Janice Hallett on Crafting The Appeal: An Epistolary Mystery

[00:00:00]ryan happy this meeting is being recorded um it's joining us from boston where it is mid afternoon and um hank has had the pleasure of already talking to janice hallett whose debut novel the appeal this is i will mention that we have autographed book plates um to go with our books and this is our february british crime book of the month because i just love it it's so much fun anyway since hank has already spoken to janice i thought that it would be wonderful as she shares her enthusiasm for the appeal with you before she might have to leave us so hank over to you oh my goodness thank you barbara i am so honored to be here today when i when i read this book the marvelous the appeal i might the pleasure was not only in in interviewing janice but in absolutely reading this book which is unique and ingenious and riveting and from the standpoint of being an author must have been so difficult to write um so you know all of you who are listening this is this book is written well janice you tell us you tell us how you put this together it is written um it's a modern epistolary novel so it's written in email text and you know other kind of messaging apps all the way through pretty much so it's quite different well it's different and it's marvelous and it's letters and it's playbills and it's it's all it's only these documents including yellow sticky notes um and one of the things that really made me it's so enjoyable and so much fun to read i know i'm gushing and babbling but this is just really original and unique you all do not miss this um it really made me think about how you have deconstructed what a story is and then a novel and then put it back together in this very puzzle-like ingenious way so you're calling the reader to action to solve this mystery talk a little bit about how you got there well it was quite an accident how i i got there i had the idea about the basic story behind the appeal but then i thought how about um i take the minor characters and look at the emails whizzing back and forth between them because that would be a great way to eavesdrop on what's going on and we'd hear what people really thought of each other instead of having a narrator explain for example so that was where it came from and it was quite um it was a spur of the moment decision that luckily worked out well because think about it people who are listening now think about if you had a list if you had a stack of someone's emails and documents it would be fascinating to read as jenna said sort of eavesdropping on someone's lives but the way you have set this up is that a lawyer sends a letter to his two clerk someone who we think is a pretty prominent lawyer sends a letter to people who we think are his two clerks saying here's a bunch of documents look through these they're in sort of chronological order and see what you can make of that and you set the reader to the task of figuring out not only what's happened but who's involved and why what if how did you think of that construct to keep it all in of a piece i i did that really to help me stay abreast of the story because very soon after writing these emails i kind of realized that the reader will need a bit of help through this so i stopped there it's before 20 000 words so pretty early on in the book um went back and conjured up these lawyer students who were looking through it with with the reader's eye so we're with them the whole time but there's a controlling force they're at their boss so um i thought that would be a good way to frame it and to to lead us through what what would be quite an unconventional narrative well so the two clerks charlotte and femi who we only meet in their discussion of these documents are struggling with what happened and at one point and this gives nothing away one of them says to the other it seems like about this is something about a community theater and the other one says i don't know what this is about but it's not about a play talk about the story story and then how that went together well the story that they're looking at is some it's about a community theater group and about the leading lights of that group the alpha family that run it now their granddaughter is diagnosed with um a terrible condition but and her only hope they're told is some very expensive drug treatment from america so they immediately set about uh fundraising among the community the family and friends that live around them to raise this money now most people throw themselves into that to help their friend but there are some other characters and there's a couple who've recently arrived following 10 years as medical volunteers in africa so they've seen a lot and their lives have been very different and they have a different perspective on this tiny community and that kind of causes eruptions one way or the other and uh it leads to murder but the the the play is set in this in a little town where there's a certain class structure of the alpha family as you say at the top and the newcomers and the wannabes and the people who are sort of inured in that in that system the appeal one of the reasons for the title the appeal is this financial appeal to raise money for poor poppy who's clearly got cancer and the other is a legal appeal for someone at some point who is um accused of murdering someone so this this double title and you know i think it's also a triple title but also the appeal of belonging in a certain place in society the appeal of who has a better life than you do the appeal of being someone that you're not and you have this background in community theater that allows you to shine a spotlight on this so brilliantly yeah i mean i i did community theater from the age of 14 until the group itself folded when i was in my um 40s so yeah a long long time i mean