my passion. It's been the sort of the reason I get up in the morning. It's the reason why I take every breath. It's in order to continue writing, and you know this, Marble Hall Murders, is, I think probably my 62nd, 63rd book now. And it's, and I'm just overjoyed that the ideas still keep coming. I've often said that writers, I think, are a little bit like sort of radios, like wirelesses, you know, the old, receivers that somehow we're not, I'm not a clever person, but I have a mind that is open to ideas. And somebody is beaming those ideas at me, and I'm just so happy that they continue to come.
Rhianna Dhillon:
For those writers who do perhaps have brilliant ideas but struggle to tie up the ends, do you have any advice?
Anthony Horowitz:
Yeah, start with the end. Just know the end. I think that it's really, really helpful, particularly in a murder mystery to know where you're going. I mean, for me, one of the problems with American films at one time was that they would test them on an audience, and if the audience didn't like the end, they would change the ending. And that was a sort of a sacrilege to me because I always think with the end, I think T.S. Eliot said ‘in our end is the beginning’, or ‘in our beginning is the end’, which one or the other, but both are true, because I think that there is an inevitability about a novel, but it comes to a point where the hero or the heroine maybe dies or they get married or the killer is revealed or the bomb goes off, or the world ends, or whatever it might be, but the whole book has led to that point irrevocably. There was no other way. So to somebody who has difficulty writing a book because, you know, they don't know how to end it, I would say start with the end, know where you're heading, and maybe the journey will be a little easier.
Rhianna Dhillon:
So we've talked a bit about the screen adaptation, so you screen write your own novels, that's correct? You adapt them, yes. So how involved do you get in the casting?
Anthony Horowitz:
I am what's called an EP, an executive producer, which means that I do have a sort of say in these matters, but actually I'm not very good at casting, so I leave it to the experts. I'm very lucky to be married to Jill Green, who is the producer of the shows, and she's brilliant and never makes any mistakes, and Rebecca Gatward, our director, is also, she comes out of the theatre, and she absolutely hits it on the nail. I mean, I've been watching some of the rushes of this new show, Marble Hall Murders, shooting even as we speak, and every scene is just perfect. It's just better than I could have imagined. So occasionally I'll make a comment, but as often as they'll just smile and ignore me anyway.
Rhianna Dhillon;
Lesley Manville obviously narrates the books as well. Did she, was she involved in narrating the audiobooks before she was cast in the TV show?
Anthony Horowitz:
She did do, I think, one half of Moonflower Murders, and I'm not quite sure how that happened because she is the busiest actor in the world. I mean, honestly, she flew home last year from Crete and was in Norway the next day shooting a film. She never ever stops. She's remarkable, and she is a friend as well, she has become so after three seasons. And this year we were very, very lucky because Tim McMullan, who plays Pünd in the series, reads one half of the book, and Lesley Manville reads the other, so you get both of them in the audio recording, and it's brilliant. I mean, that your audio, as you probably know, is shooting up in sales and such, and its importance in a book's life now, you know, it's quite soon it might even overtake print.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Do you think that will happen?
Anthony Horowitz:
It's a possibility. It's doing so fantastically well.
Rhianna Dhillon;
When you're adapting your novels, how hard on yourself are you? Do you find mistakes that you try and rectify in the TV show? Are you quite happy with what you've done? I know that some people say that writing never stops. So, when you're given the chance to almost kind of refresh it for another medium, how does that change?
Anthony Horowitz:
Well, it's not about being hard on myself, it's about being aware of what is possible and what will work on television and what won't. And of also understanding that a television audience is very different from somebody reading a book. When you're reading, you do it at your own pace. If you get a little bit lost, you can stop and go back a few pages, find the name of the character you want to check out on and remember how they are involved in the story and then continue forward. If you get a little bit tired on page 27 or 37 or whatever, you can stop and go and have a cup of tea. Television is a continuous run, I mean, yes, you can pause your TV but not many people do, you sort of go with it. And also of course it's more difficult to go backwards and to sort of rethink it. Television has to be a little bit simpler, a little bit less, a little bit more streamlined if you like. So it's just a question not of being hard or making difficult decisions, but just being aware of the differences between the two mediums and adapting them, which of course is the name of the job, so that they will work. It's a technique, television writing is much more a technique than book writing, which is more passionate and where anything goes, where you can, you know, it's your whole world. Never forget also that a book is one person's work. Well, that doesn't include, of course, all the people in the publishing house who contribute towards it, but generally speaking, the writing process is a singular process, but once you're into television, it'll be 60 different people who are making decisions about how your characters look, who they are, what the room is they live in, what car they drive, how they speak, etc. etc. what their makeup is, what their hair is like, everything. Decisions are made for you. So you are writing not the film so much as the blueprint for the film, whereas when you're writing the book, it is the whole thing.
