April 27, 2025 • 31 mins
In this episode, Vaseem discusses his new psychological thriller The Girl in Cell A, inspired by great small town novels such as In The Heat of the Night, and the 1874 small town true crime known as The Axe Murders of Saxtown
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to ourda Junction everyone. This week on the show,
we have a very very special guest me. I'll be
chatting to my co host about my latest novel, The
Girl in Cela, which is published later this week on
the first of May. To be precise, it's my first
psychological thriller set in small town America, so we will
be talking unreliable narrators, small town mysteries, forensic psychotherapists, and
(00:26):
all things thrillery abber, How are you, my friend?
Speaker 2 (00:30):
How am I You've woke me up at five in
the morning to record this what I can only describe
as the Vassim Khan Special. How do you think I feel?
I'm thrilled to be here to talk all things vassiinm Cahn.
It's my lifelong ambition. I don't know what to say.
I am thrilled.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
You know what they say, the early worm gets the bird.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Yep, man, this is possibly the worst bird I've ever got. Anyway, Anyway,
enough about my problems. How are you, my friend? What
have you been up to this week?
Speaker 1 (01:04):
I'm very, very very busy prepping for the launcher of
this book. But before we get into that, you say
that you're JD and all the rest of it. But
you should really be on cloud nine because you, or
rather your book Hunted, has just made the long list
for one of the top crime fiction prizes in the country,
(01:25):
the Theeaston's Old Peculiar Crime Novel of the Year Award.
So let's start with a congratulations and a pat on
the back for you.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Oh that was more of a slap on the head,
but then apart on the back, but thank you, thank you,
my friend, for that rather heartfelt laudation.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
Is that what laudation? Can we say?
Speaker 1 (01:43):
That?
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Is that?
Speaker 3 (01:44):
What is? Now? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (01:45):
It's great. It's great to be on on the the
extans a Peculiar Crime Novel of the short.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
List long list.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
Rather, I shouldn't say that, I should say I'm getting
presumptuous there long list. But there are some brilliant books
on there of our friends, a number of people who've
been on the show. Most importantly our good friend in
ran My Mood is also there for Finding Sophie. But
so many of our friends are on that list, right,
(02:13):
people like Elie griff Is, Chris Bruce Meyer, Alan Parks,
just to name three. But it's a great great Chris
Whittaker it's a great, great list. Any one of those
could get to the short list and any one of
them could win. So it's brilliant and thank you, thank
you for pulling strings to get my name on that list.
Speaker 1 (02:32):
You do look a lot like Pinocchio to me. You're
very wooden. It is your style of writing and delivery,
so it is quite easy to pull strings.
Speaker 3 (02:40):
It's not fair.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
Have you been like a wait for a couple of hours.
I mean, this is the problem. I'm still asleep and
you're cracking jokes at my expense when we are here.
All I was going to do on this episode is
going to be nice to you, because, as you said,
this is the vissin Khant special. Do you know what
else has been going on? I have been a single
parent these last two weeks. My wife and my younger
(03:02):
son have been on holiday. Myself and my younger my
elder son have been here and it's been Oh I
tell you, it's been difficult. It's been fun in games
at times, but it's been difficult to others. I know
what it feels like to be a single parent and
it is not easy.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
I suspect that your your eldest son now also knows
what it's like to be a single parent had to
look after you for two weeks.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
I think he's probably applying to child services to get
me put.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
Into a home.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
But fortunately my wife is back soon and then normal
service will be resumed. Assuming she comes back, of course,
you know. I mean she may have discovered life outside
of Clan Muckergy again, and maybe she sees that the
grass is greener on the other side. That would be
very scary. I think we should talk a bit about
what we're here to talk about. We are here to
(03:51):
talk about ladies and gentlemen. We are here to celebrate
the launch of Some people have called it literature. I
mean not me, obviously, but some people have been raving about.
Everyone who's read this book has been raving about it already,
which frankly makes me slightly concerned that it might be
quite good. It's called The Girl in cell A, And
(04:13):
to introduce it, I'm going to ask my good friend
and colleague and the writer of this particular epic, Vasim Cahan,
what is The Girl in Selle all about. Well, I'm
glad you asked me that, because you've written it on
this piece of pip before.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
So I will explain completely off the cuff, of course.
Go on, Well, you've heard the saga of this story
over the years that it's taken to put together, so
I won't bore you. I will rather bore our listeners.
So it's a psychological thriller. It's set in contemporary small
town America, in a small town called eden Falls, which
I made up and then later discovered that there actually
(04:54):
is a town called eden Falls. It's in the southern
half of the States, not the Deep Sound, just sort
of south of the Mason Dixon line, you might say.
And it's a town that.
Speaker 3 (05:04):
Is shallow South.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
Yeah, the shallow South, let's call it that. The town's
been ruled for several generations by a mining dynasty run
by an Amos y Clerk who is a ruthless clan patriarch. Now,
at the age of seventeen, a young woman named Orianna,
who works for Amos, she's the daughter of the white
Clerk's housekeeper, is convicted of murdering the heir to the dynasty,
(05:28):
Amos's son, Gideon y Clerk. Now, she claims that she
didn't do it. She can't remember the exact events of
that day anyway, She gets sent to prison, becomes a
minor celebrity, the eponymous girl in cel A. And because
of the fame and wealth of the White Clerk dynasty
and their very reclusive nature hidden away in this small
mining town, America can't get enough of this mysterious case
(05:49):
did Orianna do it or not? And that's essentially the
story of the book, And it's told through two strands
with alternating chapters and the best traditions of psychological thrillers.
And in the first strand, which is set in the past,
we have Orianna arriving in prison, her early years in prison,
and she's being interviewed by a forensic psychologist, a psychotherapist
(06:10):
named annie La Day, whose task is to get behind
Orianna's faulty memory, which he likens to the black box
of a downed aeroplane, to try and find out what
truly happened on the day that Gideon was killed. So
we have vibes of the silent patient and a oh
and a search for truth with a potentially unreliable narrator
in the driving seat. Now, in the second strand, which
(06:31):
is set in the present time, we have Orianna released
after serving an eighteen year sentence, she's now a woman
in her mid thirties, but of course her development has
been arrested during all of those years because she's been
in prison. And she decides, not very wisely, to return
to Eden Falls to try and determine for herself what
really happened that day? Can she get behind this faulty
(06:53):
memory of hers? Did she commit this gruesome murder? And
as she blasts away around town digging up the past,
all manner of hostility. Hostilities are at least because of
course you have to remember, everyone thinks of her as
as a murderer, and of course Amos is still around.
The White Clerk dynasty are still around, and she sets
herself up on the outskirts of this town to try
(07:14):
and find out who, in her opinion, the real murderer is,
although of course everyone still believes that she did it.
