April 13, 2025 • 31 mins
In this episode we chat to journalist, literary critic and novelist Lucy Atkins about her latest book Windmill Hill ... and her love of pony fiction
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Murder Junction everyone. This week on the show,
we are chatting to Lucy Atkins, author, journalist, and literary critic.
Lucy will be having a very grown up chat with
us about her career and novels, including her latest book,
Windmill Hill. Lucy, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Thank you, thank you for having me right.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
We're going to start at the beginning and we're going
to ask you about about growing up. Where did you
grow up? What did you do on the way to
your first job.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
I grew up in a village in Sussex, and I
started writing when I was about six and was very
clear I was obsessed with ponies and.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Was very clear that I was going to write pony books.
Speaker 4 (00:50):
A pony fiction is a very very decided. It's a
growing area, isn't it.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
I have heard from a reliable source, my literary agent,
that the way to make money as a writer now
is to write cowboy fiction.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
I've just been watching four series of Yellowstone, which, for
the uninitiated is an incredibly successful modern contemporary cowboy series
starring Kevin Costner and a whole bunch of others. It's
it's been builders succession, but with cowboys and horses, which
is pretty pretty I thought.
Speaker 4 (01:21):
It was Dallas with it's like a modern day Dallas
without the oil, right because instead of cattle, they've got horse.
Speaker 5 (01:28):
Well they do have cattle, right. It's all about but
it's not.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
It's not set in the city. It's it's it's all
out in this in rural areas and Kevin cost massive
homestead which other people want to impache upon.
Speaker 4 (01:42):
But anyway, I think I think we'll see listen, you
have to write this cowboy pony, but you really do.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
That's I think.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
I think.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
Actually, what I forgot to say is it's supposed to
be erotic and romantic.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
Oh oh, I see, you know, well, I don't want
to lower the tone.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
It could go wrong, couldn't it.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
There there are corners of the of the Internet, especially
on Amazon, where there's a whole sort of sub sub
subgenre of rather ikey pony erotica.
Speaker 4 (02:11):
Why do I get the feeling of a scene that
you've been a number one best seller in that particular category.
Speaker 5 (02:16):
Is that how you know this?
Speaker 1 (02:17):
Well, I mean we've talked about this before, my friend,
because you you you sent us links to some sort
of dinosaur erotica or oh, yeah, you remember the loch
Ness Monster.
Speaker 5 (02:27):
Was weird.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (02:28):
Yeah, there's there's.
Speaker 4 (02:30):
Some markets for all sorts of things out that that
really is.
Speaker 5 (02:34):
Then that's where it's at.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
All right, So you you knew you were going to
be a writer from a very young age, and you
actually come from quite a literary pedigree. I was doing
my research and you are the daughter of.
Speaker 4 (02:46):
Psicographer It's alexicographer picographer BT S Atkins, and the niece
of linguist John McCardy Sinclair.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
I'd love to know a little bit more about bts Atkins.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
It's all related to the only books.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
Interestingly, because my mother was she was the editor of
the Collins Robert English French Dictionary, which is the sort
of red and blue dictionary that people of a certain
age all grew up with.
Speaker 4 (03:14):
Anyway, Well, I was going to say, there was the
bean of our childhood existence is that book.
Speaker 5 (03:18):
Wasn't it?
Speaker 2 (03:19):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (03:19):
Well it was the It informed my whole childhood. And
my mum used to go away to Glasgow, where Colin's
headquarters was, and she would go for book fairs and
she'd come back with a suitcase full of Colin's pony books.
So her career in mine kind of overlapped in a
(03:41):
strange way because of these book fairs that she used
to go to. But she was a she wrote dictionaries,
and she was a phenomenal, a phenomenal linguist and became
a kind of computational linguist, having gone from sort of
editing dictionaries on her kitchen table. She was really at
(04:04):
the forefront of kind of voice recognition, speech recognition, all
of this.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
She was working in.
Speaker 3 (04:10):
With oup with linguists at Berkeley, and my uncle was
in the same field, and they actually produced a dictionary
together in the eighties.
Speaker 5 (04:21):
So is this your mum's brother when you say your
uncle is There.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
Was only the two of them.
Speaker 3 (04:26):
There were Scottish and both obviously you know, had some
sort of weird linguistic gene. And they created something called
the British National Corpus, which is this sort of enormous,
kind of multimillion words citation resource that changed the way
that dictionaries are written. And they wrote the first dictionary
(04:47):
using this kind of online resource showing really how language
is used, not how it ought to be used or
how we think it's used.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
So they were like these phenomenal.
Speaker 3 (04:59):
Pioneers in the world of lexicography and linguistics, and they,
as siblings do.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
She was the big sister, he was a little brother.
Speaker 3 (05:06):
They fell out catastrophically, never spoke to which I mean
it was a nightment.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
They did this project together.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
She thought he had used, had disrespected her and used
some of her work without telling her.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
And you know, god os and you know what thought.
Speaker 3 (05:23):
And they they had this kind of insane, very small
world they both dominated, but they would be, you know,
at these massive conferences, not really speaking to each other.
Speaker 5 (05:35):
Did they make up?
Speaker 3 (05:36):
He kind of did in the end, sort of on
as he was coming to the end of his life.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
They did.
Speaker 3 (05:42):
And I think what it was apart from the sibling,
you know, two kind of alpha siblings with massive brains
battling it out on the same battlefield.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
You know, somebody, somebody was going to get hurt. But
also they like.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
I can see that, I can see that the parallel
right there, obvious, you.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
Know, has pointed out the absence of massive brains means
it's not it's a bit of a non issue. Really,
I would love.
Speaker 4 (06:09):
It if they'd actually fallen out over a particular word.
That would have been cool. If there was the definition
of a word that had upset them. That would have
been and then a rappros more many us.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
I believe I might have got this wrong.
Speaker 3 (06:22):
I may have made this up, but I think it
was a It was a paper they co authored in
some way about the word risk. Okay, I might be
just making this up now, but it was amazing that
they would.
Speaker 4 (06:36):
Do you know that you could have a whole paper
on on on words. I think that's amazing as opposed to.
Speaker 3 (06:41):
Words on spend something like five years working purely on
the word risk.
Speaker 1 (06:47):
Do either of you remember that Blackadder episode where he
had the dictionary one where he had I think Johnson, Yes,
that's right, and then he gets really upset because there's
one word missing from his dictionary ossage.
Speaker 5 (07:03):
Ossage was the world, wasn't it.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
Yeah? I think Baldrick came up with it and he
got really really upset. Mister Johnson. Okay, so you you've
obviously got the pedigree. There's no there was no career
for you other than being a right now with this,
with this, with this parentage. But you you studied literature
at Oxford, but then you had a stint with Amnesty International,
(07:27):
Is that right?
Speaker 2 (07:28):
Yes? I did.
