Death By Shredder | Chapter One

Matt & Mollie kick off Novel Idea with a brilliantly ill-advised challenge: write a novel together, one chapter at a time, with no planning, alternating weekly. Steffan Powell joins as narrator, referee and professional reader-out-louder, steering them away from Mollie’s romcom instincts and Matt’s action fantasies and into what “everybody loves”: murder.

A coin toss crowns Matt as Chapter One author, and he introduces us to Detective Ian Chalk at Willow Manor, where the wealthy Augustus Smythe has supposedly died in a freak accident involving a paper shredder and a tie. Chalk’s dramatic “will reveal” goes wrong when the document he triumphantly retrieves from a grandfather clock turns out to be a parish newsletter celebrating the housekeeper Mrs Paisley’s record-breaking tomato. Enter Chalk’s new partner, D.I. Brie Rockfort, who produces the real will — painstakingly pieced back together after being shredded — and raises the stakes with a bombshell: Augustus Smythe may not have died accidentally after all. The chapter ends with the household summoned to the study, now an official crime scene, as Mollie prepares to take over Chapter Two with a major plot point, a character deep-dive, and a scene of conflict.

Matt and Mollie are writing a novel… together. They alternate chapters in a bid to create a gripping murder mystery. The catch? They have completely different ideas about what the book should be.

Hosted by Matt Edmondson and Mollie King, with ever-patient narrator and referee Steffan Powell, each has just one week to continue the story — reacting, escalating, derailing and occasionally rescuing the plot from the other. Steffan reads the chapters aloud and tries to keep the whole thing vaguely coherent.

What starts as a simple premise becomes a competitive, unpredictable battle of twists, cliffhangers and creative one-upmanship.

Part comedy show, part audiobook, part social experiment — and by the end, there’s a complete original novel, written in real time.

Welcome to the story.

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