So it's a murder mystery, but it's also a great
big family saga about relationships, Oriana's childhood relationships with the
love of her life, Luke why Clerk. He's part of
the dynasty and her particular, in particular her relationship with
(07:34):
Amos Why Clerk, who's this ruthless patriarch? And we can
compare him my guest to the Brian Cox character Logan
Ray out of Succession or the Kevin Costner character out
of Yellowstone. So we have twisty murder mystery meets small
town secrets meets unreliable narrator goodness. And some people have
described it, amongst the many endorsements as the Silent Patient
meets all the colors of the Dark, and the two
(07:56):
authors of those two particular novels, Alex mcleidy's and Chris Whitker,
have also given ringing endorsements for the book. So if
all of that sounds like your cup of Tea, as
I said, it's coming out later this week on the
first of me, pre orders and orders would be gratefully appreciated.
Speaker 3 (08:13):
I would.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
I'll have to say that sounds And I'm not just
saying this because you know I will never say anything
nice about you unless I meant it.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
That sounds brilliant. I must say I have a copy
and I'm going to read it now. This is this
is why I hate you.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
You're making me read this book now because I was
going to just leave it aside and say nice things
about it and not read it like I do with
most of your books, but this one sounds really really good.
It sounds cinematic, it sounds epic, and the fact is,
you can actually write a pretty damn good sentence, so
(08:47):
we put it to put it all together, I am
sure this is And well, look you've had the quotes already.
Speaker 3 (08:52):
From the greats, so it sounds brilliant.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
So tell me why this change of direction.
Speaker 3 (08:59):
Why is picological flower?
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Well, I love the genre, and of course it's incredibly popular,
so there's always that whenever we're thinking of writing books.
I mean, you stretched yourself by writing an out and
out thriller against it in the States with Hunted, and
you've had enormous success success with that, so obviously the
gamble of doing something different has paid off. And I
think as authors, we you know, when you have a
(09:22):
successful series, as we both have with lots of readers,
it's easy to just stay in that in that lane
and not deviate. But the harder thing, and sometimes the
more interesting thing, from from our own point of view,
is to do something completely different. And it's nice to
jump into a genre which you enjoy as a reader.
And you know, I read Gone Girl, which is sort
(09:45):
of the gold standard for psychological thrillers many years ago,
when I was completely blown away, as were millions and
millions of other the readers, by the dual narrator, the
twists and the turns, and the dual reveal of the
secrets that both of these narrators had within that story.
(10:06):
And I think for me that was a template that
I wanted to create, and I hope that I've managed
to do that. And the other thing I think, which
I think you and I both really enjoy, is the
idea of exploring the microcosm within closed communities of everything
that's good and bad about human beings, because we've both
written books, you in Calcutta, me in Bombay, where there's
(10:29):
millions and millions of people, and yet even within that
mass of individuals, we have characters who sometimes feel quite
disconnected to their environments. In your case, Sam the Policeman,
who's a white man in Calcutter of nineteen twenties in
your Window and Vanergy series, and in my case Pursus,
(10:51):
who's a parsy from a small community in Bombay in
my Malabar House novels. In spite of being surrounded by millions,
they are sometimes close. And my character in the girl
in Selee. Oriana is very much like that, but in
a very small town environment.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
I'm fascinated by some of these characters. First, they tell
us a little bit more about Oriana. She's in love
with the other son in the dynasty, is that.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
Right, the grand nephew. She grew up with a grand nephew.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
So tell us a bit about her her life.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
Oriana hales from the Indian subcontinent, as a nod to
my own heritage. She's so. Following the emancipation of slaves
in the British Empire in the eighteen thirties, a lot
of these people who who ran sugar and cocoa plantations
in the Caribbean needed laborers, and so they managed to
import a whole bunch of laborers from India. I mentioned
(11:40):
in the book a couple of ships, one called the
Whitby in eighteen thirty eight and the other the Hesperus,
which brought over about two hundred and forty nine people
from Calcutta. It's one hundred day voyage. And these people
had proved themselves in the fields of Mauritius, and now
they became these indentured laborers for privateers on their dates
in the Caribbean, and then of course it was just
(12:02):
a short hop from there to the southern American States,
and that's where Oriana's people have hailed from. And they're
Catholics because they were converted by the Portuguese back in
India in the state of Goa in the fifteen hundred.
So she's and her mother are Catholics, and so they
end up eventually at working for the white clerks in
(12:23):
this small American town of eden Falls. And of course
Oriana has grown up in America. She's American, but that
small point of difference does keep her slightly apart. And
then of course we've got Amos, who's from fiercely Protestant stop.
You know, he has been handed this mining dynasty by
his father and grandfather who basically created it from nothing
(12:44):
in this tiny wooded, forested town towards the southern part
of the United States. And this is a place eden
Falls where faith matters, so as you might expect from
from the name of the town. And his actions and
those of his family are often morally doing, but they're
always couched in this veneer of a religious authority. In fact,
(13:04):
one of his sons is a preacher he has three sons,
Gideon who's just been has been murdered, presumably by Orianna,
and two others who still survived. For Amos, his primary
goal is to preserve his family's wealth and power at
any and all costs, and his tentacles run throughout not
just the town of eden Falls, but the entire county.
So when Oriana rocks up again, of course there's going
(13:28):
to be this dynamic between them where she insists that
she didn't kill his son, and he believes that she did,
but he's willing to now reconsider things to see whether
or not there might be another killer in town.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
His tentacles run throughout the community. It's like you in
the crime fiction world, right, So you like the Amos
I mean, what was the inspiration for him? Then where
did he come from? If he wasn't you, then where
did he come from? What triggered that? Why this character?
Speaker 1 (13:57):
Well, everyone loves as as I referenced earlier, everyone loves
a ruthless a ruthless patriarch or matriarch in one of
these families that have overreaching power, and I mentioned the
character of Logan Ray in Succession, but also the Kevin
Costner character whose name I can't remember. In Yellowstone, I
(14:19):
don't know if you've ever seen Yellowstone.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
But his name but mysticulous.
Speaker 1 (14:24):
Fabulous series. So these characters who believe themselves to be
morally upright, but are willing to resort to any and
all means in order to preserve their wealth and power
because they believe not just that it's their moral right,
but it's their duty to do so for their family
and for the people that they care about.
Speaker 3 (14:43):
And why small town in usay then.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
Well, if you think about it, I mean, small towns
have that amazing quality of being both insular but also
having these wonderful secrets and and possible relationships bubbling away
under the surface that allow you as an author to
(15:07):
explore when you're writing a murder mystery, explore these these
how these relationships can turn out to be a lot
more than they seem on the surface. And this goes
back to the traditions of murder mysteries that are more
than just that. So, you know, to kill a mockingbird,
you know where a false accusation in a small town
(15:29):
leads to injustice. And there's a shape there's shades of
that here in The Girl in See because of course,
Oreana is part at least part partly descended from from
a non white background. But then you've got one of
my favorite books and films, In the Heat of the Night.
