This script has been lightly edited for clarity.
Jace Lacob: I’m Jace Lacob and you’re listening to MASTERPIECE Studio.
A mysterious phone call brings retired archaeologist Judith Potts and her two friends, Becks and Suzie, to a garden party at the home of Marlow grandee, Sir Peter Bailey. On the phone call, Sir Peter told Judith he was worried something bad might happen at the party but couldn’t say more over the phone.
Champagne, flowers, and a string quartet welcome Judith, Becks and Suzie as they arrive. But it’s not all breezy, as any elegant summer garden party wouldn’t be complete without a bit of drama. However, at this particular soiree, that little bit of drama turns out to be something far more serious. A loud crash brings the partygoers inside to find their host crushed to death beneath a bookshelf.
CLIP
Tristram: Help me lift this!
Suzie: Come on. Come on, all together now!
Jenny: No, no, no!
Judith: We need to call an ambulance.
And just like that, Marlow’s unlikely, yet highly skilled crime solving trio jumps back into action.
CLIP
Judith: Suzie, Becks, you stay here. Talk to people. Hunt around. We need to start investigating.
Becks: Won’t Tanika mind?
Judith: Mind? She’ll be livid. But until she tells us we can’t nose around…
Suzie: We can do what we like. Yeah, I like it.
A low-speed, high-stakes chase involving a mobility scooter shows these three friends will stop at nothing to chase down a clue. But by the end of the first episode, it looks as if Judith, Suzie, and Becks are on their own.
CLIP
Phone buzzing
Judith: Tanika.
Tanika: I’ve got to drop this Peter Bailey case.
Judith: What?
Tanika: I can’t prove any crime’s been committed.
Judith: But Sir Peter knew something was up. That’s why he rang me. The cabinet had been removed from its hook beforehand. And fingerprints were wiped from evidence in the room.
Tanika: You knew about that?
Judith: And Sir Peter’s new will is still missing. I don’t know who did it, or how it was done, or why it was done for that matter, but I know he was killed.
Today, we’re joined by the mastermind behind The Marlow Murder Club series novels, author Robert Thorogood. Robert also wrote the first two episodes of The Marlow Murder Club Season Two, which are based on his novel Death Comes to Marlow, the second in his Marlow Murder Club novel series. In this conversation, we talk with Robert about everything from inspiration and Agatha Christie, to what may lie ahead for Marlow’s favorite unofficial detectives.
Jace Lacob: And this week we are joined by Marlow Murder Club author and creator, Robert Thorogood. Welcome.
Robert Thorogood: Hi. Thanks for having me on the show.
Jace Lacob: So, with credits like Death in Paradise and its two spinoffs and your Marlow books, your name has become synonymous, we’ll say, with the murder mystery genre. Before we delve into Marlow Murder Club, how was your fascination with mystery sparked by reading an Agatha Christie novel at your great aunts farm at age 10?
Robert Thorogood: Yeah, that’s so true. Gosh, yes. So, in the olden days as a child, you’d get farmed out for weeks at a time to your great aunt, which probably continues to this day. But what happened at the great aunt’s was there was nothing to read, no television, just nothing. So you’d go around your great aunt’s shelves, just looking to see if, gosh, is there anything? There would be a copy of The Reader’s Digest. I love The Reader’s Digest. And she had a copy of Evil Under the Sun. No, Peril at End House. Sorry, I had to remember which order. And so I idly picked it up and I was not that old and it just blew me away.
I’d always been into magic and magic tricks, and I was reading lots of books on magic because I’m one of the cool kids here. The cool kids are into magic. And so when I saw what Agatha Christie did, the trick, it’s a really good murder mystery to start with because the conceit of who the killer is, if you don’t know anything about murder mysteries, is stunningly good. So the reveal at the end blew my socks off. And I fell in love with the genre, but particularly I fell in love with Agatha Christie, and I’ve been ever so slightly obsessed with her ever since.
Jace Lacob: So you’re on holiday. That book is the sixth Poirot, I believe, and it finds the Belgian detective on holiday in Cornwall himself. What was so formative about diving into that first Christie mystery for you?
Robert Thorogood: Yes, it’s the humor. The character of Poirot, I find just brilliant. He’s pompous, he’s self regarding, he takes himself too seriously, but also he jokes. So he seemed the most perfect comic, brilliant character. And I had been aware of Sherlock Holmes before then, but I always found the idea of Holmes not attractive at all because he’s very sort of acetic, isn’t he? And he’s serious and he frowns a lot, and his stories are very dark and 19th century. And suddenly here we were in the 1930s I presume, and it’s sort of art deco and it’s fun and you’re by the seaside and it’s sunny.