i met my partner there um i met most of my friends come from there and uh yeah it's a great hobby to do it's it's like a family when you work on a play together um you're like a family the states are very high so it's a really intriguing world in which to set a drama and at the beginning of the book you can you see you all see this you you have the list of characters in the play they're putting on and who they are and the little yellow stickies from the lawyer to charlotte and femi sort of explaining some of the relationships which is only which is one of the many ways in the book that you shepherd us through reading through reading this book and if your book makes me think about and barbara come in whenever you want of course the book makes me think about how we are all storytellers when we write a letter when we write an email when we make a report because it it's the history that we want to be real we are creating the history that we want we're being persuasive or newsy or setting down the facts as we see them or rationalizing or or or making stuff up and and you see that in in these emails talk a little bit about being each of the people that wrote the emails and how instantly recognizable they are and this is how it looks by the way oh yeah that's a good idea which is a good idea let me just add too before she answers that that you never mean forever hank so you know i'm a speed reader i can't read dickens for example because i cannot read dialect i just can't do it all the dickens i've ever ever known you know i've seen in either film or television or something um i'm never going to know what becky sharp got up to i mean it's just not going to happen for me and so i was really apprehensive about opening this book knowing that it had this structure and i have to say janice that i'm amazed that it read just as quickly as if it were a conventionally presented narrative i didn't have any of that you know throwing me out um so i mentioned that in case any of you are thinking this is going to test your reading skills uh it really it really doesn't and the other thing i would say which i thought was genius is by inserting the lawyers into this you created a ticking clock for this book because they only have whatever it is like three days or something to review all of this material for the queen's council that his question is is the right person in prison for the crimes that we're about to to read about so i like the fact that you created a you know um an urgency here um that makes everything go along faster did that only happen when you decided to introduce the lawyers did it sort of ramble up till then oh yeah it i instinctively put that timing on because of coming from screenwriting for tv and film there's often a time limit when you write scripts and stories for film and tv to create an urgency in it i think i did that instinctively in this purely from coming from that world but as hank was saying i mean i spent an awful lot of time working on each email so that the reader wouldn't have to pay too much attention to the email headers who things were to and from but as soon as the person opened up their email you knew who it was and you knew who they were talking to because it's different for each character talking to each other character i spend an awful lot of time immersed in the dynamics of the of the book to get that right so you can read it and so it can wash over you and you can relax while you're reading and it still goes in so i mean i hope that that happens and that comes across i i told janice i propose what you're saying barbara exactly um when we talked i said when i when i realized that this book was in emails and documents my subconscious was saying oh please don't make me read this please please don't make me read this i i just don't i frankly don't want to read this and it was instantly immersive instantly easy to read as you were saying it just washes over you and janice has crafted these emails so that you know there's someone who uses a lot of exclamation marks and a lot of xx and there are some that are very very terse you completely understand the people who are writing the emails just as we open emails from each other and we know who they're from and so anyone who is as barbara says anyone who is apprehensive as we both were about reading this it takes a page to get to it the other thing that you do that is so brilliant is femi and charlotte the law clerks just at the point of the book where i mean every single time where i was thinking uh what it could be this then up charlotte and femi saying just exactly the same thing and they'll say one of them will say do you get this and the other one says yeah yeah yeah here's what the deal is and the other one says oh yeah i should have seen that so you are so you have made this interactive you've made an interactive novel oh definitely interactive immersive um it's yeah it's like it's like a video game it's you you engage a part of your brain that you often don't usually engage while reading so yeah i mean that was all deliberate and i paid a lot of attention in the edit to where the reader might need some help to get up to speed um if they were reading in in bits or if they were reading it all together so yeah we paid a lot of attention in the edit to that before i headed into a digression i've totally forgotten the question that i interrupted that you asked her hank do you remember what it is yes it was about the individualization of the emails to make them be consistent right so you know i think it would be helpful because not everybody is fully immersed in british culture that that you explain first of all what is the queen's council and why are these two people working for them let's start with the real basics here and then we'll go on to the national health service uh keesee or queens council is um a