Speaker 3 (07:29):
I worked for nonprofits for a few years and and
I felt like I should do something useful, and and
it was I wanted it to work, but my heart
was just in books, and and I just couldn't even
though it was I could see it was, you know,
just incredibly important the work that was being done at Amnesty.
(07:52):
And I could believe in it one hundred percent, you know,
obviously in my head, but my heart, I just I
just wanted to work in book.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
Were you in the UK or did you get sent abroad?
Speaker 2 (08:02):
I was in the UK.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
Yeah, I was a campaigns officer in the in Amnesty UK,
and I did other things as well in nonprofit before.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
And then I imagine a book reviewer.
Speaker 4 (08:16):
I imagine it's quite stressful, you know, working for Amnesty International.
It's it's tough, you know, emotionally, it's got to take
a toll, right, all the stuff you're dealing with.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
Yeah, I mean I think.
Speaker 3 (08:32):
It would have done in the long run, Yes, definitely
it would have done. It didn't because I wasn't there
for long enough, and and because I was, I was
doing a campaign's job where I was doing a lot
of organizing and a lot of getting other people to
do things to to really spread the emotional message. So
(08:53):
I was doing budgets and you.
Speaker 4 (08:55):
Know, ah, budgets, I like that. You're you know, we're
we're accountants. Oh okay, we like budgets.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
We both went to the London School of Economics and
study finance and whatnot.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
I was not good at budgets, and in fact it
was I don't know what I was doing being in
charge of any numbers at all. Because when I when
I was going to go and do graduate work in America,
you have to do something called the GRE I think
it still exists as like.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
A graduate recruitment exam where you have to take.
Speaker 3 (09:25):
This is after university, So anyone who wants to study
in America has to do these exams, and you have
to do papers in logic, language and maths. And I
did in my maths paper, I got four percent.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
Did you brankrupt?
Speaker 5 (09:41):
That's impressive.
Speaker 3 (09:42):
I was looking at doing a PhD at Stanford University
and they rang me up and said, there's been a
mistake on your transcript. And I had to say, actually,
I'm sorry, that hasn't just not very good at maths.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
We should probably terminate this podcast right now.
Speaker 5 (09:58):
Do you know what you've got? The four percent? Four?
Speaker 2 (10:00):
I think it was not for choice. The whole thing
was mad. I mean, it was a massive achievement to
get only four percent.
Speaker 5 (10:08):
See for everything, you would have got twenty five percent.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
Let's talk about happier times. Because then, as you say,
you made some sort of weird somersault into the world
of journalism as a reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement.
And was it while you were doing that that you
wrote your first first novel.
Speaker 3 (10:28):
I was writing so all the time, pretty much from
the age of six onwards.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
I was always writing. So I was writing.
Speaker 3 (10:34):
I think when I was working for the Times Solitary Supplement,
I was writing short stories, but I wasn't showing them
to anyone, And I don't think I showed anything to
anyone until I was in my early thirties and wrote
what I can only imagine was utter Build wrote, I
wrote this novel. I can't remember anything about it was.
(10:57):
I just remember being quite pleased that I managed to
get to ninety thousand words and think, God, you know great,
I'll send it to someone.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
AB would be happy if the reviewers called his novels
are to Build.
Speaker 4 (11:08):
They call it i'd be I'd be happy with that
utter anything is good.
Speaker 3 (11:14):
I sent it to like three literary agents and they all,
you know, rejected it, and I thought, okay, I'm just
not very I thought I'm not designed to be a
fiction writer.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
I thought, well, it couldn't have been that bad. I
think you're being very modest because you were published not
long after with The Missing One, Right, so tell us
about that book.
Speaker 3 (11:33):
Yeah, I think that was a good Ten years later, yeah,
I went into nonfiction writing. So I wrote some books
about having babies and things like this, and then I
I went to it. It was around my fortieth birthday
and I went to a party with some old friends
(11:53):
from university and there was a guy there and he
was that guy that.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
Always says the really annoying thing that you don't want.
Speaker 3 (12:00):
This guy said to me, oh, Lucy, I always thought
you'd be a novelist. And I felt like somebody had
kind of put a knife in my heart, and I thought, yes,
so did I, So did I, And I then went
and did And I had still been writing fiction all
this time. But I knew it was bad. I knew
(12:20):
enough about fiction to know that it was bad. But
I couldn't figure out how to make it good. And
so after this fortieth birthday party encounter, I gave myself
the gift of a creative writing course, and that turned
the whole thing around for me. It turned me from
a nonfiction writer to the fiction writer I wanted to be.
(12:44):
Or I mean, it's a work in progress, it's still
it's still.
Speaker 4 (12:50):
It sounds to me, Lucy like that guy is the
one who gave you the impetus to do what you
wanted to do.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
I saw.
Speaker 5 (12:57):
He sounds like the hero of the whole story to me.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
So tell us about the missing one. What's the book about?
Give us the thirty second pitch.
Speaker 3 (13:05):
It's quite hard to describe because it's about a killer
whale researcher who, interestingly, we can sort of touch back
on the linguistics background, because this researcher in the book
is researching in the nineteen seventies. She's researching communication between
killer whales, because orcas speak to each other in really
(13:26):
complex language. And it was based on a real woman
that I came across. I used to live in Seattle,
and I came across her, and she lived in the
Pacific Northwest, and she went out on a little boat
and she dropped microphones down into the water and listened
to the killer whales communicating with each other, and I thought,
this is I wrote a short story based on her,
(13:48):
and then I thought this is just this is a novel,
and I started. I wrote the whole novel from her perspective,
and it was rejected and I thought, oh, I'm just
still in fiction writer.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
On crap, this is never going to work.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
And then I wrote another non fiction book, and this
story of this killer whale researcher was still there in
the back of my head, and I went back to
it and realized I had to write it from the
perspective of her daughter, who was trying to piece together
her mother's past, because I couldn't really get myself into
(14:23):
the really existence of someone who goes out listening to
killer whales, but I could.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
Definitely get myself into the.
Speaker 3 (14:31):
Existence of the daughter who wants to know more about
the mother who's doing this. So it's all really about
this woman who goes with her toddler to a very
remote part of the Pacific Northwest trying to piece together
her mother's secret past life, which involved lots of killer
whale experiences, and a terrible thing happens to her toddler
(14:55):
while she's there, and it all becomes this sort of psychological,
suspensey kind.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
Of drama where she's trying to save.
Speaker 3 (15:03):
Her child and trying to connect with her mother's past
at the same time.
Speaker 4 (15:07):
I love a good can When did you know when
you recome moment that you knew, actually, this is it,
this is going to work.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
I think it was.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
Actually it was having had nine months of despair and
self doubt and not looking at it for nine months,
and then going back into it and realizing that the
story was great, but it was the way I was
telling it that didn't work.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
And just I can't remember the exact moment when I made.