Did you ever come across that?
Speaker 3 (15:46):
I have, I have watched it.
Speaker 1 (15:48):
It's a mystery novel by John Ball from nineteen sixty five,
and it's set in South Carolina. For those of you
who don't remember, it's about a black detective, Virgil Tibbs,
who passes through this small town and murder has occurred,
and at first they think he did it, so they
arrest him at the train station, and then, of course
they discover he's actually a homicide detective, and so they
call upon him to try and help solve this, to
(16:08):
solve this murder, And of course it became the enormously
successful and influential film of the same title, In the
Heat of the Night, starring Sydney Potier. Do you remember
the famous line from that.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
Frankly, my dear, I don't give damn.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
Yeah, not really that close. It's because it's about race
as much as it's about the murder. The amos y
clerk of this town, the rich white dude industrialist who
runs a town. He slaps Sydney Potier, and then Sydney
Potier slaps him back, and he's the first black man
on screen, from what I understand, to slap a white
(16:44):
man on screen, and then he says something along the
lines of call me mister Tips. One of the reasons
that it went down in history.
Speaker 3 (16:52):
It's a very powerful film, it really is.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
But I saw that as a teenager, and ever since
then it's stuck with me that small towns are just
the perfect perfect environment for murder mysteries because they allow
you to explore so much more than just the mystery itself.
Speaker 3 (17:09):
How long did it teach? Write?
Speaker 1 (17:10):
Well, I think you were there at the beginning. Weren't
you when I first.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
Mentioned I remember it was so long ago.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
Oh well, that's because you're very old now and your
member probably why your wife's ran away. It took over
three years to write, because I wrote, I had the
initial idea, I sold it to my publisher on the
basis of a one page synopsis, and then I had
to go away and write the thing while I was
still writing other books. I wrote the first draft. We
sat down, we looked at it, and then we knew
that it was good. But there was something quite missing.
(17:38):
And so then I thought about it a bit more,
and then I realized that some of the tropes that
we associate with psychological thrillers weren't there. It needed to
be in first person. It needed to be in present
tents rather than past tense, to give it that sense
of immediacy. And so you can imagine I had one
hundred thousand words and trying to turn that into first
person and present tense.
Speaker 3 (17:58):
It was.
Speaker 1 (17:59):
It was very painful, but it was well worth the effort.
I think, based on the feedback that I've had so far.
Speaker 3 (18:06):
I think that's that's good advice.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
You know, if to other writers, if you want to
add immediacy to your work, first person is.
Speaker 3 (18:13):
Often present tense is often the way to go.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
But yeah, I mean for somebody who is a machine
who writes so quickly and so you know, I wouldn't
say quickly, but you're you're efficient, right, you write a
book a year at least For a book to take
you three years is you know, it's a herculean task,
and I'm sure it's well worth it. The end result
is going to be amazing. And tell our readers, because
(18:41):
I know our listeners.
Speaker 3 (18:42):
I know this. You went over to the States to
do a bit of research. How did that go well?
Speaker 1 (18:47):
To be fair, we were both supposed to go over
for a first called melis Domestic, and then you were
waylaid at the last second and unable to to come.
We were going to hire a car and drive drive
all the way, yes, exactly, although hopefully without driving off
a cliff at the end of it. Yeah, that went
(19:09):
really well because I made some great friends out there
who directed me to some lovely small towns, and a
couple of them who were absolutely lovely. They drove me
around five or six of these tiny, tiny towns, and
there's one particular incident that sticks out, and you have
to remember, you know, a person of our heritage in
the southern part of the United States, in small towns,
(19:34):
there's course for a slight degree of nervousness, I guess
before we get there. But my experiences were lovely. Everybody
I spoke to when I told them what I was doing,
were more than happy to open up and talk to
me about their lives. And there was one particular town
I think it couldn't have been more than two thousand people.
There's more people on my street in London. To be honest,
we went into this tiny library where two lovely older
(19:57):
ladies were chatting away. You know, nobody else was in there,
and of course they stopped when I came in, because
I doubt they'd seen many people like me wandering before.
Speaker 3 (20:06):
Yeah, not that ugly, I'm sure.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
And then we got talking and then one of them said,
wait a second, and then she went out into the
into the main library, and she came back with a
copy of my first novel, which had been on the
shelves for ten ten years, a bit chewed.
Speaker 3 (20:23):
Up, pristine? Was it pristine?
Speaker 1 (20:25):
No, it was actually quite cheered up. And she said,
I thought i'd recognize your name because people borrow your
your books from us. So I thought it was just
such a lovely moment. And yes, it was really nice,
and I'm really glad that I made that journey out right.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
Okay, Well, this is a technically a true crime podcast now,
because that's what. Well, it's got a true crime element
to it, because that's what you're insisted we do. Tell me, what,
do you have a favorite small town true crime I.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
Don't know about favorite, but there's certainly one that I
thought I'd mentioned today because it caught my eye. Have
you heard of the axe murders of Saxton?
Speaker 2 (21:01):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (21:01):
You know what? No?
Speaker 1 (21:03):
Okay, so sax down. So this this harks back to
eighteen seventy four, and Saxtown was a small farming village
in the state of Illinois, and it was home to
a group of German immigrant families. And I want to
read to you a dispatch from the Belleville Advocate, the newspaper.
(21:26):
It's a newspaper recording. It is my favorite newspaper because
you're a bit of a Bellvillion, aren't you?
Speaker 3 (21:33):
Bloody? Love the bell Advertiser. What was it called? Dispatch? Even? Yeah?
Love it?
Speaker 2 (21:37):
Love it anyway, tell us about it.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
This is Friday, March twenty seventh, eighteen seventy four, and
this is how it begins their story. Several times we
have been called on to record deeds of blood and villainy,
and now we undertake to record the most appalling crime
that has occurred in this state in a number of years.
An investigation by an official revealer scene that would make
the stoutest heart quail. And had the discovery of the
(22:03):
murderer been made by neighbors of the murdered family at
the coroner's inquest, there would have been no need for
a judge or jury, for the excited populace would surely
have torn the murderer limb from limb. You don't have
the stoutest heart, but has your not so stout heart quailed?
Speaker 2 (22:23):
Lots of me is quailing right now, shivering.
Speaker 3 (22:25):
You know. My legs have turned to jelly, inns have
turned to what not.
Speaker 2 (22:30):
My mouth has turned to ice cream, but it often
turns to ice cream.
Speaker 3 (22:36):
Yeah, story tell us the context.
Speaker 1 (22:39):
Okay, So the murder pertains to the Stelz Leader family,
who had immigrated to Illinois like many others from Germany,
and in this small rural tract of land known as
sax Down. They lived in this close knit community, and
then on March seventeenth, one of their neighbors, Benjamin Schneider,
(22:59):
he needed to borrow some potato seeds, as one does,
so he ventured along to his neighbor's hamlet, the Stell's
Reader family home, and he noticed that everything was quiet,
nothing going on, no horses and cattle wandering around doing stuff,
And so he knocked no answer on the front door,
wanders in and a sight of utter gruesomeness confronts him.