very senior barrister so they're um involved in the court um procedure um whereas femi and charlotte they start off as um law students and he's their visited shooter although but the the novel spans a certain amount of time so by the end they're article clerks so they've moved on there so yeah it's a very senior um barrister um taking juniors under his wing really and getting them both to help him but he's also helping them um and he's spotted something in them that will help him uh bring him if you never watch run paul of the bailey which is you know one way you can determine all this barristers here are the people who go to court and are allowed to argue solicitors are the lawyers who do all the paperwork they're the guys that do the real estate work and you know the tax and the wills and all that convincing everything so and a queen's council is a barrister who takes silk as they call it um and so he's very senior and he's the guy you would bring in because they're expensive um before a major case and then he would have a support staff like any trial lawyer in the united states well i think you're married to a lawyer so you know how all this goes well i know how it works in the united states and i've watched silk on tv so i've got this right but you know so anyway um the two clerks i find interesting because he's he's tossing this review to very junior as you say um why why would he do that in favor of somebody more senior is it is it mostly because this is a personal thing for him he just wants to be sure that that the you know right person is in prison or the wrong person gets out whatever it is yeah he wants uh young fresh people he wants i think his words are he wants fresh eyes on the case and you don't get fresher than keen uh law students uh that's that's his thinking behind it he wants you know a fresh um an interesting perspective on it to see i was just now you go on because my question is more basic carry on well well i think that another reason that it's so marvelous to have charlotte and femi the sort of newbie wannabe lawyers is that we we feel as readers we're coming into it very purely with fresh eyes as well and we feel that we're sort of in exactly the same position as charlotte and femi and we also put ourselves you know we think maybe we can figure it out before they do and it's so much fun to be on this adventure on this journey with them figuring it out with them so it's yet another way that you bring the reader right into the book yeah no it's a real challenge to the reader i mean i i think that that's fun it makes you participate in what's going on um what is the basic thing that's going on janice we can't give too much away but you know who who is poppy and what is um the core of of what's happening here poppy is the little girl um who is the focus of the hayward family and who they're looking to um buy the drug treatment for so that it's the poppy appeal that they're uh they're raising money for and i'm not sure what else i can say that won't give anything away well i think you might explain about the national health service because you know in america this this thing would go differently so all right yeah of course in in the uk uh we wouldn't pay for our treatment but if you are diagnosed with something as bad as a poppy has been diagnosed with um you might have options to source um drug treatment that's either uh offered elsewhere in the world or is experimental um elsewhere in the world and you would have to pay for that um which and it's certainly the time i started writing the novel i was seeing a lot of those fundraising campaigns on facebook um that was a lot of that about so it did occur to me you know that we will pay you know we will raise money for healthcare um when it's a very very serious um disease or when it's a child um so so that was in my mind as i was writing the novel at first but yeah so we although we don't pay for our health care there in certain circumstances we have um there are options that we people will go abroad to look for treatment that's not available on the nhs so we call it crowdfunding don't we hey i mean it's like having a gofundme page or something right yeah absolutely but in britain it's called an appeal and it seems it seemed to have a little more formal structure to the way you would go about an appeal than perhaps crowdfunding which seems to me um has a wide variety of um possible organizing factor i mean you know i read about a couple that raised money through crowdfunding gofundme or whatever to drive their volkswagen bus around patagonia or something so you know there doesn't seem to be necessarily what most people would think of as a worthy cause behind some of these but i had a feeling from the way they went about it that it's a little more structured in the uk would that be true it can be when they're talking about amounts that are as large as this um although technically i suppose uh poppy's appeal is a crown crowdfunding campaign um sarah jane one of the characters um jumps on board and ratchets it up a notch really to make it a proper um you know charity fundraising campaign and she she brings it onto another footing and i think she um she's one of the most compelling characters in the in the book in the end and her energy really drives this campaign forward and and and makes it um makes it official for a lot of the people in there but i'm going to have to i'm going to have to pop off barbara and janice but let me just say quickly in closing in in in writing and writing a novel one of the things i always think about is what does someone want and why and how far will they go to get it and you have captured that so gorgeously and so rivetingly in the appeal i i cannot praise you enough i cannot if i could stand up i would stand and applaud for this book and i oh my goodness thank you for her perfect