Speaker 3 (15:34):
That decision that I needed to rewrite it from the
daughter's perspective, but the minute I did, it just started
to feel right.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
There was a film I saw when I was much
younger called Orca, and it was about some fisherman who
accidentally kill a baby killer whale, and then the mother
hunts them down one by one, so it slightly went
a bit looney, but I always feel killer whales get
a bad rap. Yes, I know they actually can kill
great white sharks, but they don't tend to kill too
(16:04):
many human beings.
Speaker 3 (16:06):
They don't kill human beings, so they're not interested in killing.
They're they're they're amazing, and then they're the thing that
really appealed to me is that they're a matriarchal society.
They're dominated by the grandmother and they live in pods
where the grandmother the rules, everyone makes all the decisions,
and the girls go off and leave and the boys
(16:26):
stay with their moms for.
Speaker 5 (16:27):
The It's like an Asian family.
Speaker 1 (16:32):
We're both thinking the exact same thing that that is.
You've just precisely described an Asian family there.
Speaker 5 (16:38):
Well, there you go along with the killer matriarch. Yeah,
my goodness, there.
Speaker 2 (16:45):
Indian.
Speaker 5 (16:47):
That's impressive.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
Did you know that they sleep with one eye open
Asians matriarchs? Well, apparently it's a fact. I remember it
from a long time ago, so apparently they. I don't
know if it's true or not.
Speaker 4 (17:01):
It's like one of your seen facts in Inverted Comers,
is what we're talking about.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
It's like the fact about that sharks never stopped moving
because if they do, they they can't get oxygen into
through their guilds. I mean, I don't know if that's
true or not. I'm sure I.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
Seem to remember.
Speaker 3 (17:17):
I mean, it was ten years ago that I was
obsessed by all of this stuff, but I do seem
to remember that killer whales swim for miles miles and
miles while they're sleeping.
Speaker 4 (17:26):
Wow, all right, Well from Pony Killer Wills, I think
you should tell us about the new book Windmill Hill.
Speaker 2 (17:33):
Well it is.
Speaker 3 (17:35):
When we say new, I think we need to use
that term lightly because I'm actually currently almost finished a
new new book.
Speaker 5 (17:42):
So oh good good.
Speaker 4 (17:43):
We'll come on to that. We want to hear about that,
but tell us something about about the current book. Then.
Speaker 2 (17:48):
On the current book.
Speaker 3 (17:49):
The current book is, it's a book about two old
ladies who live in a in.
Speaker 2 (17:56):
A dilapidated windmill in Sussex. It's based on a.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
Real windmill that I know well, called Jack Windmill, which
is near Brighton, and it's and it's a kind of
dilapidated windmill that's falling down and has been really neglected.
When I went to a party in a house and
we managed to crawl up inside this windmill, the house
that's attached to it. You can rent it out, and
(18:21):
I went someone invited me there and in the middle
of the night we crawled up into this dilapidated windmill
and I was really clear, I'm very I seem to
be creatively, really driven by locations, like interesting places, and
it was really it was just begging for a novel
to be written about it. And so it's about these
(18:43):
old ladies who live in this Sussex windmill, and it's
about their relationship and what has brought them to this,
to this windmill, and the.
Speaker 2 (18:55):
Depth of their friendship.
Speaker 3 (18:56):
One of them came as the housekeeper, and one of
them is a push ex Shakespearean actress, and they've just
over the years, they've formed this incredibly powerful bond and
the past is catching up on them.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
When the novel opens, you know that something. They call
it the awful Incident.
Speaker 3 (19:16):
So there has been an awful incident, and the novel
really is piecing together what that awful incident was, what
the hell have they done? But there's also a plot
in the distant past that gradually evolves, and I was
really interested in memory and how you can repress memories
(19:39):
up to a point, but they're going to burst through eventually,
and it's about that Astrid, my main character, the Shakespearean
actress has been suppressing a trauma for forty years and
it's all just caught up with her.
Speaker 1 (19:58):
So it's sort of suspense, perhaps in the domestic domestic noir.
Speaker 5 (20:03):
I love that.
Speaker 4 (20:04):
I love the psychological aspect of it.
Speaker 5 (20:07):
I love that.
Speaker 4 (20:07):
You know, everyone loves secrets, right, but as you say,
when you bury them, when you bury them for too long,
what are the implications of that?
Speaker 2 (20:15):
Yes, exactly.
Speaker 3 (20:16):
And she's he's kind of she's eighty she's eighty two,
and she's.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
The kind of. An incident at the beginning of the
novel is that.
Speaker 3 (20:25):
She discovers, well, no, this isn't the awful incident.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
It is a different.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
This is the thing that kicks off the novel is
that she discovers that the man that she.
Speaker 3 (20:35):
Used to be married to in the seventies, who has
become a national treasure, is a famous actor, is in
Scotland that he's dying. And Astrid gets she's not left
the windmill in about forty years, and she gets on
a train.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
Ah, she's there's a sort of in a way.
Speaker 3 (20:53):
It's also over a day that she's on this train
and she's thinking about the past and about the most
recent past, which is the awful incident, and the distant past,
which is her relationship with Magnus, who is dying. And
it turns out Magnus is right, is about to publish
a memoir on his deathbed which will expose her, and
she's going up to stop him.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
Right. And you say she's not left this windmill for
forty years.
Speaker 3 (21:20):
Well she she's left it in order to try and
earn money. So she One of the jobs she's managed
to get is as a wirologist, which is which is
a hired mourner. So people hire you to go to
funerals when somebody's died and they don't have enough relatives weeping,
they hire a cast mourners. And she's made quite good money.
(21:44):
So she goes on day trips to funerals and weeps
convincingly and has a backstory.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
And you know, this is actually a thing in the
Middle East and in Asian country.
Speaker 2 (21:53):
So it is big in China. I gather.
Speaker 3 (21:59):
I actually I based a lot of this of her
store mourology story on something I found online where some
out of work actor had written a kind of blog
about his time as a morologist.
Speaker 1 (22:14):
And it's what beer and I do on weekend.
Speaker 4 (22:17):
Well, that's what I'm going to do at your funeral.
Good money novelist, come myrologist. I do like that. I
like that a lot.
Speaker 1 (22:26):
All right, So you've hinted. So this book is currently
available about as you say it came out. Was it
last year?
Speaker 2 (22:31):
It came out, I've lost all track of time. I
think years ago. And it was in paperback last year.
Speaker 1 (22:37):
So that's wind milkim. But you've spent the last couple
of years and you've just hinted at it writing another book,
So can you tell us anything about that?
Speaker 3 (22:48):
Once again we come full circle because this book that
I've been writing for the last two years is about
a lexicographer, and it's actually about Samuel Johnson, who was
the eighteenth century lexicographer, or it's partly about him, and
it's really he was very He had some very good
(23:10):
female friends in his life, and I became very interested
in the women in his life, and one of them is.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
A classic.
