This script has been lightly edited for clarity.
Jace Lacob: I’m Jace Lacob and you’re listening to MASTERPIECE Studio.
Marlow. The quaint little town on the River Thames where life moves at a slower pace. Neighbors know each other by name, regattas and garden parties fill the weekends, cafes and shops bustle with locals and tourists alike. But surely no town can be as perfect as it appears on the surface.
As we’ve seen, Marlow is quickly becoming a murder hot spot. However, fortunately for this small town, three friends have come together and risen to the occasion, acting as either civilian investigators or amateur sleuths, depending on the attitude of the local police on any given day.
CLIP
Tanika: What’ve you got?
Judith: Well, we don’t want to get you into trouble. So you won’t be interested in Sarah Fitzherbert who lives at 18 Alison Road, runs the coffee cart at the station, and could well be Tristram Bailey’s accomplice.
Tanika: Sarah Fitzherbert, 18 Alison Road. Not interested in her at all. And I suppose you don’t want to know we’ve still not found Sir Peter’s most recent will.
Judith: It’s an irrelevance. Nor have we.
Tanika: Not even listening.
Despite the local police’s on-again-off-again relationship with this case, Judith, Suzie and Becks have been stalwart in their investigation, ruffling whatever feathers necessary on their quest to uncover the truth of this case.
CLIP
Becks: We learnt how important your name is to you when we first met. And the only way you can keep your aristocratic title is if Sir Peter never remarries. Which he now never will, will he Lady Bailey?
Lady Bailey: How dare you speak to me like that! How dare you! Come on Raphie!
In the end, Judith, Suzie, and Becks solve the murder, alongside the police of course. Justice is delivered, and good prevails. Peace is restored in Marlow, at least until next week, anyway.
CLIP
Rosanna: Thank you for catching father’s killer.
Judith: It’s the least he deserved.
Tanika: Miss Bailey? Under UK law, no one is allowed to benefit from a crime they commit. Your brother won’t inherit a penny. Your father’s entire estate, his house, and money, will go to his next closest living relative, you.
Rosanna: I’ll make sure good comes of this.
Author Robert Thorogood returns to the podcast to discuss writing these first two episodes of The Marlow Murder Club Season Two, as well as writing the novel that inspired these episodes, Death Comes to Marlow.
Jace Lacob: This week we are once again joined by Marlow Murder Club author and writer, Robert Thorogood. Welcome.
Robert Thorogood: Thank you for having me on the show.
Jace Lacob: So, The Marlow Murder Club started life as a television pitch, I believe, rather than a novel, and it was optioned back in 2015 by Ecosse of Monarch the Glen fame under the name The Murder Club. How much did the overall concept change between that original television pitch and you writing the first Marlow book?
Robert Thorogood: Not a huge amount. Actually, funny enough, so Ecosse had this idea, they’d got the rights to this book where a bunch of retired pathologists and detectives and entomologists and, just everyone across the board, get together for a conference once a year, I’m slightly misremembering this, and they find an old case that was never solved. And with all of their experience and wisdom and knowledge, they try and solve it. I mean, isn’t that brilliant? What a great thing to do to get together, you could just go off and grow roses, but no, these people get together once a year and try and catch murderers.
And so that was the book. And I read the book and I really enjoyed it. But I felt that that was quite a big idea, and my instincts are normally more domestic. I said, look, why don’t we try and get together a group of amateur sleuths? So, I turned it into a group of women in their local community, but it was quite a dark idea because it was dealing with real murders. It had that darkness, there was a truthfulness to it. And when Ecosse were developing it with me, we sort of placed it in a slightly more down-at-heel town. It was going to be not quite so light and sunny.
And so, having gone through that process and then being turned down by every single television channel in the UK. And it’s always hugely disheartening. And so at this stage, the idea was basically, three women solve crime, but there’s a darkness maybe to the murder mysteries. I thought, I don’t want to let it go, but I’ve kind of… once you’ve been turned down by all of the channels, you’re kind of stuffed. But I didn’t want to let it go, but I had a book deal to write novels. I’d written four Death in Paradise novels, all of them original stories. But the fifth book, which I was due to go in and pitch to my editor, I went in and they said, so what’re you going to do for your fifth book in Death and Paradise land? And I went, how about I don’t do a Death and Paradise book and I’ll pitch to you instead a brand new idea. And over lunch, I pitched The Marlow Murder Club. And I had the title for it, I had the characters. I’d been sitting on the idea now for two or three years and my publisher went yeah, that shows promise. And I went off and wrote the first book.