life patrick that's so nice of you um this is a treasure of a novel janus and congratulations on all of it and i have ordered the twyford code your next book so barbara talk i hope you all will talk about izzy and sarah jane and poppy and the people who don't appear in the novel and how you chose who would who would be in the novel um and i wish i could stay forever and congratulate you but thank you barbara for including me in this um it's it's so much fun to let the world know about this book oh thank you thank you hank very much hank is just such a brilliant interviewer and it's wonderful to have one writer speak to another about you know writing kinds of things which contributes so much to it so thank you hank very much for joining us i'll see you again soon yes right so here we are janice you and me um let's go back let's i'm hoping that my internet connection which can wobble in my library slightly but i'm so bored with always being in my office which isn't nearly as scenic so if i freeze patrick will have to pop in and rescue us um let's go back and talk about the structure a bit because um i think the epistolary novel is a is a fascinating way to solve a lot of problems and i remember reading pamela by richardson which may or may not be the first novel in english but anyway it's a a deal and it seemed to me that the thing that that worked so well was a it um it allowed different voices to come in in a you know before we had any real grasp on how to tell stories that way and it also created a timeline because the letters are moving back and forth and dated so that the reader you know keeps up so was that part of your thought are you a reader of the epistolary novel ladies or isn't it lady susan isn't that the austin that's an epistolary novel right but i think it was austin's first first whatever and it was her way of sort of learning how to structure a story i'm pretty sure it's called ladies lazy's i i know i've read lady susan so you know did that pop into your mind when you started thinking about writing the appeal um you know not much did pop into my mind when i started it i i started free kind of way i didn't have a deadline it wasn't commissioned it was written completely on spec um it was a spur-of-the-moment decision really to to move from screenwriting to novel writing i i didn't think of any separate idea i just started on the same idea i'd been thinking of for a script and that was how i i launched it um one thing that i started off writing but then change was when i first um wrote the appeal i didn't put any dates in or times i just hadn't i just concentrated on the characters um and it's only when i got to the end really that i i realized it did need dates and in fact that would be an opportunity to put in a few more twists and things some readers might notice someone might not uh so that was um we've got a big job then to put all the dates in and all the times but i think it was worth it because it does give it an air of authenticity for a start but it's also another clue or lots of other clues um well that's very true they are clues but it also it also gives you such a concrete structure you know in that um you if the reader can in fact if necessary flip back you know to see whatever time and because i mean one thing's about email that's interesting it's not only the date it's actually the time so you guys you know whether it was like an instant reply or you know took a while um however it was but then when you have the conversations with the um the attorneys you know they have different um because they're what are they they're actually texting aren't they they are they're on them a whatsapp style bubble what's it so so that the attorney stuff looks like this where they're just chattering back and forth but if you're into the this is the email structure where you know it has the proper headings so it'll say from joyce walford recur for poppy then we have the date and the time and then to the recipient we're all familiar with that so you know i i think your novel works in part because by now people are accustomed to email it might have you know years back been a little more of a challenge to the average reader but now we know what to expect um i love it i think together with this you know screenwriting is mostly dialogue right um yeah it's it's not uh to do a dialogue and very very sparse um explanation of where you are um it's very technical uh kind of writing um screenwriting so yeah i mean it's the dialogue is where you deliver character so when you think i've been writing scripts that way and then look at the appeal i mean it's quite a uh kind of authentic um generation from one to the next really it was uh it wasn't a difficult transition to make bearing in mind that i i chose the epistolary form right well i mean i think your screenwriting experience certainly helps you know make this a polished kind of a piece one of the other things about doing this with email and what's happened so forth is you can bring so many players into the story you know you don't have to gather them all up in the room you know like a rex doubt where you wind up you know with the suspects and all of it in the real wolf you know in the study in the bad guy in the yellow chair usually or however it went um but you can have all these different voices and they don't even have to be in the uk if you you know um don't want them to be in fact aren't there some emails from africa as part of this yeah and there's there's in fact one member of the community who is traveling around the world and she's emailing very inappropriate things uh all the way through um so there are some light moments in this although it is about um raising money for a child's medical treatment it's quite a there's a light touch as well i think it's quite a funny novel um to read from a comedy of manners