Speaker 3 (23:20):
She was an extraordinary woman who was one of the
founding members of the Bluestocking Society, which was a sort
of intellectual society where women at last in the mid
In the mid eighteenth century, women were generally not allowed
to admit that they read books or that they were
interested in anything intellectual. They had to hide if they
(23:43):
knew Latin and Greek too well, and they had to
conceal it if they had any interest in science and
stuff like this. And my character, Elizabeth Carter, was one
of Samuel Johnson's best friends, and she managed to have
life of the mind and do all of these things
(24:05):
without alienating anyone. And I've written really a novel about
her and her friendship with Samuel Johnson and how.
Speaker 4 (24:13):
Did she manage it? How did she manage it in
that environment too.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
It's extraordinary.
Speaker 3 (24:18):
I mean, when you start to really look at what
she did and how she played it, she just played
a blindingly good game.
Speaker 2 (24:26):
She didn't want to be married off.
Speaker 3 (24:29):
She should have been married off to someone who would
then have crushed her. And she managed to avoid marrying anyone,
even though there was an enormous amount of pressure on
her to marry people.
Speaker 2 (24:40):
And she was lovely.
Speaker 3 (24:42):
She was just such a lovely good woman, and she focused,
she focused very tightly on being a good person, and.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
People were so disarmed.
Speaker 3 (24:53):
I think by the fact that she was so obviously
a decent human being and unpretentious and straightforward and loving
and nice, and.
Speaker 2 (25:04):
They were sort of Somehow she managed to.
Speaker 3 (25:08):
Lull people into a sense of security that allowed her
to be interested in astronomy and geography and mathematics, and
she taught herself eight languages fluently, and she made eventually
made a fortune translating a Stoic philosopher and made enough money.
(25:33):
At the very beginning of my novel, her father is
really worried about her, saying, what will you do when
I die? Because there won't be anyone to look after you.
And that's the theme of her life is what will
happen to a spinster.
Speaker 2 (25:45):
With no one?
Speaker 3 (25:46):
And at the end she has made enough money by
translating a Stoic to buy her own I think.
Speaker 5 (25:52):
That's where the money is.
Speaker 4 (25:53):
Stoicism. That's really cool.
Speaker 5 (25:56):
That's what we need to do.
Speaker 4 (25:57):
But find some Stoics that need translating.
Speaker 1 (26:01):
Well on the weekend when we're not we're not mourning,
we're not mourning.
Speaker 3 (26:06):
Yeah, you do have to spend I think maybe about
fifteen years really really immersed in Greek and Latin at
Latin and really you know, perfecting your linguistic emission.
Speaker 1 (26:17):
Now we're buy the lady both ancient Greek.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
That was her name, A I'll do it for us, now, God, what,
let's not go there.
Speaker 4 (26:28):
What was the lady's name again?
Speaker 2 (26:30):
She's called Elizabeth Carter and Samuel Johnson.
Speaker 3 (26:34):
They became friends when Samuel Johnson first arrived in London,
aged about twenty eight, and Elizabeth Carter was a poet
already aged twenty one, and she was kind of famous
and Johnson was fully unknown, and they formed a really
lovely close bond and which lasted all their lives.
Speaker 5 (26:54):
And as we know, there was no romance, no romance there.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
Now we see in the fiction that might be.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
This is this is this is coming.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
Up against historical fiction and.
Speaker 1 (27:05):
How you can This is your nonfiction and fiction lives
colliding now. And of course we know that Johnson come
famous until blackadd of three, So yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4 (27:15):
So what's what's this book called? Do you have a title?
Speaker 2 (27:18):
Its working title is Flying Horse.
Speaker 4 (27:22):
Ali Ah, well, I hope you get to keep that.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
So this is basically your nonfiction, your fiction, and your
childhood love of ponies.
Speaker 3 (27:31):
All it's all come together in a chaotic mess.
Speaker 1 (27:37):
Well inspired, Lucy, we know you inspired way, we know
you have other commitments at the moment, so we're not
going to keep you any longer. Absolutely lovely, lovely chatting
to you, and and thank you for carving out a
bit of a bit of your other hectic day to
chat with us.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
Oh, thank you for having me. It's been a delight.
Speaker 4 (27:57):
Well, I will I was going to say, you didn't
you didn't introduce me, So I think I'm going to
have to say a few words before I get out
of this, because I wanted to talk to you about
what you've been up to today, because you're looking very smart.
Lucy's looking very smart, and you're looking You're looking like,
you know, you've just had tea with Camilla, So.
Speaker 5 (28:17):
What's been going on? Why are you dressed so smartly today?
Speaker 1 (28:20):
You'd not be so far wrong. I've been at a
two hundred year old restaurant in London called Rules, which
is a sort of literally salon for all the great
so Charles Dicken and H. G. Wells and Graham Green.
I was in the Graham green room and I was
washing dishes. That's what it felt like at times. It
was a journalistic lunch for quantum of Minister, the Q
(28:42):
book that's going to come out later this year, and
we had a good laugh. We had a good laugh.
Speaker 4 (28:48):
And what's the latest on that? When can we see that?
That's going to come quite soon?
Speaker 1 (28:52):
No, that's in October. So there's a lot. I mean,
there's a large campaign that's going to be rolled out
over the course of the year. But my claim to
fame is that my bottom may well have graced the
same spot that Charles Chaplin sat in.
Speaker 4 (29:05):
Actually, for you, that is quite an achievement, isn't it.
I mean, your bottom does get about, it's true. But
Charlie Chaplain is that's well done.
Speaker 5 (29:12):
I'm impressed.
Speaker 4 (29:12):
I'm sure our listeners are very impressed. How did you
grace this? How did your backside grace this? Was it
a chair or exactly what were you doing?
Speaker 1 (29:23):
A very old chair? So it might well have been
around since Chaplain's day, I don't know, but at least
the old chair. Like that old story about if you
have an axe and you change the head and then
you change the shaft, is it still the same ax?
And it may not be the exact same chair that
Charlie Chaplin's bottom sat in, but his bottom was in
(29:44):
the vicinity of the space where the chair is now,
so where your.
Speaker 5 (29:47):
Bottom later had its time?
Speaker 4 (29:50):
Yes, I see a very old chair for a very
old bottom, and ladies and gentlemen. That brings us to
the close of yet another episode.
Speaker 5 (29:57):
I've really enjoyed this. I feel we've learned something. It's
lovely when we have someone clever on, isn't it. Once again?
Speaker 1 (30:04):
Well, we have to slightly put an asterisk around that
when it comes to mass in an exam. Yeah, yeah, yeah, she's.
Speaker 4 (30:12):
A hope four percent mate, four percent. I think we
should have a test before we let guess. Come on,
we should have some sort of entrance exam, right, and
then we'll see how loose one here. I should say
once again, if you'd liked the show, can we ask
you to please leave a review, sign up for regular
episodes in your favorite podcast app, and please do spread
(30:34):
the word so fast. Cowboy fiction, if we were to
write cowboy fiction, if we were to star in cowboy fiction,
what would be our cowboy names?