But also, all of Agatha Christie’s books are very slyly humorous. I loved the humor in them and the fact that she manages to create so much character and so many incidents. You know, a box of chocolates arrives that nearly kills you, that sort of thing — a plot device that I think I’ve stolen two other times in the 17 years that I’ve been writing murder mysteries. And at the end of it all, she hasn’t overstayed her welcome. Her books are often only 55,000 words long.
I mean, you marvel as somebody who writes murder mystery novels, I marvel at how on Earth she manages to create brilliant characters, brilliant detectives, brilliant plots and stories and worlds, and then wrap it up with an amazing ending, and effectively still have time to get to the pub for 9:00pm because it’s only 55,000 words long.
Jace Lacob: You’ve said that you struggled academically at school, but then you proclaimed one day, “I’ve got to learn how to write and how to write murder mysteries.” What was behind that awakening? Where did that come from after reading Peril at End House?
Robert Thorogood: I’m always a little conflicted when I consider this. I always felt from a very, very early age that I wanted to be a writer. So, I’d always had this sense, but the problem was, I just wasn’t in top set, as we would say in England. I wasn’t amongst the first rank of scholars who’d go off to great universities. And I wasn’t in the second rank either. I was in the third rank. When I got to my secondary school, I was put in the third stream, as we would say.
And so I had this urge and desire, but I had to live with it as a secret thing because there was no way that you could be a professional writer. In my school there were 30 other English students who were better. And when eventually it came to do A levels, which is, before you go off to university, you start specializing. I didn’t have the courage to choose English just because I wasn’t considered academically gifted in that way. And so I did history, I did politics and I did economics, which were tremendous subjects to study, and very useful actually as a writer, particularly the history.
And even at university, I then read history at university. But all the time I was being stalked by this feeling of ‘I want to write’. And so when I was at university, I wrote a novel that I put in a drawer and I wrote sketches for the university sketch troupe. So, I was constantly writing, but I didn’t feel I could give myself permission to say it out loud. When I meet young people now and they talk about, oh, I might want to be a writer, I always say, give yourself permission to give it a go.
It didn’t hold me back necessarily, I did waste a lot of time worrying whether I should give it a go because I was giving it a go, but just doing it secretly and being a bit embarrassed about it all and sometimes you just have to go for it. Which eventually I did. And it was only a short 15 years after I left university that I got Death in Paradise off the ground. So there were some tough yards in and amongst all of those 15 years.
Jace Lacob: So, I want to talk about that because early on in your career you were selling scripts to the BBC, ITV, among others, but those television projects weren’t moving forward. How did the untimely death of an English cricket coach in Jamaica serve as an inspiration for you?
Robert Thorogood: Oh gosh. Well, not inspiration. I always feel very bad about where the idea for Death in Paradise comes from. The truth is, you spend a lot of time writing treatments and scripts for shows that never get made. And so you can sort of have a hinterland where you appear to be completely unsuccessful, and in some respects you are because you’re not working on a show. But for all of the times from my twenties and early thirties, I was writing scripts. It wasn’t before the internet, but it was slightly before the internet. And I didn’t know anyone in the industry. I didn’t know what I should be doing.
I now know I should have tried to get a job on one of the soap operas. We have great soap operas here, and that is how you get trained up in television, by just turning the handle and trying to write as many scripts as possible. I didn’t know that. So I kept trying to come up with original ideas. And I’m married to a journalist and my lovely wife Katie said to me that in order to get ideas, I needed to read the newspapers every day. I mean, this is how pre-internet it is. I was buying a newspaper, a physical newspaper.
And so every day I’d read the newspaper and any story that felt like there was a story in it, I would cut it out and put it in clippings. And then one day in 2000 and I think it was seven, there was a very sad story. It was front page news all over the world. The Pakistani cricket coach, they thought he’d been murdered in a locked room in the Caribbean during the Cricket World Cup. And I was reading this story thinking, God, that’s terrible that someone has murdered a cricket coach. But actually, because he had a British passport, when it was discovered it might be murder, the Metropolitan police in London sent out their own detective to solve the murder. And I just, in that instant thought, that would make a really fun show. And the idea came to me that week over a few days, it was, “Untitled Copper in the Caribbean” idea.
But because I wasn’t super successful, I had no TV credits at that time. When I took it around to production companies, I was met generally with people saying, oh, that’s a good idea, but we are never going to make it because this is 2007, 2008. We didn’t make TV shows abroad back then. It was going to have to be filmed in the Caribbean. So we can’t afford to make it. It’s too far away. Just technically it was difficult and there’s a lot of humidity in the Caribbean and they weren’t sure whether they could do high definition filming because you need battery packs. Battery technology didn’t allow them to film.