(23:23):
So Karl Stell's Reader, sixty five years old, is lying
in a very large pool of blood and his throat
has been cut from ear to ear. In the very
next room, his thirty six year old son Friedrich has
had his scar bashed in and his throat also slashed.
And beside him is his twenty eight year old wife
Anna and their two tiny children, three year old Carl
(23:47):
and eight month old Anna Junior, all have been bludgeoned
to death. All of the entire family is believed to
have been killed by an axe, hence the axe murder
axe murder title. So word of this gets out of course,
and you know, it becomes a sensation around the country,
front page of the New York Times, et cetera, et cetera.
(24:09):
The community of these German farmers are absolutely horrified, and
the police begin to look around and two suspects come up.
So first thing you need to know is that Frederick
Stell's Reader, the son of Carl Stell's Reader, has received
a substantial inheritance from Germany and the estate. The estate
(24:30):
is worth several thousand dollars at the time, which is
quite a big sum in today's today's cash, probably what
you've got in your pockets right now. So the police
are thinking that perhaps somebody murdered the entire family so
that they could inherit. So suspicion falls upon a chap
(24:51):
called Frederick Boots.
Speaker 3 (24:54):
Now he is sounds like it sounds like a wrong.
Un to me, by the sound of it.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
He's definitely a wrong. So Bolts is married to one
of the murder victims, the daughter in law of Karl's
Sells Reader. So he's married to Anna's sister.
Speaker 3 (25:10):
Oh okay, and.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
He's borrowed two hundred dollars from the Stells Reader family
and he's never paid it back.
Speaker 3 (25:16):
The cat sounds a lot likely for simcan.
Speaker 1 (25:19):
So the police believe that he's murdered them all so
he can inherit the family. It doesn't have to pay
his debt back, et cetera, et cetera. What's more, they
find footprints, bloodied footprints leading away from the house, and
these footprints, as they follow them through, lead all the
way to Boltz's front door.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
Now, for reasons convenient.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
Well anyway, he's he is arrested, he's tried, but for
reasons that we don't we no longer know? He is
acquitted And in fact, he later sued the Stells Reader
estate and he was awarded four hundred dollars. So he's
actually two hundred dollars up on the whole venture.
Speaker 3 (25:59):
Oh no, he's more than that, right, he is six
hundred up?
Speaker 1 (26:01):
Oh true? If he yeah, because he's never paid back
the original two hundred does he see? This is this
is why you're an accountant.
Speaker 2 (26:07):
This is why you need me, mate, This is why
you need me because my brain still work.
Speaker 1 (26:10):
So the second guy, even more intriguing. His name is
John Askin, and he worked for the Stells Reader family
on occasion, and he's got a long running grudge against
Frederick Stell's reader. And he apparently is a very large
and powerful man who made his living with an axe.
Clue right there. He had a bad had a bad temper,
(26:32):
not really well liked around sax Town. But there's one
other characteristic which firmly puts him in the dock, certainly
given the prejudice at the time. He had ginger hair.
Speaker 2 (26:44):
What is it with you and Ginger? This is the
second week in a row you've mentioned.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
It's not well. I tell you what it is. It's
nothing to do with me, my friend. It's the fact
that that and a clump of that exact same colored
hair was found in Carl Stell's reader's palm as he
laid down in this pool of blood. And again again
he was arrested, but again released for reasons that we
do not know. So various other suspects were arrested, but
(27:11):
again all ended up being released. So unfortunately, this famous,
infamous true crime small town mystery remained a mystery to
this day.
Speaker 3 (27:23):
So it's unsolved.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
So some guy has possibly framed the thing before DNA,
right before DNA. If it was in the days of DNA,
then somebody would have gone to prison. And I suppose
in Illinois they couldn't have even found a black guy
in town, which there was their third option. They could
have just found a black guy and lynched them, right,
That's what they did.
Speaker 3 (27:42):
In those days.
Speaker 2 (27:43):
So yeah, that's a horrific story, horrifical, right. But I
want to pull you up on something. You said that
the neighbor went round. I think it was a neighbor
because he went round to borrow potato seats, and.
Speaker 3 (27:58):
Potatoes don't grow from do they.
Speaker 1 (28:01):
They grow I think you've cracked it all along.
Speaker 3 (28:04):
Mate.
Speaker 2 (28:04):
It was him or because oh, I'm just going to
go and get some potato seeds. No, they grow from
seed potatoes, which are actually tubers.
Speaker 3 (28:13):
So they are.
Speaker 2 (28:14):
If they'd asked me, mate, if they'd asked me back
in eighteen seventy four, Crane would have been solved in
like a day.
Speaker 3 (28:21):
But no, they went down.
Speaker 2 (28:22):
The whole ginger haired German relative route.
Speaker 3 (28:26):
No. No, no, no.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
The answer is potatoes don't grow from seeds the minute
he walked into a police station. So no, I've went
to worrols on potato seeds. They should have arrested them
there and then because he doesn't know the first thing
about farming.
Speaker 1 (28:40):
Color me impressed. Color me impressed. Sitting in your little
torture dungeon in Surrey, you have managed to solve this
unsolved mystery of one hundred and fifty years distance.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
It's not little dungeon. It's quite big, spacious. Tell me now, then,
where can people where? And when can people find this
this modern day class. If I may be so bold,
you may be so bold, You may be well. As
I said, it comes out on the first of May.
But you can pre Order it now from all good bookshops.
Get it from your.
Speaker 1 (29:10):
Indies, get it from your big chains, get it from
I'll get it online. I'm going to be doing a
mini tour. I'll be up in Manchester, your Coleeds, Marlow,
all sorts of lovely places talking about talking about this book.
I would greatly appreciate people having a dip into this
book because, as you know with Hunted, when you do
(29:31):
something different, you don't always know how it's going to land. Yes,
it's had great endorsements from some of the best psychological
thriller writers in the world, people like your Ruth Wears
and etc. Et cetera, your Sharry Lapenias, et cetera. But
it will be lovely for ordinary readers to get their
hands on a copy. Read it and let me know
(29:53):
what you think.
Speaker 3 (29:55):
You know what, I think they absolutely should. I mean,
obviously the one for.
Speaker 2 (30:00):
People who listen to this podcast will.
Speaker 3 (30:02):
Go out and get it. But tell your friends as well.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
I mean, you know, the boy has produced something a
bit special here, and yeah, people deserve to read it now,
mister Kahnt, I think on that note, that brings us
to the close of yet another episode. A very special
episode The Vassine Can't Special once again. If you've liked
the show, can we ask you to leave a review,
sign up for regular episodes using your favorite podcast app, and.