i suppose well it is yeah but i mean you can have an almost infinite cast when they are contributing like that now before we started i asked you about the sequel which is already prob not the sequel your second novel which is already published in the uk and i'm not sure i pronounced it is it pronounced twyford or twiffer yes twilight code the twyford code so tell us a bit about the structure of the twifer crow because you've taken it up another step well it's not well i mean it's not traditionally epistolary but it is kind of i mean it's some the main character whose story we're hearing is um illiterate so he can't write but he's written this book for us and the way he's done it is he's recorded his story on an iphone 4 and it's been put through automatic transcription software to create the audio files that we're reading so this automatic software has introduced various um things that it does it blanks out any swearing or anything it thinks is swearing it will mishear words but will just put down what it thinks and it'll mishear the same words in the same way or in different ways all the way through so there's a kind of a layer of um sort of a filter that's been put over the text that you're reading and it's surprisingly though how quick you can see through it and how you can still read what what is meant it's like those things you got on facebook a few years ago where you get a sentence and every letter was wrong apart from the first and the last letter of each word but you could still read it it's something about language that's more that's a function and it's automatic and we don't realize quite how easy we can take in um what we're reading so i mean hopefully that's as good a reader as the appeal well you do you know so what are you writing like modern comedies of manners using these interesting new uh storytelling techniques i'm not sure maybe um i don't really think much before i start writing it's a really organic um evolutionary process for me i kind of i just have fun and i hope what comes out at the end is something that other people enjoy um that's mine you know i mean you were number one sunday chinese best seller with the appeal so clearly plenty of people enjoyed it and now you're also good yeah you're going to be here in the united states so have you you know performed i mean now that you're a published writer and a best-selling writer you must spend time with other writers what kind of feedback have you had from them are they envious are they curious what do you know what sort of reaction have you gotten um really supportive so i have to say um i'm on twitter quite a bit and book twitter that's all the authors and readers and bloggers and reviewers and and people who chat about books on twitter it's a really supportive place um and touchwood i haven't you know had you know any negativity uh at all i mean everyone is supportive of each other um i think writers appreciate how hard it is and how hard it is to get where you get so you know we certainly don't resent anybody and i hope no one is envious of me either you know it's it's all hard rule on our own journey as writers it'd be interesting to see you know whether if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery it'll be interesting to see if anyone else um you know but there was um meg cabot wrote a really good book the name which has totally escaped me but it was all and it was quite a long time ago it was all done in emails and part of the fun of the of the storytelling or the headers in the emails and you know the names that people adopted as their you know email identity and so forth were absolutely wonderful i think it's i might be wrong if she's written more like that if that's the only one i've read because she's written other conventional stories so i guess the question for you would be you know now that you've wandered into this um or deliver whatever um do you feel now that you have to to continue to write in this episode i say epistolary you pronounce it differently i i might not even pronounce it probably no you're probably right there's you know american and english are two different languages so we have to get used to it but i mean now do you feel like you know you're going to be expected to write like this or do you think you could suddenly sit down and write a more conventional conventionally narrated novel or or wouldn't you want to bother with it well i've got a whole load of ideas for um you know books and other things and i i kind of treated each idea separately so the appeal came to me as um emails the twyford code came to me in the particular way it did and certain other and i've got some other ideas i want to do but they just wouldn't work with emails or texts or with audio anything they would have to be a fairly conventional narrative to get them out um so yeah i mean hopefully if um my career pans out that i can eventually write those particular books um yeah that will be a more conventional narrative and and hopefully that will best serve that story so i always think that there has to be more than just um what might be seen as a gimmick there has to be a reason for that format for that story in that format um and if there isn't then it shouldn't be in that format so i hope that you know at some point i will write a more conventional narrative um fingers crossed i'll get to do it i wasn't pushing you in that direction i was just um just curious because you know the whole branding thing with modern publishing is that people come to expect a writer to produce you know a particular kind of work um and you know i'm hoping that you can resist that pressure i agree with you that the story should dictate um and and you know this conversation janice comes up with people who write series and you know every once in a while a series author will have an idea for a story that doesn't