Speaker 5 (30:47):
And what I was saying would be the Indians
Speaker 4 (30:54):
On that culturally inappropriate bombshell, ladies and gentlemen, having your
friends the Red vactually writers on murder Junction, Hm
Welcome to Murder Junction everyone. This week on the show,
we are chatting to Lucy Atkins, author, journalist, and literary critic.
Lucy will be having a very grown up chat with
us about her career and novels, including her latest book,
Windmill Hill. Lucy, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Thank you, thank you for having me right.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
We're going to start at the beginning and we're going
to ask you about about growing up. Where did you
grow up? What did you do on the way to
your first job.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
I grew up in a village in Sussex, and I
started writing when I was about six and was very
clear I was obsessed with ponies and.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Was very clear that I was going to write pony books.
Speaker 4 (00:50):
A pony fiction is a very very decided. It's a
growing area, isn't it.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
I have heard from a reliable source, my literary agent,
that the way to make money as a writer now
is to write cowboy fiction.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
I've just been watching four series of Yellowstone, which, for
the uninitiated is an incredibly successful modern contemporary cowboy series
starring Kevin Costner and a whole bunch of others. It's
it's been builders succession, but with cowboys and horses, which
is pretty pretty I thought.
Speaker 4 (01:21):
It was Dallas with it's like a modern day Dallas
without the oil, right because instead of cattle, they've got horse.
Speaker 5 (01:28):
Well they do have cattle, right. It's all about but
it's not.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
It's not set in the city. It's it's it's all
out in this in rural areas and Kevin cost massive
homestead which other people want to impache upon.
Speaker 4 (01:42):
But anyway, I think I think we'll see listen, you
have to write this cowboy pony, but you really do.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
That's I think.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
I think.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
Actually, what I forgot to say is it's supposed to
be erotic and romantic.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
Oh oh, I see, you know, well, I don't want
to lower the tone.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
It could go wrong, couldn't it.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
There there are corners of the of the Internet, especially
on Amazon, where there's a whole sort of sub sub
subgenre of rather ikey pony erotica.
Speaker 4 (02:11):
Why do I get the feeling of a scene that
you've been a number one best seller in that particular category.
Speaker 5 (02:16):
Is that how you know this?
Speaker 1 (02:17):
Well, I mean we've talked about this before, my friend,
because you you you sent us links to some sort
of dinosaur erotica or oh, yeah, you remember the loch
Ness Monster.
Speaker 5 (02:27):
Was weird.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (02:28):
Yeah, there's there's.
Speaker 4 (02:30):
Some markets for all sorts of things out that that
really is.
Speaker 5 (02:34):
Then that's where it's at.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
All right, So you you knew you were going to
be a writer from a very young age, and you
actually come from quite a literary pedigree. I was doing
my research and you are the daughter of.
Speaker 4 (02:46):
Psicographer It's alexicographer picographer BT S Atkins, and the niece
of linguist John McCardy Sinclair.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
I'd love to know a little bit more about bts Atkins.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
It's all related to the only books.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
Interestingly, because my mother was she was the editor of
the Collins Robert English French Dictionary, which is the sort
of red and blue dictionary that people of a certain
age all grew up with.
Speaker 4 (03:14):
Anyway, Well, I was going to say, there was the
bean of our childhood existence is that book.
Speaker 5 (03:18):
Wasn't it?
Speaker 2 (03:19):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (03:19):
Well it was the It informed my whole childhood. And
my mum used to go away to Glasgow, where Colin's
headquarters was, and she would go for book fairs and
she'd come back with a suitcase full of Colin's pony books.
So her career in mine kind of overlapped in a
(03:41):
strange way because of these book fairs that she used
to go to. But she was a she wrote dictionaries,
and she was a phenomenal, a phenomenal linguist and became
a kind of computational linguist, having gone from sort of
editing dictionaries on her kitchen table. She was really at
(04:04):
the forefront of kind of voice recognition, speech recognition, all
of this.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
She was working in.
Speaker 3 (04:10):
With oup with linguists at Berkeley, and my uncle was
in the same field, and they actually produced a dictionary
together in the eighties.
Speaker 5 (04:21):
So is this your mum's brother when you say your
uncle is There.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
Was only the two of them.
Speaker 3 (04:26):
There were Scottish and both obviously you know, had some
sort of weird linguistic gene. And they created something called
the British National Corpus, which is this sort of enormous,
kind of multimillion words citation resource that changed the way
that dictionaries are written. And they wrote the first dictionary
(04:47):
using this kind of online resource showing really how language
is used, not how it ought to be used or
how we think it's used.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
So they were like these phenomenal.
Speaker 3 (04:59):
Pioneers in the world of lexicography and linguistics, and they,
as siblings do.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
She was the big sister, he was a little brother.
Speaker 3 (05:06):
They fell out catastrophically, never spoke to which I mean
it was a nightment.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
They did this project together.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
She thought he had used, had disrespected her and used
some of her work without telling her.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
And you know, god os and you know what thought.
Speaker 3 (05:23):
And they they had this kind of insane, very small
world they both dominated, but they would be, you know,
at these massive conferences, not really speaking to each other.
Speaker 5 (05:35):
Did they make up?
Speaker 3 (05:36):
He kind of did in the end, sort of on
as he was coming to the end of his life.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
They did.
Speaker 3 (05:42):
And I think what it was apart from the sibling,
you know, two kind of alpha siblings with massive brains
battling it out on the same battlefield.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
You know, somebody, somebody was going to get hurt. But
also they like.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
I can see that, I can see that the parallel
right there, obvious, you.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
Know, has pointed out the absence of massive brains means
it's not it's a bit of a non issue. Really,
I would love.
Speaker 4 (06:09):
It if they'd actually fallen out over a particular word.
That would have been cool. If there was the definition
of a word that had upset them. That would have
been and then a rappros more many us.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
I believe I might have got this wrong.
Speaker 3 (06:22):
I may have made this up, but I think it
was a It was a paper they co authored in
some way about the word risk. Okay, I might be
just making this up now, but it was amazing that
they would.
Speaker 4 (06:36):
Do you know that you could have a whole paper
on on on words. I think that's amazing as opposed to.
Speaker 3 (06:41):
Words on spend something like five years working purely on
the word risk.
Speaker 1 (06:47):
Do either of you remember that Blackadder episode where he
had the dictionary one where he had I think Johnson, Yes,
that's right, and then he gets really upset because there's
one word missing from his dictionary ossage.
Speaker 5 (07:03):
Ossage was the world, wasn't it.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
Yeah? I think Baldrick came up with it and he
got really really upset. Mister Johnson. Okay, so you you've
obviously got the pedigree. There's no there was no career
for you other than being a right now with this,
with this, with this parentage. But you you studied literature
at Oxford, but then you had a stint with Amnesty International,
(07:27):
Is that right?
Speaker 2 (07:28):
Yes? I did.
Speaker 3 (07:29):
I worked for nonprofits for a few years and and
I felt like I should do something useful, and and
it was I wanted it to work, but my heart
was just in books, and and I just couldn't even
though it was I could see it was, you know,
just incredibly important the work that was being done at Amnesty.