Speaker 3 (30:28):
Please do spread the word. So Vas.
Speaker 2 (30:32):
Do you think we're a pair of unreliable narrators, Well.
Speaker 1 (30:36):
If you're asking whether we're a pair of massive liars,
well yes, we are authors and we do make shit
up for a living.
Speaker 3 (30:43):
Do we not.
Speaker 2 (30:45):
Nope, everything I write is factual. You know, every word
I've lived. Every word of what I've written is a
lived experience. And on that nonsensical note, we have been
your friends, the Red Hot Chili writers on Murder Junction.
Please do go out and buy a copy of Girl
(31:05):
in Sale, because.
Speaker 3 (31:06):
Otherwise he's going to be miserable and make my life help.
Thank you,
Welcome to ourda Junction everyone. This week on the show,
we have a very very special guest me. I'll be
chatting to my co host about my latest novel, The
Girl in Cela, which is published later this week on
the first of May. To be precise, it's my first
psychological thriller set in small town America, so we will
be talking unreliable narrators, small town mysteries, forensic psychotherapists, and
(00:26):
all things thrillery abber, How are you, my friend?
Speaker 2 (00:30):
How am I You've woke me up at five in
the morning to record this what I can only describe
as the Vassim Khan Special. How do you think I feel?
I'm thrilled to be here to talk all things vassiinm Cahn.
It's my lifelong ambition. I don't know what to say.
I am thrilled.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
You know what they say, the early worm gets the bird.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Yep, man, this is possibly the worst bird I've ever got. Anyway, Anyway,
enough about my problems. How are you, my friend? What
have you been up to this week?
Speaker 1 (01:04):
I'm very, very very busy prepping for the launcher of
this book. But before we get into that, you say
that you're JD and all the rest of it. But
you should really be on cloud nine because you, or
rather your book Hunted, has just made the long list
for one of the top crime fiction prizes in the country,
(01:25):
the Theeaston's Old Peculiar Crime Novel of the Year Award.
So let's start with a congratulations and a pat on
the back for you.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Oh that was more of a slap on the head,
but then apart on the back, but thank you, thank you,
my friend, for that rather heartfelt laudation.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
Is that what laudation? Can we say?
Speaker 1 (01:43):
That?
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Is that?
Speaker 3 (01:44):
What is? Now? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (01:45):
It's great. It's great to be on on the the
extans a Peculiar Crime Novel of the short.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
List long list.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
Rather, I shouldn't say that, I should say I'm getting
presumptuous there long list. But there are some brilliant books
on there of our friends, a number of people who've
been on the show. Most importantly our good friend in
ran My Mood is also there for Finding Sophie. But
so many of our friends are on that list, right,
(02:13):
people like Elie griff Is, Chris Bruce Meyer, Alan Parks,
just to name three. But it's a great great Chris
Whittaker it's a great, great list. Any one of those
could get to the short list and any one of
them could win. So it's brilliant and thank you, thank
you for pulling strings to get my name on that list.
Speaker 1 (02:32):
You do look a lot like Pinocchio to me. You're
very wooden. It is your style of writing and delivery,
so it is quite easy to pull strings.
Speaker 3 (02:40):
It's not fair.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
Have you been like a wait for a couple of hours.
I mean, this is the problem. I'm still asleep and
you're cracking jokes at my expense when we are here.
All I was going to do on this episode is
going to be nice to you, because, as you said,
this is the vissin Khant special. Do you know what
else has been going on? I have been a single
parent these last two weeks. My wife and my younger
(03:02):
son have been on holiday. Myself and my younger my
elder son have been here and it's been Oh I
tell you, it's been difficult. It's been fun in games
at times, but it's been difficult to others. I know
what it feels like to be a single parent and
it is not easy.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
I suspect that your your eldest son now also knows
what it's like to be a single parent had to
look after you for two weeks.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
I think he's probably applying to child services to get
me put.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
Into a home.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
But fortunately my wife is back soon and then normal
service will be resumed. Assuming she comes back, of course,
you know. I mean she may have discovered life outside
of Clan Muckergy again, and maybe she sees that the
grass is greener on the other side. That would be
very scary. I think we should talk a bit about
what we're here to talk about. We are here to
(03:51):
talk about ladies and gentlemen. We are here to celebrate
the launch of Some people have called it literature. I
mean not me, obviously, but some people have been raving about.
Everyone who's read this book has been raving about it already,
which frankly makes me slightly concerned that it might be
quite good. It's called The Girl in cell A, And
(04:13):
to introduce it, I'm going to ask my good friend
and colleague and the writer of this particular epic, Vasim Cahan,
what is The Girl in Selle all about. Well, I'm
glad you asked me that, because you've written it on
this piece of pip before.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
So I will explain completely off the cuff, of course.
Go on, Well, you've heard the saga of this story
over the years that it's taken to put together, so
I won't bore you. I will rather bore our listeners.
So it's a psychological thriller. It's set in contemporary small
town America, in a small town called eden Falls, which
I made up and then later discovered that there actually
(04:54):
is a town called eden Falls. It's in the southern
half of the States, not the Deep Sound, just sort
of south of the Mason Dixon line, you might say.
And it's a town that.
Speaker 3 (05:04):
Is shallow South.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
Yeah, the shallow South, let's call it that. The town's
been ruled for several generations by a mining dynasty run
by an Amos y Clerk who is a ruthless clan patriarch. Now,
at the age of seventeen, a young woman named Orianna,
who works for Amos, she's the daughter of the white
Clerk's housekeeper, is convicted of murdering the heir to the dynasty,
(05:28):
Amos's son, Gideon y Clerk. Now, she claims that she
didn't do it. She can't remember the exact events of
that day anyway, She gets sent to prison, becomes a
minor celebrity, the eponymous girl in cel A. And because
of the fame and wealth of the White Clerk dynasty
and their very reclusive nature hidden away in this small
mining town, America can't get enough of this mysterious case
(05:49):
did Orianna do it or not? And that's essentially the
story of the book, And it's told through two strands
with alternating chapters and the best traditions of psychological thrillers.
And in the first strand, which is set in the past,
we have Orianna arriving in prison, her early years in prison,
and she's being interviewed by a forensic psychologist, a psychotherapist
(06:10):
named annie La Day, whose task is to get behind
Orianna's faulty memory, which he likens to the black box
of a downed aeroplane, to try and find out what
truly happened on the day that Gideon was killed. So
we have vibes of the silent patient and a oh
and a search for truth with a potentially unreliable narrator
in the driving seat. Now, in the second strand, which
(06:31):
is set in the present time, we have Orianna released
after serving an eighteen year sentence, she's now a woman
in her mid thirties, but of course her development has
been arrested during all of those years because she's been
in prison. And she decides, not very wisely, to return
to Eden Falls to try and determine for herself what
really happened that day? Can she get behind this faulty
(06:53):
memory of hers? Did she commit this gruesome murder? And
as she blasts away around town digging up the past,
all manner of hostility. Hostilities are at least because of
course you have to remember, everyone thinks of her as
as a murderer, and of course Amos is still around.