So, all of these technical reasons and the fact that I’m a nobody means that I got met by real enthusiasm for the idea, but total indifference as to whether or not they could pull it off. And then eventually I realized, and this is such an important lesson, is that if I don’t have the clout to get an idea this good over the line, then I need to find somebody who has the clout for me.
And there’s a great, great British writer called Tony Jordan, who created a show called Life on Mars. He created another one called Hustle. He’d worked on EastEnders. He’d done so well in his career that he’d just set up a production company called Red Planet, and he was looking for new writers. And so, I entered the competition that he was running and got to the final of that and pitched him the idea because I was so desperate to get it to someone with proper clout. And he loved the idea and I was really excited about that. But I said to him, Tony, I’m nobody, it’s expensive, it films in the Caribbean. He went, no, don’t worry about that. He said, we are just getting the BBC or ITV to offer a commission for a treatment and a script. And he went into the BBC and pitched it to them.
So, I wrote the first script and the BBC liked it in the second script and the third script. And a short 18 months later, it was a very hard and stressful 18 months of my life, and for my wife Katie and I had two kids by this point, we eventually got green lit and we eventually got making it. And then finally, I say finally, at the time I didn’t know, I then embarked upon a 17 year period of writing and thinking about murder mysteries every single waking second until from then, right up until this moment I’m speaking to you.
MIDROLL
Jace Lacob: We’re back with Marlow Murder Club author Robert Thorogood. Your work has been described as ‘cozy mystery’. How comfortable are you with that moniker of cozy crime when it comes to murder? Is it just a necessary shorthand of describing the tone of a work?
Robert Thorogood: I try and be positive about it because actually it doesn’t bother me at all, and I think it does point to a truth in the genre, which is, yes, we kill people. But, it’s not going to be gruesome and upsetting for the reader or for the viewer. If we stab you with a knife, it’s going to be a letter opener rather than a machete. So, you choose from a limited suite of murder weapons, and you choose from a limited suite of worlds that you go into, quite often the middle classes or the wealthy. And I find that joyous. I love that.
But also the bit that ‘cozy’ doesn’t describe, which I am particularly wedded to is the idea of a fair play crime where when the detective, two thirds of the way through, or four fifths of the way through, sort of clicks their fingers and says, aha, I’ve got it! In every story that I’ve written, television show or book, when the detective says they’ve got it, and there’s always a moment when they do say that, the detective and the viewer or reader have exactly the same information.
So, you’re sort of playing a parlour game with the viewer, which is saying, okay, you know who the suspects are, you know what the clues are, can you guess who the killer is? And I think ‘cozy’ sometimes does sort of also allow for quite a fudgy sort of an ending, which is great, and I can read a book like that and really enjoy it. But the stuff I want to write, I do want to write a proper, fair play murder mystery, because like a lunatic, what I’m aspiring to whilst also knowing I will never succeed, is to write something good enough that I could give it to Agatha and go, look, I’ve done a murder mystery. What do you think, Agatha?
Obviously she’d immediately say, here are the 12 ways you could improve it, and could you work on all of the characters? And the notes would go on forever. But I do want to do something which is a true, fair play, golden-age-style murder mystery and that’s within the cozy genre. So yeah, let’s call it cozy, that’s fine.
Jace Lacob: That’s so fascinating to me that you do have Agatha Christie in a way sitting behind you with the keyboard.
Robert Thorogood: Always. It’s really weird. Always. And only her, because she was the formative one. I only read Agatha Christie in my teenage years. I didn’t read another murder mystery writer until after I’d left university. So, subsequently, I’ve completely fallen in love with loads of writers, modern writers like Anthony Horowitz or Janice Hallett or Stuart Turton. The list goes on and on and on. But my formative creative years were spent puzzling over the genius of Agatha Christie and how she manages to trick you every single time into not noticing who the killer is.
Jace Lacob: I want to turn our attention now to Marlow Murder Club. So, Marlow follows an archeologist-turned-crossword setter and her friends in this very picturesque English village solving murders. While Death in Paradise follows an Englishman solving mysteries in the relentless sun and heat of the Caribbean. To go back to Christie again, what is it about fish out of water detectives that interests you so much, that conflict between character and setting?
Robert Thorogood: One of the things I learned, actually we all know this from watching television and reading books, is that particularly in a murder mystery, in a cozy world, the setting is almost more important than anything else apart from your hero detective, because it’s the setting that grounds it and the setting has to be real and concrete. And so the setting is such an important part of what a story is.