fit the series you know it's wrong for the characters or is in the wrong time or wrong place or whatever and and sometimes they're able to write that book sometimes they feel pressured you know discouraged from doing it um while you're building a career so it helps that you have been such a success out of the box you have more um you know clout with your with your publisher having been successful and unpredictable to some degree that you know to allow people to to follow you into something than if you had started um differently so you know it's a it's a gamble how does your agent react do you know you you must um with a successful contract you must have had an agent was it hard to find an agent well um it was but not for books i mean i did have um way back in my career uh years and years where i couldn't get an agent at all this is back when i was screenwriting um i even had a film made with a co-writer and still couldn't get an agent for many years so i mean i am one of those writers whose career was held up really for lack of an agent for a long long time but that was that was back then um so lucy fawcett that she'll land in london is my screenwriting author but i was lucky really because the same agency also um represents novel writers so when i was ready to write a novel lucy could pass um that manuscript onto gaia gaia banks and so so that was a fairly easy transition compared to other writers who perhaps may be represented by a screenwriting agent but not have access to novel agents so so that was was fairly easy but back in the day i did have a problem finding an agent well you want to have an agent who's enthusiastic about your work um if they don't believe in it then they're not going to be able to sell it so what was your agent's reaction when confronted with this interesting book and they were um really supportive and all from what from the word go i mean that they were the first people um both lucy and guy to read um those early versions of the appeal i mean they read the first version was two hundred thousand no hundred thousand not two hundred thousand a hundred thousand words long so twenty thousand words longer than the book we've got here and it was all um emails between izzy and sam who um if you've read the book you'll know that um izzy emailed sam a lot and they're very intense emails well there were a great many more of those in the original version so lucinda read that and they they gave me some very um crucial feedback on that first um draft um to cut those emails out and to do various other things and so yeah they were brilliant actually brilliant that's wonderful i know part of the part of the editorial process involves pruning um you know sometimes authors don't write anything quite long enough but most of the time there's extra material and the book that finally emerges should be one that has been pruned and sculpted and all the rest of it so that there are not um as elmer leonard's famously said i leave out the words that readers skip and you you know which is a wonderful i'm not sure that may be apocryphal but you know basically that was his idea he was also opposed to adverbs so i'm not sure if i'm mixing all that up but um yeah i can see that you know whittling it down to um to its essence would be would be a big thing but also don't you think janice when you know when you're telling yourself a story when you're writing it inevitably you wind up with some repetition um oh i think we might have lost barbara she was she was talking about repetition are you back are you back barbara we lost you for a second oh i'm sorry it's this internet connection again i'm gonna have to stop doing things in my library um am i back you're back now your question was about repetition all right sorry um i was talking about um the fact that when writers are are drafting a novel oftentimes there's repetitious material because they're telling themselves the story and you know we read it in a concentrated period of time but for a writer could go on for months days years whatever it is so it's really important that you know you you go back and remove all those things that her repetitions are are unnecessary or and sometimes you have to a different direction occasionally when you were whittling it down um yeah and i say repetition is something that um certainly my editor always spots and the proofreaders will stop we'll spot it too it's really easy to use the same phrases the same words and you don't just don't notice that you're doing it um even when you read your own work back to you to yourself um so it's really um crucial to get almost as many people as possible reading that manuscript and telling you where these little glitchy things um might be improved um it's not that something's wrong perhaps but where it could be better that's to get your book the best it can be um what was the second part of your question i don't understand i probably forgot i knew i am i'm going to have to give up this venue because there's just something that doesn't work with the email patrick you can come and rescue us um i just want to say if if you can still hear me um then one of the other things about the appeal while while it is a british story um there there are international elements to the story and email allows those to come in the way they communicate so this in a way is is a kind of global story which i've written if not an empire today at one point was an empire global empire and so you know it has some tentacles so to speak all over the world so patrick why don't we let you take over before i screw this up sure no problem um yeah we could you kind of go in and out um but um can you talk a little bit about i mean it's it's really an ingenious uh way of telling a story you know because uh there's no you know oftentimes we're sort of um the reader is is uh has that comfortable