(07:52):
And I could believe in it one hundred percent, you know,
obviously in my head, but my heart, I just I
just wanted to work in book.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
Were you in the UK or did you get sent abroad?
Speaker 2 (08:02):
I was in the UK.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
Yeah, I was a campaigns officer in the in Amnesty UK,
and I did other things as well in nonprofit before.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
And then I imagine a book reviewer.
Speaker 4 (08:16):
I imagine it's quite stressful, you know, working for Amnesty International.
It's it's tough, you know, emotionally, it's got to take
a toll, right, all the stuff you're dealing with.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
Yeah, I mean I think.
Speaker 3 (08:32):
It would have done in the long run, Yes, definitely
it would have done. It didn't because I wasn't there
for long enough, and and because I was, I was
doing a campaign's job where I was doing a lot
of organizing and a lot of getting other people to
do things to to really spread the emotional message. So
(08:53):
I was doing budgets and you.
Speaker 4 (08:55):
Know, ah, budgets, I like that. You're you know, we're
we're accountants. Oh okay, we like budgets.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
We both went to the London School of Economics and
study finance and whatnot.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
I was not good at budgets, and in fact it
was I don't know what I was doing being in
charge of any numbers at all. Because when I when
I was going to go and do graduate work in America,
you have to do something called the GRE I think
it still exists as like.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
A graduate recruitment exam where you have to take.
Speaker 3 (09:25):
This is after university, So anyone who wants to study
in America has to do these exams, and you have
to do papers in logic, language and maths. And I
did in my maths paper, I got four percent.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
Did you brankrupt?
Speaker 5 (09:41):
That's impressive.
Speaker 3 (09:42):
I was looking at doing a PhD at Stanford University
and they rang me up and said, there's been a
mistake on your transcript. And I had to say, actually,
I'm sorry, that hasn't just not very good at maths.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
We should probably terminate this podcast right now.
Speaker 5 (09:58):
Do you know what you've got? The four percent? Four?
Speaker 2 (10:00):
I think it was not for choice. The whole thing
was mad. I mean, it was a massive achievement to
get only four percent.
Speaker 5 (10:08):
See for everything, you would have got twenty five percent.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
Let's talk about happier times. Because then, as you say,
you made some sort of weird somersault into the world
of journalism as a reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement.
And was it while you were doing that that you
wrote your first first novel.
Speaker 3 (10:28):
I was writing so all the time, pretty much from
the age of six onwards.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
I was always writing. So I was writing.
Speaker 3 (10:34):
I think when I was working for the Times Solitary Supplement,
I was writing short stories, but I wasn't showing them
to anyone, And I don't think I showed anything to
anyone until I was in my early thirties and wrote
what I can only imagine was utter Build wrote, I
wrote this novel. I can't remember anything about it was.
(10:57):
I just remember being quite pleased that I managed to
get to ninety thousand words and think, God, you know great,
I'll send it to someone.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
AB would be happy if the reviewers called his novels
are to Build.
Speaker 4 (11:08):
They call it i'd be I'd be happy with that
utter anything is good.
Speaker 3 (11:14):
I sent it to like three literary agents and they all,
you know, rejected it, and I thought, okay, I'm just
not very I thought I'm not designed to be a
fiction writer.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
I thought, well, it couldn't have been that bad. I
think you're being very modest because you were published not
long after with The Missing One, Right, so tell us
about that book.
Speaker 3 (11:33):
Yeah, I think that was a good Ten years later, yeah,
I went into nonfiction writing. So I wrote some books
about having babies and things like this, and then I
I went to it. It was around my fortieth birthday
and I went to a party with some old friends
(11:53):
from university and there was a guy there and he
was that guy that.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
Always says the really annoying thing that you don't want.
Speaker 3 (12:00):
This guy said to me, oh, Lucy, I always thought
you'd be a novelist. And I felt like somebody had
kind of put a knife in my heart, and I thought, yes,
so did I, So did I, And I then went
and did And I had still been writing fiction all
this time. But I knew it was bad. I knew
(12:20):
enough about fiction to know that it was bad. But
I couldn't figure out how to make it good. And
so after this fortieth birthday party encounter, I gave myself
the gift of a creative writing course, and that turned
the whole thing around for me. It turned me from
a nonfiction writer to the fiction writer I wanted to be.
(12:44):
Or I mean, it's a work in progress, it's still
it's still.
Speaker 4 (12:50):
It sounds to me, Lucy like that guy is the
one who gave you the impetus to do what you
wanted to do.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
I saw.
Speaker 5 (12:57):
He sounds like the hero of the whole story to me.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
So tell us about the missing one. What's the book about?
Give us the thirty second pitch.
Speaker 3 (13:05):
It's quite hard to describe because it's about a killer
whale researcher who, interestingly, we can sort of touch back
on the linguistics background, because this researcher in the book
is researching in the nineteen seventies. She's researching communication between
killer whales, because orcas speak to each other in really
(13:26):
complex language. And it was based on a real woman
that I came across. I used to live in Seattle,
and I came across her, and she lived in the
Pacific Northwest, and she went out on a little boat
and she dropped microphones down into the water and listened
to the killer whales communicating with each other, and I thought,
this is I wrote a short story based on her,
(13:48):
and then I thought this is just this is a novel,
and I started. I wrote the whole novel from her perspective,
and it was rejected and I thought, oh, I'm just
still in fiction writer.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
On crap, this is never going to work.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
And then I wrote another non fiction book, and this
story of this killer whale researcher was still there in
the back of my head, and I went back to
it and realized I had to write it from the
perspective of her daughter, who was trying to piece together
her mother's past, because I couldn't really get myself into
(14:23):
the really existence of someone who goes out listening to
killer whales, but I could.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
Definitely get myself into the.
Speaker 3 (14:31):
Existence of the daughter who wants to know more about
the mother who's doing this. So it's all really about
this woman who goes with her toddler to a very
remote part of the Pacific Northwest trying to piece together
her mother's secret past life, which involved lots of killer
whale experiences, and a terrible thing happens to her toddler
(14:55):
while she's there, and it all becomes this sort of psychological,
suspensey kind.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
Of drama where she's trying to save.
Speaker 3 (15:03):
Her child and trying to connect with her mother's past
at the same time.
Speaker 4 (15:07):
I love a good can When did you know when
you recome moment that you knew, actually, this is it,
this is going to work.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
I think it was.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
Actually it was having had nine months of despair and
self doubt and not looking at it for nine months,
and then going back into it and realizing that the
story was great, but it was the way I was
telling it that didn't work.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
And just I can't remember the exact moment when I made.
Speaker 3 (15:34):
That decision that I needed to rewrite it from the
daughter's perspective, but the minute I did, it just started
to feel right.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
There was a film I saw when I was much
younger called Orca, and it was about some fisherman who
accidentally kill a baby killer whale, and then the mother
hunts them down one by one, so it slightly went
a bit looney, but I always feel killer whales get
a bad rap. Yes, I know they actually can kill
great white sharks, but they don't tend to kill too
(16:04):
many human beings.