I do have one idea for a fourth book with Susan Ryeland, but very different from Marble Hall Murders and the ones that went before. Shorter, some will be glad to hear, and very modern. But it's an idea that won't go away. And that's how it is with me. When an idea comes into my head, often it'll be gone by lunchtime and it was a bad idea and it shouldn't have ever been there. But if an idea stays there for years and years, as this one has done, then the only way to get rid of it is to write it.
Rhianna Dhillon:
And would you ever just do an Atticus Pünd series?
Anthony Horowitz;
The opposite. I might just do a Susan Ryeland series but drop Atticus Pünd. I love Atticus Pünd, but I find that, you know, doing parodies or homage to golden age crime fiction, it can only go so far until you find yourself becoming a little repetitive, and I don't want that to happen. I think the biggest fear in my writing life is repetition, formula, writing books simply because they're successful, so you, for example, might do 30 or 40 Alex Rider books because they're doing well, and then you suddenly realise that actually, you're boring your audience as much as you're boring yourself. So I like to keep moving on and I've got lots of other ideas, but as I say, just one with Susan Ryeland and possibly without Atticus Pünd.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Anthony, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast.
Anthony Horowitz:
It's been a pleasure talking to you.
Rhianna Dhillon:
So Marble Hall Murders and all of Anthony's other Penguin books are available on the link in the show notes or wherever you buy your books. And if you're hunting for a good summer read, I cannot recommend it enough.
Would you like to hear us talk to a specific author? Or maybe you want to hear recommendations for your favourite niche genre? If you’d like to influence what we cover on Ask Penguin then we’d love to hear from you! You’ll find the link to a short questionnaire in the show notes to this episode and we’d love it if you could complete it!
So that's some summer detective fiction covered, but what else might you be interested in? Our Ask Penguin inbox has been filling up with requests. So joining me and Anthony in the studio now are Penguin colleagues Alison Barrow and Olivia Mead. Welcome.
All:
Thank you.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Lovely to have you back on. So together, I'm hoping that we can put the perfect summer reading list together to see our listeners and our viewers through to September. So, before we get into some of those questions, can you just remind us what you both do here at Penguin, Alison?
Alison Barrow:
We're both publicists. We both get paid for reading books and shouting about them. So I work at Transworld, one of the divisions at Penguin, and promote mostly fiction, but some non-fiction as well. So, yeah that's my role.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Best job in the world.
Alison Barrow:
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
Olivia Mead:
I mean, we get to talk about books for a living, which is brilliant. I was a bookseller for eight years before I came to this side, so I've made a living out of doing that since I was 15, which is brilliant. So I work at Penguin General, which is another division, and I do a kind of almost 50/50 split of fiction and nonfiction.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Wonderful. Let's get into it. So a listener has asked, is summer reading still about light reading? What do you guys think?
Alison Barrow:
I think that's quite a challenging question because it depends on how you interpret light and what you're looking for, really, because hopefully in the summer, it's blue skies and sunshine anyway, so the mood is lifted. If we mean light in terms of hopeful and uplifting, why not have that all the year round, is my sense of it. And I tend towards the dark in a lot of my reading. So I love reading crime and I love reading thrillers, and that doesn't matter what time of year it is. So I suppose it depends on how you interpret light and what your particular need is.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Olivia?
Olivia Mead:
I mean, physically, light is like holding a book above you on a sun lounger. I just took like a 500-page hardback on holiday with me and it was a nightmare. But I think I think Alison is right. I think tonally, perhaps, I don't like the idea of it being light in terms of, like, less, lesser quality or something. I think that is where it gets quite pejorative. For me, sort of approaching Christmas and those sort of summer months where everyone's a bit more relaxed about things because the sun is shining, is actually a time where you can stop and slow down a bit and maybe take your time a bit more with things. So, I've always found summer a really good time to get into kind of longer, meatier, sort of maybe sagas or series or something like that because you've just got that maybe a bit more mental kind of free space you're not on autopilot. So, yes, tonally, but I just, I'm a reader that reads anything all year round.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Anthony, how about you?