i'm not sure how to say it but like an orientation of a of an omniscient third person narrator kind of guiding you through uh and there's not that here which so which is which is wonderful um and the reader is forced to really fill in so much that's not on the page you know especially with these lines of text dialogue you know the readers doing a lot of the work you know filling in the story was that was that fun to uh to uh kind of construct it must have been it was huge fun and as i was saying earlier i didn't have any deadlines so i could just play with it and that's that was what i was doing for most of that first draft was exploring um different ways of of speaking about these events exploring the characters getting to know them getting to know them so i could write from their point of view um so um authentically uh so yeah it was i think there's a hand going through the appeal but it's invisible it's like you're lead and you don't realize there's a narrator because that narrator's well it's me i suppose but i haven't said anything in in the text so right yeah you're right through it um so yeah i'm not i'm just i'm pleased that people have got it if you know it's so good to hear when they do and you just don't know what's funny is that there are i'm sure very subtle differences depending upon you know if you're talking by way of a of a text or if you're talking by way of an email or you know different kinds of texts have different different language or different vocabulary shorthand was it fun playing with that yeah absolutely and we each have a different approach to each different format so some people will write emails that are four pages long right um whereas others will just do one line as if they were writing a text or or on whatsapp they won't adjust their um the way they text uh for email at all so yeah it was wonderful to bring out their personality through something so um you know left field if you like do something that we don't even realize what we're doing yeah it's really become universal because that's the way we all communicate now and isn't it isn't it interesting how um you know you think about uh some of these conventions just over the last 10 15 years you know you know barbara i think we can we can see you too and hear you um remember how like say even 15 years ago when you saw somebody in uh outside in a restaurant or in a coffee shop holding up their phone you're like what a what an a-hole you know how rude yes how rude and now you see people i mean that's just uh you know i know it people think a cone of silence has descended over them and that they can you know speak about intimate details in a room full of people and nobody's actually right you'd just be like i wanted to point out too that um and here's an example of um first published in the lockwood gazette that you actually bring in a third person because you've got excerpts from newspaper coverage and so forth so you know you've got the first person narrative going back and forth in the emails and the messages but then every once in a while and then of course you've got the you know junior clerks clark's um reading but then every once in a while you get a statement from a newspaper which introduces yet a a different voice so you know it's this is almost like a master class in um in putting together voice and perspective were you able to hear all that yeah all right yeah we have on that yeah there's also some um interviews uh towards the back of police interviews as well so there's a slightly slight change in the in the voice so um it's not entirely 100 emails but it's mostly emails and there are a couple of characters that are crucial to the story that you never really hear from at all um you know all you know about them is other people's um presentation of them one of them i think is a is a really terrific surprise so i did think janice that you did a wonderful job surprising us with this very complicated story that um i could figure out part of it i mean i was pretty sure i knew where part of it was going but you really surprised me with at least two plot threads so you know it's a real it really is a challenge to the reader when you start out if you pay careful attention i'll be you know it'd be interesting to see if you managed to get it all before you know what happens yeah it's interesting some people do get it so it's it's um i think it's possible to get um it's possible to guess i'm not sure it's possible to get all of it i think you can get one yeah no not all of it maybe not all yeah so and yet and yet i didn't feel like crying foul you know i didn't feel like saying no fair you know you didn't you didn't like it's all there it's just remarkably cleverly concealed hey patrick are there any questions from the audience at this time of day it's not a very large audience as a general rule but people will watch this for you know days thereafter well i'll keep i'll keep looking um you know we forget how many epistolary novels there really are out there i mean there's you know dracula is an epistolary novel in many ways um uh what was the one that they made the that wonderful movie with anthony hopkins uh 84 cheering crosstalk and the guernsey literary potato peel society was a recent example uh there are so many with with this cast of characters um did you have well i'm not gonna ask you did you have fun again but uh did did certain personalities sort of emerge that uh surprised you uh or asserted themselves in ways that you didn't expect um yeah there were a few i mean there are a few characters that i think were me at some point in my life and that i think well i like to think i've moved on from them but i'm go in writing those characters it felt like i was going back to someone who i once was and there's certainly a lot of people there that i've observed um in my life uh both through