Speaker 3 (16:06):
They don't kill human beings, so they're not interested in killing.
They're they're they're amazing, and then they're the thing that
really appealed to me is that they're a matriarchal society.
They're dominated by the grandmother and they live in pods
where the grandmother the rules, everyone makes all the decisions,
and the girls go off and leave and the boys
(16:26):
stay with their moms for.
Speaker 5 (16:27):
The It's like an Asian family.
Speaker 1 (16:32):
We're both thinking the exact same thing that that is.
You've just precisely described an Asian family there.
Speaker 5 (16:38):
Well, there you go along with the killer matriarch. Yeah,
my goodness, there.
Speaker 2 (16:45):
Indian.
Speaker 5 (16:47):
That's impressive.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
Did you know that they sleep with one eye open
Asians matriarchs? Well, apparently it's a fact. I remember it
from a long time ago, so apparently they. I don't
know if it's true or not.
Speaker 4 (17:01):
It's like one of your seen facts in Inverted Comers,
is what we're talking about.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
It's like the fact about that sharks never stopped moving
because if they do, they they can't get oxygen into
through their guilds. I mean, I don't know if that's
true or not. I'm sure I.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
Seem to remember.
Speaker 3 (17:17):
I mean, it was ten years ago that I was
obsessed by all of this stuff, but I do seem
to remember that killer whales swim for miles miles and
miles while they're sleeping.
Speaker 4 (17:26):
Wow, all right, Well from Pony Killer Wills, I think
you should tell us about the new book Windmill Hill.
Speaker 2 (17:33):
Well it is.
Speaker 3 (17:35):
When we say new, I think we need to use
that term lightly because I'm actually currently almost finished a
new new book.
Speaker 5 (17:42):
So oh good good.
Speaker 4 (17:43):
We'll come on to that. We want to hear about that,
but tell us something about about the current book. Then.
Speaker 2 (17:48):
On the current book.
Speaker 3 (17:49):
The current book is, it's a book about two old
ladies who live in a in.
Speaker 2 (17:56):
A dilapidated windmill in Sussex. It's based on a.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
Real windmill that I know well, called Jack Windmill, which
is near Brighton, and it's and it's a kind of
dilapidated windmill that's falling down and has been really neglected.
When I went to a party in a house and
we managed to crawl up inside this windmill, the house
that's attached to it. You can rent it out, and
(18:21):
I went someone invited me there and in the middle
of the night we crawled up into this dilapidated windmill
and I was really clear, I'm very I seem to
be creatively, really driven by locations, like interesting places, and
it was really it was just begging for a novel
to be written about it. And so it's about these
(18:43):
old ladies who live in this Sussex windmill, and it's
about their relationship and what has brought them to this,
to this windmill, and the.
Speaker 2 (18:55):
Depth of their friendship.
Speaker 3 (18:56):
One of them came as the housekeeper, and one of
them is a push ex Shakespearean actress, and they've just
over the years, they've formed this incredibly powerful bond and
the past is catching up on them.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
When the novel opens, you know that something. They call
it the awful Incident.
Speaker 3 (19:16):
So there has been an awful incident, and the novel
really is piecing together what that awful incident was, what
the hell have they done? But there's also a plot
in the distant past that gradually evolves, and I was
really interested in memory and how you can repress memories
(19:39):
up to a point, but they're going to burst through eventually,
and it's about that Astrid, my main character, the Shakespearean
actress has been suppressing a trauma for forty years and
it's all just caught up with her.
Speaker 1 (19:58):
So it's sort of suspense, perhaps in the domestic domestic noir.
Speaker 5 (20:03):
I love that.
Speaker 4 (20:04):
I love the psychological aspect of it.
Speaker 5 (20:07):
I love that.
Speaker 4 (20:07):
You know, everyone loves secrets, right, but as you say,
when you bury them, when you bury them for too long,
what are the implications of that?
Speaker 2 (20:15):
Yes, exactly.
Speaker 3 (20:16):
And she's he's kind of she's eighty she's eighty two,
and she's.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
The kind of. An incident at the beginning of the
novel is that.
Speaker 3 (20:25):
She discovers, well, no, this isn't the awful incident.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
It is a different.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
This is the thing that kicks off the novel is
that she discovers that the man that she.
Speaker 3 (20:35):
Used to be married to in the seventies, who has
become a national treasure, is a famous actor, is in
Scotland that he's dying. And Astrid gets she's not left
the windmill in about forty years, and she gets on
a train.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
Ah, she's there's a sort of in a way.
Speaker 3 (20:53):
It's also over a day that she's on this train
and she's thinking about the past and about the most
recent past, which is the awful incident, and the distant past,
which is her relationship with Magnus, who is dying. And
it turns out Magnus is right, is about to publish
a memoir on his deathbed which will expose her, and
she's going up to stop him.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
Right. And you say she's not left this windmill for
forty years.
Speaker 3 (21:20):
Well she she's left it in order to try and
earn money. So she One of the jobs she's managed
to get is as a wirologist, which is which is
a hired mourner. So people hire you to go to
funerals when somebody's died and they don't have enough relatives weeping,
they hire a cast mourners. And she's made quite good money.
(21:44):
So she goes on day trips to funerals and weeps
convincingly and has a backstory.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
And you know, this is actually a thing in the
Middle East and in Asian country.
Speaker 2 (21:53):
So it is big in China. I gather.
Speaker 3 (21:59):
I actually I based a lot of this of her
store mourology story on something I found online where some
out of work actor had written a kind of blog
about his time as a morologist.
Speaker 1 (22:14):
And it's what beer and I do on weekend.
Speaker 4 (22:17):
Well, that's what I'm going to do at your funeral.
Good money novelist, come myrologist. I do like that. I
like that a lot.
Speaker 1 (22:26):
All right, So you've hinted. So this book is currently
available about as you say it came out. Was it
last year?
Speaker 2 (22:31):
It came out, I've lost all track of time. I
think years ago. And it was in paperback last year.
Speaker 1 (22:37):
So that's wind milkim. But you've spent the last couple
of years and you've just hinted at it writing another book,
So can you tell us anything about that?
Speaker 3 (22:48):
Once again we come full circle because this book that
I've been writing for the last two years is about
a lexicographer, and it's actually about Samuel Johnson, who was
the eighteenth century lexicographer, or it's partly about him, and
it's really he was very He had some very good
(23:10):
female friends in his life, and I became very interested
in the women in his life, and one of them is.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
A classic.
Speaker 3 (23:20):
She was an extraordinary woman who was one of the
founding members of the Bluestocking Society, which was a sort
of intellectual society where women at last in the mid
In the mid eighteenth century, women were generally not allowed
to admit that they read books or that they were
interested in anything intellectual. They had to hide if they
(23:43):
knew Latin and Greek too well, and they had to
conceal it if they had any interest in science and
stuff like this. And my character, Elizabeth Carter, was one
of Samuel Johnson's best friends, and she managed to have
life of the mind and do all of these things
(24:05):
without alienating anyone. And I've written really a novel about
her and her friendship with Samuel Johnson and how.