The White Clerk dynasty are still around, and she sets
herself up on the outskirts of this town to try
(07:14):
and find out who, in her opinion, the real murderer is,
although of course everyone still believes that she did it.
So it's a murder mystery, but it's also a great
big family saga about relationships, Oriana's childhood relationships with the
love of her life, Luke why Clerk. He's part of
the dynasty and her particular, in particular her relationship with
(07:34):
Amos Why Clerk, who's this ruthless patriarch? And we can
compare him my guest to the Brian Cox character Logan
Ray out of Succession or the Kevin Costner character out
of Yellowstone. So we have twisty murder mystery meets small
town secrets meets unreliable narrator goodness. And some people have
described it, amongst the many endorsements as the Silent Patient
meets all the colors of the Dark, and the two
(07:56):
authors of those two particular novels, Alex mcleidy's and Chris Whitker,
have also given ringing endorsements for the book. So if
all of that sounds like your cup of Tea, as
I said, it's coming out later this week on the
first of me, pre orders and orders would be gratefully appreciated.
Speaker 3 (08:13):
I would.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
I'll have to say that sounds And I'm not just
saying this because you know I will never say anything
nice about you unless I meant it.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
That sounds brilliant. I must say I have a copy
and I'm going to read it now. This is this
is why I hate you.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
You're making me read this book now because I was
going to just leave it aside and say nice things
about it and not read it like I do with
most of your books, but this one sounds really really good.
It sounds cinematic, it sounds epic, and the fact is,
you can actually write a pretty damn good sentence, so
(08:47):
we put it to put it all together, I am
sure this is And well, look you've had the quotes already.
Speaker 3 (08:52):
From the greats, so it sounds brilliant.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
So tell me why this change of direction.
Speaker 3 (08:59):
Why is picological flower?
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Well, I love the genre, and of course it's incredibly popular,
so there's always that whenever we're thinking of writing books.
I mean, you stretched yourself by writing an out and
out thriller against it in the States with Hunted, and
you've had enormous success success with that, so obviously the
gamble of doing something different has paid off. And I
think as authors, we you know, when you have a
(09:22):
successful series, as we both have with lots of readers,
it's easy to just stay in that in that lane
and not deviate. But the harder thing, and sometimes the
more interesting thing, from from our own point of view,
is to do something completely different. And it's nice to
jump into a genre which you enjoy as a reader.
And you know, I read Gone Girl, which is sort
(09:45):
of the gold standard for psychological thrillers many years ago,
when I was completely blown away, as were millions and
millions of other the readers, by the dual narrator, the
twists and the turns, and the dual reveal of the
secrets that both of these narrators had within that story.
(10:06):
And I think for me that was a template that
I wanted to create, and I hope that I've managed
to do that. And the other thing I think, which
I think you and I both really enjoy, is the
idea of exploring the microcosm within closed communities of everything
that's good and bad about human beings, because we've both
written books, you in Calcutta, me in Bombay, where there's
(10:29):
millions and millions of people, and yet even within that
mass of individuals, we have characters who sometimes feel quite
disconnected to their environments. In your case, Sam the Policeman,
who's a white man in Calcutter of nineteen twenties in
your Window and Vanergy series, and in my case Pursus,
(10:51):
who's a parsy from a small community in Bombay in
my Malabar House novels. In spite of being surrounded by millions,
they are sometimes close. And my character in the girl
in Selee. Oriana is very much like that, but in
a very small town environment.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
I'm fascinated by some of these characters. First, they tell
us a little bit more about Oriana. She's in love
with the other son in the dynasty, is that.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
Right, the grand nephew. She grew up with a grand nephew.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
So tell us a bit about her her life.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
Oriana hales from the Indian subcontinent, as a nod to
my own heritage. She's so. Following the emancipation of slaves
in the British Empire in the eighteen thirties, a lot
of these people who who ran sugar and cocoa plantations
in the Caribbean needed laborers, and so they managed to
import a whole bunch of laborers from India. I mentioned
(11:40):
in the book a couple of ships, one called the
Whitby in eighteen thirty eight and the other the Hesperus,
which brought over about two hundred and forty nine people
from Calcutta. It's one hundred day voyage. And these people
had proved themselves in the fields of Mauritius, and now
they became these indentured laborers for privateers on their dates
in the Caribbean, and then of course it was just
(12:02):
a short hop from there to the southern American States,
and that's where Oriana's people have hailed from. And they're
Catholics because they were converted by the Portuguese back in
India in the state of Goa in the fifteen hundred.
So she's and her mother are Catholics, and so they
end up eventually at working for the white clerks in
(12:23):
this small American town of eden Falls. And of course
Oriana has grown up in America. She's American, but that
small point of difference does keep her slightly apart. And
then of course we've got Amos, who's from fiercely Protestant stop.
You know, he has been handed this mining dynasty by
his father and grandfather who basically created it from nothing
(12:44):
in this tiny wooded, forested town towards the southern part
of the United States. And this is a place eden
Falls where faith matters, so as you might expect from
from the name of the town. And his actions and
those of his family are often morally doing, but they're
always couched in this veneer of a religious authority. In fact,
(13:04):
one of his sons is a preacher he has three sons,
Gideon who's just been has been murdered, presumably by Orianna,
and two others who still survived. For Amos, his primary
goal is to preserve his family's wealth and power at
any and all costs, and his tentacles run throughout not
just the town of eden Falls, but the entire county.
So when Oriana rocks up again, of course there's going
(13:28):
to be this dynamic between them where she insists that
she didn't kill his son, and he believes that she did,
but he's willing to now reconsider things to see whether
or not there might be another killer in town.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
His tentacles run throughout the community. It's like you in
the crime fiction world, right, So you like the Amos
I mean, what was the inspiration for him? Then where
did he come from? If he wasn't you, then where
did he come from? What triggered that? Why this character?
Speaker 1 (13:57):
Well, everyone loves as as I referenced earlier, everyone loves
a ruthless a ruthless patriarch or matriarch in one of
these families that have overreaching power, and I mentioned the
character of Logan Ray in Succession, but also the Kevin
Costner character whose name I can't remember. In Yellowstone, I
(14:19):
don't know if you've ever seen Yellowstone.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
But his name but mysticulous.
Speaker 1 (14:24):
Fabulous series. So these characters who believe themselves to be
morally upright, but are willing to resort to any and
all means in order to preserve their wealth and power
because they believe not just that it's their moral right,
but it's their duty to do so for their family
and for the people that they care about.