So, I knew because we’d been turned down by telly, that if I was ever going to get it back on the telly or on the telly full stop, I’d have to first write this as a book. I’d have to prove that it worked. And then having written it, I’d have to try and turn it into a bestseller and then write a series of books and try and build up a readership. And if I could show that the idea had legs, then I could maybe take it back to television land later down the line. And that’s exactly what happened. And PBS MASTERPIECE came in on their horse and saved the day right at the end. And now we’re making the TV show that I tried to set up in 2015. It’s just taken nine or 10 years longer than I would’ve liked.
Jace Lacob: You had to blink a bit. Just a little bit.
Robert Thorogood: Yeah.
Jace Lacob: So with Marlow Murder Club, we have an archeologist and puzzle setter. We have a dog walker, we have a vicar’s wife. What is it about those roles that make them such an ideal team of sleuths? Are they village fixtures who, by their nature, witness life around them, and more importantly, talk to those around them?
Robert Thorogood: Yeah, absolutely. But, there was a first principle, I’m not going to do a spoiler for the first book, but there was a first principle that I had for all of my heroes and indeed the story, which is that I wanted the heroes to be people who don’t normally get to be heroes in murder mysteries. Now, this is my interpretation of that. There are thousands of really great murder mysteries, particularly in America where the genre is so vibrant, full of single moms and stuff like that. But here in England it felt that you don’t really have 78-year-old women solving crimes.
So I thought, well, we’re going to have someone not married, doesn’t want to be married, independently wealthy, she can do what she likes. She’s going to be one of the heroes, Judith. And I thought, well, who else is unfashionable in the murder mystery world? And I thought, well, growing up with our kids here in Marlow, seeing some of the most impressive people you ever meet, other single moms that you meet at the school gate who hold down a job, raise a kid, turn up to the parents’ meetings, turn up to the theater shows, turn up on the sidelines of the sports matches to support. And they work every hour that God gives them every day, and they do an amazing job.
And I thought, yeah, single moms, let’s have a single mom in there as well. And giving her the job of dog walker was exactly because it fits in around the school drop off. And I thought a dog walker is good because again, as you say, dog walkers get out and about in the community. They know people, they know the shortcuts. It actually solves problems having someone who’s that plugged into the community.
So we’ve got Suzie, the dog walker, the single mom. We’ve got this older woman, Judith who’s very upper class and posh and comes from a very smart background. And then I thought, but Marlow is also stuffed full of these housewives who are brilliant women, but they’re a housewife and I thought, what’s the most housewife you can get in Marlow? And I thought, well, that’s the woman who’s married to the vicar. So he has the status, he has the job, he has the church, the physical building, and then she has a duty as the vicar’s wife to behave in a certain way. And I just thought, wouldn’t it be fun that by day, vicar’s wife, by night, the woman who goes around catching killers. So I thought that tension of that middle class person who’s very worried about what people think of her, very worried about whether she’s wearing fashionable clothes.
So you’ve got the posh Judith who lives on her own. You’ve got Suzie, who’s more working class, who is a single mom, and then you’ve got Becks, who’s in the middle of the two. And it was very important to me that there should be three of them because as we all know, you put three people together, and that’s going to be a lot of disagreements, and two people ganging up on one and you never get accord with three people. That’s why the Three Amigos is… loads of comedy, films and stories are, you know, Three Men in a Boat, three people are funnier than two or four. There you are, a truism I think we can all live by.
Jace Lacob: The rule of three.
Robert Thorogood: Yeah, exactly.
Jace Lacob: Marlow isn’t about forensics, but about old fashioned crime solving; legwork, investigation, wool gathering, if you will. In a deeply technological age, there’s something refreshingly old fashioned about that. Is that another connection to Christie for you?
Robert Thorogood: Yeah, it is. Thank you for the use of the word “refreshingly” in the context of old fashioned. That’s very kind and generous of you. The joy I found with Death in Paradise by setting it on a tiny Caribbean island was they wouldn’t have forensics, they wouldn’t have pathology and things like that because they’d all happen off island, which would allow me to do an Agatha Christie-style story.
So when we came to Marlow, I realized that the joy, joy, joy of having amateurs is they also don’t have forensics. Because you are just trying to tell stories where you don’t spend the whole time going to police stations where people go, well, we’ve done the DNA on the saliva, and it was that person who’s the killer. You want amateurs who don’t have access to that. So, it was important to me because I can only think in terms of golden age mysteries where there’s a locale, you’ve got a hero or a bunch of heroes, and they get on their hind legs and they go and talk to people and that’s how they solve the crime.