Speaker 4 (24:13):
Did she manage it? How did she manage it in
that environment too.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
It's extraordinary.
Speaker 3 (24:18):
I mean, when you start to really look at what
she did and how she played it, she just played
a blindingly good game.
Speaker 2 (24:26):
She didn't want to be married off.
Speaker 3 (24:29):
She should have been married off to someone who would
then have crushed her. And she managed to avoid marrying anyone,
even though there was an enormous amount of pressure on
her to marry people.
Speaker 2 (24:40):
And she was lovely.
Speaker 3 (24:42):
She was just such a lovely good woman, and she focused,
she focused very tightly on being a good person, and.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
People were so disarmed.
Speaker 3 (24:53):
I think by the fact that she was so obviously
a decent human being and unpretentious and straightforward and loving
and nice, and.
Speaker 2 (25:04):
They were sort of Somehow she managed to.
Speaker 3 (25:08):
Lull people into a sense of security that allowed her
to be interested in astronomy and geography and mathematics, and
she taught herself eight languages fluently, and she made eventually
made a fortune translating a Stoic philosopher and made enough money.
(25:33):
At the very beginning of my novel, her father is
really worried about her, saying, what will you do when
I die? Because there won't be anyone to look after you.
And that's the theme of her life is what will
happen to a spinster.
Speaker 2 (25:45):
With no one?
Speaker 3 (25:46):
And at the end she has made enough money by
translating a Stoic to buy her own I think.
Speaker 5 (25:52):
That's where the money is.
Speaker 4 (25:53):
Stoicism. That's really cool.
Speaker 5 (25:56):
That's what we need to do.
Speaker 4 (25:57):
But find some Stoics that need translating.
Speaker 1 (26:01):
Well on the weekend when we're not we're not mourning,
we're not mourning.
Speaker 3 (26:06):
Yeah, you do have to spend I think maybe about
fifteen years really really immersed in Greek and Latin at
Latin and really you know, perfecting your linguistic emission.
Speaker 1 (26:17):
Now we're buy the lady both ancient Greek.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
That was her name, A I'll do it for us, now, God, what,
let's not go there.
Speaker 4 (26:28):
What was the lady's name again?
Speaker 2 (26:30):
She's called Elizabeth Carter and Samuel Johnson.
Speaker 3 (26:34):
They became friends when Samuel Johnson first arrived in London,
aged about twenty eight, and Elizabeth Carter was a poet
already aged twenty one, and she was kind of famous
and Johnson was fully unknown, and they formed a really
lovely close bond and which lasted all their lives.
Speaker 5 (26:54):
And as we know, there was no romance, no romance there.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
Now we see in the fiction that might be.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
This is this is this is coming.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
Up against historical fiction and.
Speaker 1 (27:05):
How you can This is your nonfiction and fiction lives
colliding now. And of course we know that Johnson come
famous until blackadd of three, So yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4 (27:15):
So what's what's this book called? Do you have a title?
Speaker 2 (27:18):
Its working title is Flying Horse.
Speaker 4 (27:22):
Ali Ah, well, I hope you get to keep that.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
So this is basically your nonfiction, your fiction, and your
childhood love of ponies.
Speaker 3 (27:31):
All it's all come together in a chaotic mess.
Speaker 1 (27:37):
Well inspired, Lucy, we know you inspired way, we know
you have other commitments at the moment, so we're not
going to keep you any longer. Absolutely lovely, lovely chatting
to you, and and thank you for carving out a
bit of a bit of your other hectic day to
chat with us.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
Oh, thank you for having me. It's been a delight.
Speaker 4 (27:57):
Well, I will I was going to say, you didn't
you didn't introduce me, So I think I'm going to
have to say a few words before I get out
of this, because I wanted to talk to you about
what you've been up to today, because you're looking very smart.
Lucy's looking very smart, and you're looking You're looking like,
you know, you've just had tea with Camilla, So.
Speaker 5 (28:17):
What's been going on? Why are you dressed so smartly today?
Speaker 1 (28:20):
You'd not be so far wrong. I've been at a
two hundred year old restaurant in London called Rules, which
is a sort of literally salon for all the great
so Charles Dicken and H. G. Wells and Graham Green.
I was in the Graham green room and I was
washing dishes. That's what it felt like at times. It
was a journalistic lunch for quantum of Minister, the Q
(28:42):
book that's going to come out later this year, and
we had a good laugh. We had a good laugh.
Speaker 4 (28:48):
And what's the latest on that? When can we see that?
That's going to come quite soon?
Speaker 1 (28:52):
No, that's in October. So there's a lot. I mean,
there's a large campaign that's going to be rolled out
over the course of the year. But my claim to
fame is that my bottom may well have graced the
same spot that Charles Chaplin sat in.
Speaker 4 (29:05):
Actually, for you, that is quite an achievement, isn't it.
I mean, your bottom does get about, it's true. But
Charlie Chaplain is that's well done.
Speaker 5 (29:12):
I'm impressed.
Speaker 4 (29:12):
I'm sure our listeners are very impressed. How did you
grace this? How did your backside grace this? Was it
a chair or exactly what were you doing?
Speaker 1 (29:23):
A very old chair? So it might well have been
around since Chaplain's day, I don't know, but at least
the old chair. Like that old story about if you
have an axe and you change the head and then
you change the shaft, is it still the same ax?
And it may not be the exact same chair that
Charlie Chaplin's bottom sat in, but his bottom was in
(29:44):
the vicinity of the space where the chair is now,
so where your.
Speaker 5 (29:47):
Bottom later had its time?
Speaker 4 (29:50):
Yes, I see a very old chair for a very
old bottom, and ladies and gentlemen. That brings us to
the close of yet another episode.
Speaker 5 (29:57):
I've really enjoyed this. I feel we've learned something. It's
lovely when we have someone clever on, isn't it. Once again?
Speaker 1 (30:04):
Well, we have to slightly put an asterisk around that
when it comes to mass in an exam. Yeah, yeah, yeah, she's.
Speaker 4 (30:12):
A hope four percent mate, four percent. I think we
should have a test before we let guess. Come on,
we should have some sort of entrance exam, right, and
then we'll see how loose one here. I should say
once again, if you'd liked the show, can we ask
you to please leave a review, sign up for regular
episodes in your favorite podcast app, and please do spread
(30:34):
the word so fast. Cowboy fiction, if we were to
write cowboy fiction, if we were to star in cowboy fiction,
what would be our cowboy names?
Speaker 5 (30:47):
And what I was saying would be the Indians
Speaker 4 (30:54):
On that culturally inappropriate bombshell, ladies and gentlemen, having your
friends the Red vactually writers on murder Junction, Hm
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