Speaker 3 (14:43):
And why small town in usay then.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
Well, if you think about it, I mean, small towns
have that amazing quality of being both insular but also
having these wonderful secrets and and possible relationships bubbling away
under the surface that allow you as an author to
(15:07):
explore when you're writing a murder mystery, explore these these
how these relationships can turn out to be a lot
more than they seem on the surface. And this goes
back to the traditions of murder mysteries that are more
than just that. So, you know, to kill a mockingbird,
you know where a false accusation in a small town
(15:29):
leads to injustice. And there's a shape there's shades of
that here in The Girl in See because of course,
Oreana is part at least part partly descended from from
a non white background. But then you've got one of
my favorite books and films, In the Heat of the Night.
Did you ever come across that?
Speaker 3 (15:46):
I have, I have watched it.
Speaker 1 (15:48):
It's a mystery novel by John Ball from nineteen sixty five,
and it's set in South Carolina. For those of you
who don't remember, it's about a black detective, Virgil Tibbs,
who passes through this small town and murder has occurred,
and at first they think he did it, so they
arrest him at the train station, and then, of course
they discover he's actually a homicide detective, and so they
call upon him to try and help solve this, to
(16:08):
solve this murder, And of course it became the enormously
successful and influential film of the same title, In the
Heat of the Night, starring Sydney Potier. Do you remember
the famous line from that.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
Frankly, my dear, I don't give damn.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
Yeah, not really that close. It's because it's about race
as much as it's about the murder. The amos y
clerk of this town, the rich white dude industrialist who
runs a town. He slaps Sydney Potier, and then Sydney
Potier slaps him back, and he's the first black man
on screen, from what I understand, to slap a white
(16:44):
man on screen, and then he says something along the
lines of call me mister Tips. One of the reasons
that it went down in history.
Speaker 3 (16:52):
It's a very powerful film, it really is.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
But I saw that as a teenager, and ever since
then it's stuck with me that small towns are just
the perfect perfect environment for murder mysteries because they allow
you to explore so much more than just the mystery itself.
Speaker 3 (17:09):
How long did it teach? Write?
Speaker 1 (17:10):
Well, I think you were there at the beginning. Weren't
you when I first.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
Mentioned I remember it was so long ago.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
Oh well, that's because you're very old now and your
member probably why your wife's ran away. It took over
three years to write, because I wrote, I had the
initial idea, I sold it to my publisher on the
basis of a one page synopsis, and then I had
to go away and write the thing while I was
still writing other books. I wrote the first draft. We
sat down, we looked at it, and then we knew
that it was good. But there was something quite missing.
(17:38):
And so then I thought about it a bit more,
and then I realized that some of the tropes that
we associate with psychological thrillers weren't there. It needed to
be in first person. It needed to be in present
tents rather than past tense, to give it that sense
of immediacy. And so you can imagine I had one
hundred thousand words and trying to turn that into first
person and present tense.
Speaker 3 (17:58):
It was.
Speaker 1 (17:59):
It was very painful, but it was well worth the effort.
I think, based on the feedback that I've had so far.
Speaker 3 (18:06):
I think that's that's good advice.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
You know, if to other writers, if you want to
add immediacy to your work, first person is.
Speaker 3 (18:13):
Often present tense is often the way to go.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
But yeah, I mean for somebody who is a machine
who writes so quickly and so you know, I wouldn't
say quickly, but you're you're efficient, right, you write a
book a year at least For a book to take
you three years is you know, it's a herculean task,
and I'm sure it's well worth it. The end result
is going to be amazing. And tell our readers, because
(18:41):
I know our listeners.
Speaker 3 (18:42):
I know this. You went over to the States to
do a bit of research. How did that go well?
Speaker 1 (18:47):
To be fair, we were both supposed to go over
for a first called melis Domestic, and then you were
waylaid at the last second and unable to to come.
We were going to hire a car and drive drive
all the way, yes, exactly, although hopefully without driving off
a cliff at the end of it. Yeah, that went
(19:09):
really well because I made some great friends out there
who directed me to some lovely small towns, and a
couple of them who were absolutely lovely. They drove me
around five or six of these tiny, tiny towns, and
there's one particular incident that sticks out, and you have
to remember, you know, a person of our heritage in
the southern part of the United States, in small towns,
(19:34):
there's course for a slight degree of nervousness, I guess
before we get there. But my experiences were lovely. Everybody
I spoke to when I told them what I was doing,
were more than happy to open up and talk to
me about their lives. And there was one particular town
I think it couldn't have been more than two thousand people.
There's more people on my street in London. To be honest,
we went into this tiny library where two lovely older
(19:57):
ladies were chatting away. You know, nobody else was in there,
and of course they stopped when I came in, because
I doubt they'd seen many people like me wandering before.
Speaker 3 (20:06):
Yeah, not that ugly, I'm sure.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
And then we got talking and then one of them said,
wait a second, and then she went out into the
into the main library, and she came back with a
copy of my first novel, which had been on the
shelves for ten ten years, a bit chewed.
Speaker 3 (20:23):
Up, pristine? Was it pristine?
Speaker 1 (20:25):
No, it was actually quite cheered up. And she said,
I thought i'd recognize your name because people borrow your
your books from us. So I thought it was just
such a lovely moment. And yes, it was really nice,
and I'm really glad that I made that journey out right.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
Okay, Well, this is a technically a true crime podcast now,
because that's what. Well, it's got a true crime element
to it, because that's what you're insisted we do. Tell me, what,
do you have a favorite small town true crime I.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
Don't know about favorite, but there's certainly one that I
thought I'd mentioned today because it caught my eye. Have
you heard of the axe murders of Saxton?
Speaker 2 (21:01):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (21:01):
You know what? No?
Speaker 1 (21:03):
Okay, so sax down. So this this harks back to
eighteen seventy four, and Saxtown was a small farming village
in the state of Illinois, and it was home to
a group of German immigrant families. And I want to
read to you a dispatch from the Belleville Advocate, the newspaper.
(21:26):
It's a newspaper recording. It is my favorite newspaper because
you're a bit of a Bellvillion, aren't you?
Speaker 3 (21:33):
Bloody? Love the bell Advertiser. What was it called? Dispatch? Even? Yeah?
Love it?
Speaker 2 (21:37):
Love it anyway, tell us about it.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
This is Friday, March twenty seventh, eighteen seventy four, and
this is how it begins their story. Several times we
have been called on to record deeds of blood and villainy,
and now we undertake to record the most appalling crime
that has occurred in this state in a number of years.
An investigation by an official revealer scene that would make
the stoutest heart quail. And had the discovery of the
(22:03):
murderer been made by neighbors of the murdered family at
the coroner's inquest, there would have been no need for
a judge or jury, for the excited populace would surely
have torn the murderer limb from limb. You don't have
the stoutest heart, but has your not so stout heart quailed?
Speaker 2 (22:23):
Lots of me is quailing right now, shivering.
Speaker 3 (22:25):
You know. My legs have turned to jelly, inns have
turned to what not.
Speaker 2 (22:30):
My mouth has turned to ice cream, but it often
turns to ice cream.