I mean, you could argue it is surprising how often the killer stands in a room for however many minutes whilst the hero detective then pontificates about why they’re the killer. And the killer never seems to run away or put up much of a defense. They’re quite quick to confess. Because by that stage you just want to know who it was and then see how clever they were and how much cleverer the detective was in catching them. But yeah, I’m always going to do a non-science based story because that’s what I’m into. I’m into just the fun of a whodunit, trying to do a story where the game is, as I say, can you guess who the killer is? And science is no help for that.
MIDROLL
Jace Lacob: We’re back with Marlow Murder Club author Robert Thorogood. Sir Peter is found dead inside his locked study, crushed by a fallen bookshelf, making this a locked room mystery. But despite that, Death Comes to Marlow is still ultimately what you call a fair play mystery or a play fair mystery. How do you balance those two things? Is there a sense that many locked room mysteries or complex mysteries we’ll say, don’t always play fair?
Robert Thorogood: Hmm. Well, I’m not going to diss or denigrate anyone else’s attempt to do a locked room. The locked room mystery is the Everest, it’s the pinnacle. You have to really have a good think about it before you go up Everest, and it’s a bit like that when you do a locked room mystery. And the way the story came out for this one was that I had been idly thinking for years.
So the way I do all of my stories is I’ll have an idle thought come up on a dog walk about how you could do a trick. What’s the conceit that will allow us to smuggle the killer past the viewer? And eventually I thought, ooh, and if you watch the first two episodes, you will see how the killer managed to escape from the locked room because it’s properly locked. This is the thing, a proper locked room mystery should be a locked room. And it’s so odd, isn’t it, I came up with the trick first. And it’s nonsense, most writers, proper writers, definitely proper writers come up with characters first. I tend to come up with the trick and then I think, where would that trick work? And this trick really worked in a country house setting.
And for the first series of The Marlow Murder Club, we go around the town because we’ve got three amateur slews who’ve got to meet each other. So I thought I’d have three murders. And each of those amateur sleuths would be slightly connected to each of the murders. We’d see various areas of the town. It’d be a really good way of introducing the town. But in this series, Series Two, we know our heroes. We know the town. So I thought, now I want to do my Agatha Christie country house murder. Let’s get a load of posh people who live in a very posh house and let’s give them a title.
So this is a Baronet, Sir Peter Bailey. Believe it or not, he’s about to get married. And I love, love, love, it’s a very Agatha Christie thing, it’s a very golden age thing, when somebody comes in and is about to marry and you realize that everything is going to change. So, today the will is one thing, and tomorrow the will will be different because now we have a spouse who can inherit. So I thought, let’s do a big house, let’s have a big wedding, and let’s have the person who’s about to get married murdered the very day before his wedding. That was sort of my thinking. And so poor old Sir Peter Bailey who is a brilliant actor, as is always the way you get in these brilliant actors and then you kill them.
Jace Lacob: Kill them off.
Robert Thorogood: And you sort of think, ah, if I had known you were going to get him, I might have written more scenes for him, but his job is to die in three minutes. In the books, you never get to the end of a first chapter, but there’s a dead body. And it’s the same with the TV show. As we say in the industry, the minutes-to-body is very short. So before you go to the credits in the very first episode of the new Marlow Murder Club series, poor old Peter has been murdered, crushed to death by an enormous bookcase inside a room. The door is locked, the windows are locked. There’s no way in or out. And the only key that could have opened the door is in his pocket. How is it done? I just find that very exciting.
Jace Lacob: There is additionally a lot of humor, we’ll say, in your novels and in the series. I love, you write at one point, “The Church of England was the perfect metaphor for the country as a whole. She felt pleasing to the eye, staunchly old fashioned, and waning very much in popularity.” Or our Marlow ladies perched on that mobility scooter in series two, which I love. How do you approach the role of humor in your mysteries? Is it there to provide a sort of emotional counterweight?
Robert Thorogood: Do you know, I don’t think of it in those terms, actually. That’s very sophisticated and I really feel that I should have said yes. Generally, because I love murder mysteries, I get frustrated when a TV show seems to be sort of “taking the mick” as we would say in England, out of the genre. For me it’s very important that the people in my murder mystery stories don’t know that they’re in a murder mystery. For them, it’s real life. So the family or the group of people who have suffered this death, it really matters to them. And there should be real drama and truthfulness as much as possible in the writing, whilst also smuggling clues past the viewer. And for the hero, for them, the murder really matters and it really matters to them that they try and solve it.