Anthony Horowitz:
I agree with both of you. I'm not sure that reading needs to be seasonal. There is something though about taking a book into the sunshine and sitting beside the water where you don't want to read something that's too gloomy perhaps, that sort of, you know, fights against your mood. And the one thing I'd always say is get a book that doesn't fall apart in the sun. You notice that the glue always melts after a bit and you find yourself, especially if it's a big long book, it's pages fluttering across the beach, but yes, anything goes, and I totally agree with what Olivia said about using it as an opportunity for two or three whole weeks of actually immersing yourself in a, you know, in a solid read.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Yeah. So Astrid is looking for some recommendations for summer thrillers, please.
Anthony Horowitz:
Well, I have just finished a terrific thriller, which actually is on the table in front of me here. It's by Abir Mukherjee and it's called Hunted with this wonderful bright yellow cover. And it's got very good summer colours. But it's just a terrifically well structured, pacey, interesting and quite different thriller. I can't recommend it enough.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Tell us why it stands out to you so much.
Anthony Horowitz:
Because the main characters are not what you’d expect; they're sort of parents of missing children and the whole basis of the book is they're searching for their children before some terrible event happens. And I think that what I like about it is that both the villains of the piece and the heroes are very offbeam. I mean, it really helps that the main character is a British Muslim. And when I started reading that, I thought, gosh, is this book going to feel very different to me and am I going to find it difficult to get inside this character's head? Quite the opposite. It opens up a whole world to me. I loved it.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Wonderful. Thank you. Great recommendation, Alison.
Alison Barrow:
Well, I've just spotted on the table here, a book that I promoted earlier in the spring called The Summer Guests, which is the perfect summer read because it's set in Maine, written by the bestselling, global writer Tess Gerritson and it's a mystery centred around a lake and hidden bodies and twists and turns. So that's a perfect summer read. I think you can't go wrong with Shari Lapena, an author that we also publish. She writes about close communities. The Couple Next Door is her famous debut, but equally all of her books are based in a neighbourhood that on the surface looks incredibly peaceful and calm, but the simmering underbelly is, the crime is happening next door. So Shari gets a thumbs up. And Lisa Jewell, of course, who has a new book every summer and goodness knows how she manages that, but you can't go wrong with Lisa Jewell in the summer.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Oh great, Olivia.
Olivia Mead:
I have to give a big, we publish her but I don't work on her, but it's Nikki Smith who, for me, I hope she doesn't mind me saying this, she's like the queen of the sun lounger thriller. So her first one, which is summer in, I was about to say in a bottle, but in a book, is called The Beach Party and it is a flashback to a group of university students going on a holiday at the end of the 80s. The attention to period detail is absolutely fantastic. Oh yeah, Club Tropicana on the cassette player, it's big plastic earrings… So it's a flashback to something that happened then and then a flashforward as the crime kind of, sort of inveigles itself back into everyone's life. She's got a new one out in May, again, she does one every year, which is They Had It Coming, which is about four people, two couples, who have known each other for years. One couple sort of decides to move out, you know, into kind of, into Bali to be, you know, to live off grid and do all of that stuff and their first visitors are this other couple who come out to see them, and cracks start to unfold and it becomes apparent that everyone's been lying to each other for years. So again, you've got white sands, beaches, fantastic setting for that summer, and then just very tense relationships and sort of hidden things.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Wonderful. Great recommendations. Thank you. Vishnavi has a really good question - I really can't wait to hear what Anthony's got to say about this - do you have any recommendations of books that go with the song Summertime Sadness by Lana Del Rey?
Anthony Horowitz:
Summertime Sadness. I'm gonna go over to YouTube. Give me time to think.
Olivia Mead:
Moody, melancholic, yearning, all of that stuff and…
Rhianna Dhillon:
…kind of like Sunstruck maybe?