their emails and and their behavior um so yeah it was um it was a real sort of education really to write the novel to have to do something so different um is there was this therapeutic in some ways yeah i think it was i think it was yeah because well it's therapeutic because you can give people their comeuppance that perhaps they never had in life yes in that case it is um but yeah it is great to have characters and to be able to do things with them to create stories it's a real privilege to do that it's a privilege to be a writer as is what i've discovered this last couple of years uh i do have a question from one of our facebook viewers uh doug he says i'm wondering about the use of email in just a few texts in the novel is email uh that prevalent in the uk i feel as if here it would be all text interesting point yeah it's interesting i think um it email was sort of the primary communication a few years ago i think things because this is set in 2018 uh it has moved on here and we do text and whatsapp now i think more than email but still email is popular and particularly among older generations who remember the early days of email rather like myself and who still stick to it so yeah i mean i i still love it but it's funny how how email has sort of you know as you were saying earlier has sort of uh mimicked the text form you know whereas a couple years ago we were all signing off formally and saying our names now we you know half of us don't even bother with our name it's just a you know almost like a text yes your communication is just getting shorter yes and so we have less words to say what we want to say more silences it's it's interesting and less permanence you know unfortunately you know it's also volatile that um we're not going to end up with in many cases um papers and you know files for researchers and so forth on the other hand if you watch crime shows you recognize that one of the great tools the police have now is they can retrieve all the text correspondence from the um you know the carrier from the phone provider and so people end up inadvertently testifying against themselves um based upon you know the fact that these electronic communications don't ever really disappear so on one end you have them disappearing and on the other hand they're impermanent so you know you don't wind up with archives i find it fascinating how that is developing as a librarian and an archivist part of it i deplore but on the other hand i wonder if we're going to end up printing out you know all of these text messages and so forth in order to keep them as a as a record is that is that something you've thought about uh yeah you can get um apps or programs or something or other but you can i've never done it myself you can have to get them printed out if you want for your own records um but yeah nothing is ever deleted so you have to be careful what you say to anyone very true indeed so patrick is there anything else let's see well i'm looking at that nice row of penguin classics up there um yeah yeah who are some of your uh your literary influences or favorite authors um i like the victorian novelists thomas hardy brontes um dickens not sure i've read absolutely everything of his but i do like the ones i've read um yeah victorian novelists for me that's my go-to my comfort reads i love thomas hardy oh yeah i like native i'm very fond of anthony trollope i thought you know the palace or novels um are among my favorites and at one point they were great television we tried to go back and watch them recently and recognize the tv has really come a long way and they look so dated but they were wonderful well janice what a pleasure it's been to meet you thank you so much for is i think this is your your u.s book launch is it not today yes this is my my launch for today i guess i mean it's out in the us right now today and this is the uh you know the cast i'm doing today so uh yeah this is it well what a privilege for us um and i know you spoke to hank the other day but i'm so delighted that we've gotten a chance to do this this is really and just a marvelous book um and i'm so glad you belong to our british crime club you will automatically get a copy if you don't i urge you to order one and um we'll see if we can acquire more book plates but even without one the book will read exactly the same so um and we do have copies of the twyford code coming from london um and so if you are interested in that i urge you to go to our webstore and order one really quickly because they're going to disappear with the speed of light um what is that about by the way can you give us a little synopsis of the yeah the fifa code is about a former prisoner who um is set the task by his probation officer to revisit an episode he finds traumatic from his youth and it's when his teacher disappeared on a school trip so he has to go back and speak to his old school friends to see what they remember because he can't remember himself and he ends up going on a journey really through his own life because he discovers that his teacher found a secret code in a disgraced children's author's works um and thereby i must stop before i give too much away ooh secret codes oh see much fun you know people who love books also love books about books or books about codes or you know all that sort of thing it's so much fun we were talking about biblio mysteries last night with um a different author and how enduringly popular they are in a literary community so um anyway i'm really looking forward to my copy getting here from london and we'll see what happens so i hope we'll get to speak to you when it publishes here in the united states and um meanwhile um thank you janice for your time it's really been a great pleasure to meet you oh thank you barbara and patrick it's been a delight to be here thank you you're bad goodbye everybody