However, Judith, Suzie and Becks are quite an eccentric bunch of people and they approach things in quite an eccentric way. And Marlow itself, as I said, is a character. So, it’s not giving anything away because if there’s any trailer for the TV show, there will be a clip of the mobility scooter chase. It was very important to me that you do have a meeting where you go, what would be fun this series? And I wanted this mobility scooter chase because I thought, if somebody was escaping on a bicycle that they had to follow, look, how do you chase after them? Bicycles are quite fast. Well, in Marlow, obviously just at the moment when they want to give chase, they’re nowhere near their car. That would be too easy and boring. But they are near a chap who’s sitting outside a pub having a pint called Bob, I think named after me. I didn’t name him, I only found out his name after they’d shot it, who’s got a mobility scooter.
And it makes sense, like all proper comedy, each step makes sense in and of itself. But lo and behold, before too long you’ve got three women all in a human pyramid on a mobility scooter chasing around Marlow and going over speed bumps or indeed one speed bump. We didn’t have the budget for two stunts. And so you suddenly have a scene which is inherently comic and fun and silly, it’s genuinely silly, but there is a truthfulness to it. So you sort of still believe.
The reason why they’re doing it is because they don’t care how they look. They just want to find out where this person is going because they think he might be the killer, because it really matters to them that they capture the killer. So that tension, if there is a tension, I really enjoy playing with the tension between really wanting to catch the killer and it really mattering. But the people who I’ve set to catch the killer are slightly batty, and that’s where the comedy comes from.
Jace Lacob: Book three of your Marlow series, The Queen of Poisons will be adapted for Series Three of The Marlow Murder Club. What can you tease about where we find our sleuths in The Queen of Poisons?
Robert Thorogood: Well, so let’s have a think. So, what’s fun about The Queen of Poisons is that whenever you do a poisoning, you know that you have to tread carefully because Agatha Christie is the greatest poisoner there’s ever been. And poisons are always a very interesting proposition when it comes to murder mysteries because we kind of know, don’t we, that if you see somebody die of poison, then possibly the poison came from somewhere else. So what I love about poisonings is that already you’re in the world of the double bluff before you’ve even started.
Our audiences are so smart. We watch these shows for fun and because they’re hopefully joyous and entertaining and all of those things. But actually we’re also super smart, we’ve seen a thousand murder mysteries. So I just thought it’d be fun to kill someone in a poisoning and I thought I’d kill the mayor of Marlow. Because during lockdown we had this very meme-able thing happen in the UK, where we started watching these moments from local council meetings where counselors started to get absolutely crazy with each other over things like correct procedure and all sorts of tedious, boring rubbish.
And I thought, God, yeah, local councils, that’s a really good area for conflict. So I’m going to kill the mayor. And it was only when I was writing the book that I realized that I know the mayor of Marlow. So I suddenly thought, oh gosh, I mustn’t commit slander or libel here. So that was an interesting journey and the way we’ve solved it, you’ll see that I’ve had to make the mayor a really lovely person. And in some respects, the mystery of the book and the mystery of the world is, why would you kill someone you could never have had a motive to want to kill? And as far as the women go, they now are crime solving geniuses.
They did it in the first book and they didn’t know each other, they had to learn their way. And in the second book, they were sort of going, oh, okay, so when a murder happens, do we get together to solve a crime? Okay, we do. Let’s solve this crime. But by book three, they know each other, they know how to work their strengths, their weaknesses, why they bicker, why they get on. And so they are a formidable team trying to catch the killer of the Mayor of Marlow, which spoiler alert, they definitely do.
Jace Lacob: I love it. Robert Thorgood, thank you so very much.
Robert Thorogood: Thank you so much for having me.
Next time, Suzie Harris finds common ground with one of the suspects.
CLIP
Suzie: Find me two neighbors who are not in the middle of bin wars, because I know I am.
Person: What are you dealing with?
Suzie: My neighbor puts my bins back into my gardens before they’ve been emptied! Rude! Reckons that I’m blocking the pavement, which I’m not.
We’ll be back in the world of Marlow on Sunday, September 28th with Suzie Harris herself, actor Jo Martin. But first, something different. On September 21st, we’ll be talking with writer Neil Forsyth about everything you need to know before jumping into The Gold, the drama that tracks the pulse-pounding investigation into the largest gold heist in British history. Join us then as we travel back to 1980s South London right at the moment of the infamous Brink’s-Mat robbery.