Olivia Mead:
Yeah, sort of like, you know, that kind of golden hour, but you're yearning at the same time. There was one book, there's only one book that I can think of really for this. Well, not one book I can think of, but one that came straight to mind, and that is The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden, which is on -very excitedly - the Women's Prize shortlist. We published her, it was also shortlisted for the Booker back at the end of last year and it's coming out in paperback. Perfect time for the summer. We are in the early 60s in the Netherlands with the shadow of World War II behind us, and very much in Isabel's world. Isabel runs on rails. Everything is just so, her house means everything to her; the tiles, the crockery, absolutely everything, she hasn't changed a jot since her parents died, and she has these two brothers whom she disapproves of, one of whom is particularly louche and always turns up with yet another woman that could not be more different from Isabel. And one time he turns up with Eva, and she is, as I said, anything Isabel is, she is not. She's got too brassy bleach blonde hair and lipstick on her teeth and her hem is lumpy and she's too loud, and they end up having to spend a month together in Isabel's prize house at the peak of a sort of heat wave. And it's sort of about how these two people and their passions live alongside each other, and it's just a little masterpiece of a book.
Alison Barrow;
I also love this book so much and there's a moment in the book where you absolutely gasp out loud where things that, you know, that lovely delicious thing that you are taken along the narrative and then suddenly the author pulls the rug and it is just exquisite. Wholeheartedly recommend that book too
Olivia Mead:
Sort of Sarah Waters meets Atonement vibe sort of thing. Yeah, it feels about 600 pages like you can't actually believe it when it's sort of 220 or something, it's just brilliant what she does.
Anthony Horowitz:
I adore Sarah Waters.
Olivia Mead:
If I could let you go away with that, that would be joy to me.
Anthony Horowitz:
A book has sprung to mind that might fit this bill. You mentioned the war, and I read a book, last year in fact, but I saw it in paperback this year, actually published by this very house, which is The Warm Hands of Ghosts by Katherine Arden, which is set in the First World War, and it's a story of a nurse whose brother is reported missing, presumed dead, and goes to the front line in order to try and find him and becomes involved with the Devil. And the idea is that the Devil is a sort of a puppeteer who is manipulating the entire First World War and is in charge of, and it's actually a very brilliant idea in itself because, you know, warfare particularly the First World War was so horrible and so diabolical with this character who is never completely explained but seems to be almost like in Cabaret, if you remember that yeah the Joel Grey character, who seems to be in charge of everything. But there is also a great wistfulness in it because underneath it all, it is a love story. The main characters are all searching for, obviously, peace, happiness and love. So I think it does fit the bill of what is being asked for and it's a book I enjoyed very much.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Wonderful. Alison.
Alison Barrow:
I'm going to take us to Louisiana. And a book that is being published as we speak in the studio today. It's a book called Our Last Wild Days, and it's written by Anna Bailey, who has experience of living in Louisiana, so really has steeped themselves in that landscape. It's a story of a young woman who comes back to the town of her birth to look after her ailing mother. And we discover that she has been estranged for some considerable time from her best friend who has recently been found dead in the swamp. So there's a mystery that unravels. There's a lot of longing and yearning for lost friendship, for the fact of no reconciliation, a lot of atonement throughout the narrative. It's a beautifully written book with really gorgeous summery vibes and a lot of darkness and sadness in it.
Rhianna Dhillon:
I mean, there has to be darkness alongside the light, right? Always. Finally, Shannon has asked what books give you all the summer feels?
Olivia Mead:
I Capture the Castle is my favourite book of all time. I've read it about 35 times. One of the things I love about that book so much is Dodie Smith does the seasons of Britain so well, and the bits in the summer there are so green and yellow when you read them, that it always makes me sort of yearn for summer, but then the winter seasons are so great too. Anyway. But the other one I want to plug, and Alison and I both know this author, and she is, I think the book world's sort of best kept secret or sort of the greatest sort of promoter for our industry and everything, and that is Harriet Evans, and her book is just there called The Treasures. She's an ex-publisher from Penguin. This is her 14th novel, I think, and it is kind of the book I've wanted her - I've read almost all of her books - to sort of write, and the only way to describe it is it's sort of a big multi-generational or the start of a big multi-generational family series based around this one house. So it's sort of Cazalet Chronicles vibes, Mary Wesley, Camomile Lawn, all of those sort of chunky, brilliant, sort of very English-feeling sort of books. I think there's a real tradition that we have for those sort of books and with the summer being a time to slow down and everything, it's just one you can totally sink into in the way that you would sort of sink into a big brass bed with a big eider down on or something like that. And it follows Alice in upstate New York in the late 60s, early 70s, and Tom in the same time period, but between Notting Hill and Scotland. And how they will inevitably meet and start this kind of new family and it'll have you laughing, crying, gasping, just happy. She's a real joy, Harriet Evans, and she wears her influences very lightly, but you can kind of see where she's sort of gathered all these things from in this sort of brilliant patchwork quilt of a book. So it is the perfect sort of read in one day, lying out on the grass, you know, with the sound of summer in the background, the smell of sun cream, it's just the book you want for that day.