And then when I was coming up with the Marlow Murder Club, I didn’t have a location. I knew that I wanted to base it on my great aunts; great aunt Jean, where I first read Peril at End House, great aunt Jess, who never let you put two vegetables of the same color next to each other on the plate. I mean, these are batty eccentric women. My grandma Betty, who every night at 6:00 PM would have a single glass of scotch, which I put straight into Judith.
So, there were these amazing women who helped raise me and I wanted to do a story. I had this character and I didn’t know where she would live, but if you go around the south of England, or indeed any part of England, there’s already a detective show there. If you want to go up north, there’s Vera brilliantly stealing all of the Northeast. Or the Oxford and Cambridge are stolen seven or eight times over, whether it’s Morse in Oxford or Grantchester in Cambridge.
I mean, England’s not a huge country. We are running out of counties to set murder mysteries. I just thought after leaving London, my family and I, Katie and I moved to Marlow. It’s really beautiful, I’m describing it to you, watch the TV show. It’s really pretty and it’s a perfect home county sort of town. And the thing that Agatha Christie was so good at, she would show you a very middle class, a very apparently well to do bit of the world, whether it’s maybe a village or maybe it’s a town, or if we’re in a city like London, it’ll be set in the swish hotels.
And I just thought, hang on, Marlow is perfect and I don’t have to get on a plane to do research because I already live in Marlow. For me to do research for the books and the TV show, I just have to put the dogs on a leash and walk out my front door and turn left or turn right.
Jace Lacob: So, you mentioned the women in your life that you drew upon to create these characters. Was there any influence by Christie’s The Tuesday Club Murders?
Robert Thorogood: Literally, yes, there was. And you’ve very kindly set that up in a way that allows me to, as I have to do quite often, try and apologize and explain why I seem to have named, not seem to, why I have named the The Marlow Murder Club, a series of books and the TV show after what appears to be the most successful British murder mystery book, The Thursday Murder Club which I think came out three months before mine.
But yes, it was named after… so that was the first story that Miss Marple appears in. And when I created Richard Poole for Death in Paradise, I was very much trying to create my Hercule Poirot. Richard Poole, if you know the show or those first two series, he’s pompous and self regarding, and he has all of the traits of Hercule Poirot in fact. He believes in his intellect and he spots all clues. But over the years, having worked in that world, which I adore, I adore, which is very much a male approach to solving crime, I was always aware that the other great crime solver in the world of Agathe Christie was of course, Jane Marple.
And I found myself just wondering, what might a modern day Jane Marple be like? And thinking about my great aunts and my grandmother and these wonderful, eccentric, brilliant women, none of whom worked in offices, in fact, none of whom had jobs, but all of whom, this is a generalization, but it certainly felt to me growing up, were significantly cleverer than their husbands. Their husbands would go out and have the status and the jobs and the company car and all of these things. But these women who stayed at home, who as a young person growing up, I was around a lot more, I just saw how witty and brilliant and bright these women were.
And I just thought, I wonder if one of them could solve a crime. I’m now 53, so the timing doesn’t quite work because my mother is now basically the same age as Judith in my books. And in fact, Judith is named after my mother’s good friend Judith who was the first person who taught her how to do crosswords. And then my mother taught me how to do crosswords. So that’s why Judith is called Judith. But, imagine there’s a woman who’s towards the end of her life, who’s independently wealthy, lives in a fabulous house, because when I was writing the book you want to give your hero a really good house, doesn’t have a man in her life at all, and so society says that she’s invisible. That’s kind of the world of being a 78-year-old woman who lives on her own.
And I realized that the power of Jane Marple is, of course, the fact that she’s old and single, because she’s invisible and then she can go around the world. And her superpower is of course her intellect and her, well in Jane Marble’s case, her understanding of human nature, isn’t it? The fact that she can see through you. And I’d wanted to do my Jane Marple, which is why I eventually named it The Marlow Murder Club, because The Tuesday Murder Club was the first time you ever hear of a Jane Marple story.
Jace Lacob: I love that. So Death in Paradise is your Poirot, Marlow Murder Club is your Marple.
Robert Thorogood: Kind of, yeah. I’m nervous about trying to claim too much kinship with Agatha Christie. I’m just saying I was aware that Jane Marple was an older woman who solved crime, and so I thought I’d do that.
Jace Lacob: I love it. I love it. Robert Thorogood, thank you so very much.
Robert Thorogood: Thank you so much for having me.
Next time, Judith looks for clues in the most cryptic of places.
CLIP
Becks: Sorry, should you be taking that?
Judith: Well, there’s another crossword to solve. So, yes.
Becks: You really think the crossword setter is sending secret messages?
Judith: I do, actually.
Next week, author Robert Thorogood returns to the podcast to wrap up the first of three murders this season of The Marlow Murder Club.