Rhianna Dhillon:
That's so brilliant.
Alison Barrow:
I can't wait to read that. Actually, to echo Olivia, a classic for me and pretty much the only book I read every year, once a year, is a book called A Month in the Country by J L Carr. It is a beautifully realised story of two men who have come out of the First World War. It's set in summer in 1920. It's in the remote English countryside. It is so powerful in its brevity, it lives with you, the language is poetic. I don't want to give too much away, but it could definitely have come under the remit of a sad book as well, because there's a lot of melancholy on those pages. And then for something more uplifting and contemporary and light, a brilliant book by the American author Katherine Newman. Her new book Sandwich is just published. She sets her books in Cape Cod. It's about a family, different generations all navigating their way through life's ups, downs, ins and outs, the clashes that they have in the kitchen, the joy they have on the beach. It's very, very funny, and she is the nearest contemporary writer we have to the absolutely iconic Nora Ephron, and I think she's absolutely brilliant.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Amazing, that is a great recommendation. Anthony?
Anthony Horowitz:
Well, I'm very glad that we've actually been allowed to go back in time and go to the classics a little bit. You started it with Dodie Smith, a great recommendation incidentally I was brought up on Dodie Smith. But the book I think that absolutely exemplifies summer for me is L.P. Hartley's The Go Between, which is a wonderful sad love story set during a long Edwardian summer in the country, where Leo, a young boy, has been invited to the house of people who are much richer and more aristocratic than he is, and he gets drawn into an illicit love affair between the daughter of the of the owners of this house and the local sort of gamekeeper, a sort of a rugged character played I think by Alan Bates in the in the wonderful film. The screenplay by Harold Pinter, one of the great, great screenplays and a fantastic film. But I just remember that book so much for its description of heat and sunshine and grass and clothes that are just slightly too sweaty and hot because they're Edwardian and that whole world of it and I think it's really important, you know, we always want to recommend modern books and new books and writers who are alive, but there are also so many great classics out there that we shouldn't forget, and that's certainly one of them.
Rhianna Dhillon;
That's such a great one. You know, there are books like Atonement that I don't think would exist without something like…
Anthony Horowitz:
Atonement is another actually, and I could have recommended that too, yes.
Rhianna Dhillon:
And Anthony, while we have you, this isn't a listener question, this is one of my questions, but we have to ask about detective crime fiction. The kind of ones for summer. Are there any that spring to mind?
Anthony Horowitz:
Well, again, the summer is tricky because at the moment, my favourite writer is Icelandic and Iceland doesn't know a great deal about summer. It tends to be quite cold, but Ragnar Jónasson is definitely worth discovering if you haven't come across his work. I finished recently The Sanatorium, and that's a really chilly book in a dark sanatorium somewhere in Iceland where murders have happened in the past and patients are there in the present, and it's very dark and menacing and it has a sequel, which I'm reading at the moment, which I'm enjoying very much called, I think it's called something like, The Strange Mystery of the Missing Writer. I'm probably not quite getting the title right, but it's not out anyway yet. It'll be out next year. But if you haven't discovered his books, although they are Nordic noir, he began his life as a translator of Agatha Christie, and therefore he is sort of regenerating her work and her values, and all his books are not exactly summery, but very, very worth the read.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Absolutely perfect. You're a very persuasive panel. Those are all fabulous suggestions. Thank you so much. I hope that we've given you some ideas to take you through your holidays and back again. My own to read pile, it's getting dramatically out of hand. I need to try all of these. And you can find more information on all of the books that we've discussed today by clicking on the link to the Penguin website, and previous podcast episodes will give you ideas for all sorts of different genres and authors.
Me and the rest of the podcast team are taking a little summer break, all the better to get cracking on with our reading, but we'll be popping back up with a few special episodes over the next few weeks, so look out for those. But in the meantime, a huge, huge thank you to everyone who submitted questions to us this series. They are such a huge part of the show. We love hearing. From you. So please keep them coming via the email address, penguinpodcast@penguinrandomhouse.co.uk or on Instagram at Penguin UK Books. We'll be back with more episodes and more Ask Penguin recommendations in the autumn. Subscribe so you don't miss us. Thank you so much for listening and happy reading.