Speaker 3 (22:36):
Yeah, story tell us the context.
Speaker 1 (22:39):
Okay, So the murder pertains to the Stelz Leader family,
who had immigrated to Illinois like many others from Germany,
and in this small rural tract of land known as
sax Down. They lived in this close knit community, and
then on March seventeenth, one of their neighbors, Benjamin Schneider,
(22:59):
he needed to borrow some potato seeds, as one does,
so he ventured along to his neighbor's hamlet, the Stell's
Reader family home, and he noticed that everything was quiet,
nothing going on, no horses and cattle wandering around doing stuff,
And so he knocked no answer on the front door,
wanders in and a sight of utter gruesomeness confronts him.
(23:23):
So Karl Stell's Reader, sixty five years old, is lying
in a very large pool of blood and his throat
has been cut from ear to ear. In the very
next room, his thirty six year old son Friedrich has
had his scar bashed in and his throat also slashed.
And beside him is his twenty eight year old wife
Anna and their two tiny children, three year old Carl
(23:47):
and eight month old Anna Junior, all have been bludgeoned
to death. All of the entire family is believed to
have been killed by an axe, hence the axe murder
axe murder title. So word of this gets out of course,
and you know, it becomes a sensation around the country,
front page of the New York Times, et cetera, et cetera.
(24:09):
The community of these German farmers are absolutely horrified, and
the police begin to look around and two suspects come up.
So first thing you need to know is that Frederick
Stell's Reader, the son of Carl Stell's Reader, has received
a substantial inheritance from Germany and the estate. The estate
(24:30):
is worth several thousand dollars at the time, which is
quite a big sum in today's today's cash, probably what
you've got in your pockets right now. So the police
are thinking that perhaps somebody murdered the entire family so
that they could inherit. So suspicion falls upon a chap
(24:51):
called Frederick Boots.
Speaker 3 (24:54):
Now he is sounds like it sounds like a wrong.
Un to me, by the sound of it.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
He's definitely a wrong. So Bolts is married to one
of the murder victims, the daughter in law of Karl's
Sells Reader. So he's married to Anna's sister.
Speaker 3 (25:10):
Oh okay, and.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
He's borrowed two hundred dollars from the Stells Reader family
and he's never paid it back.
Speaker 3 (25:16):
The cat sounds a lot likely for simcan.
Speaker 1 (25:19):
So the police believe that he's murdered them all so
he can inherit the family. It doesn't have to pay
his debt back, et cetera, et cetera. What's more, they
find footprints, bloodied footprints leading away from the house, and
these footprints, as they follow them through, lead all the
way to Boltz's front door.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
Now, for reasons convenient.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
Well anyway, he's he is arrested, he's tried, but for
reasons that we don't we no longer know? He is
acquitted And in fact, he later sued the Stells Reader
estate and he was awarded four hundred dollars. So he's
actually two hundred dollars up on the whole venture.
Speaker 3 (25:59):
Oh no, he's more than that, right, he is six
hundred up?
Speaker 1 (26:01):
Oh true? If he yeah, because he's never paid back
the original two hundred does he see? This is this
is why you're an accountant.
Speaker 2 (26:07):
This is why you need me, mate, This is why
you need me because my brain still work.
Speaker 1 (26:10):
So the second guy, even more intriguing. His name is
John Askin, and he worked for the Stells Reader family
on occasion, and he's got a long running grudge against
Frederick Stell's reader. And he apparently is a very large
and powerful man who made his living with an axe.
Clue right there. He had a bad had a bad temper,
(26:32):
not really well liked around sax Town. But there's one
other characteristic which firmly puts him in the dock, certainly
given the prejudice at the time. He had ginger hair.
Speaker 2 (26:44):
What is it with you and Ginger? This is the
second week in a row you've mentioned.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
It's not well. I tell you what it is. It's
nothing to do with me, my friend. It's the fact
that that and a clump of that exact same colored
hair was found in Carl Stell's reader's palm as he
laid down in this pool of blood. And again again
he was arrested, but again released for reasons that we
do not know. So various other suspects were arrested, but
(27:11):
again all ended up being released. So unfortunately, this famous,
infamous true crime small town mystery remained a mystery to
this day.
Speaker 3 (27:23):
So it's unsolved.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
So some guy has possibly framed the thing before DNA,
right before DNA. If it was in the days of DNA,
then somebody would have gone to prison. And I suppose
in Illinois they couldn't have even found a black guy
in town, which there was their third option. They could
have just found a black guy and lynched them, right,
That's what they did.
Speaker 3 (27:42):
In those days.
Speaker 2 (27:43):
So yeah, that's a horrific story, horrifical, right. But I
want to pull you up on something. You said that
the neighbor went round. I think it was a neighbor
because he went round to borrow potato seats, and.
Speaker 3 (27:58):
Potatoes don't grow from do they.
Speaker 1 (28:01):
They grow I think you've cracked it all along.
Speaker 3 (28:04):
Mate.
Speaker 2 (28:04):
It was him or because oh, I'm just going to
go and get some potato seeds. No, they grow from
seed potatoes, which are actually tubers.
Speaker 3 (28:13):
So they are.
Speaker 2 (28:14):
If they'd asked me, mate, if they'd asked me back
in eighteen seventy four, Crane would have been solved in
like a day.
Speaker 3 (28:21):
But no, they went down.
Speaker 2 (28:22):
The whole ginger haired German relative route.
Speaker 3 (28:26):
No. No, no, no.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
The answer is potatoes don't grow from seeds the minute
he walked into a police station. So no, I've went
to worrols on potato seeds. They should have arrested them
there and then because he doesn't know the first thing
about farming.
Speaker 1 (28:40):
Color me impressed. Color me impressed. Sitting in your little
torture dungeon in Surrey, you have managed to solve this
unsolved mystery of one hundred and fifty years distance.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
It's not little dungeon. It's quite big, spacious. Tell me now, then,
where can people where? And when can people find this
this modern day class. If I may be so bold,
you may be so bold, You may be well. As
I said, it comes out on the first of May.
But you can pre Order it now from all good bookshops.
Get it from your.
Speaker 1 (29:10):
Indies, get it from your big chains, get it from
I'll get it online. I'm going to be doing a
mini tour. I'll be up in Manchester, your Coleeds, Marlow,
all sorts of lovely places talking about talking about this book.
I would greatly appreciate people having a dip into this
book because, as you know with Hunted, when you do
(29:31):
something different, you don't always know how it's going to land. Yes,
it's had great endorsements from some of the best psychological
thriller writers in the world, people like your Ruth Wears
and etc. Et cetera, your Sharry Lapenias, et cetera. But
it will be lovely for ordinary readers to get their
hands on a copy. Read it and let me know
(29:53):
what you think.
Speaker 3 (29:55):
You know what, I think they absolutely should. I mean,
obviously the one for.
Speaker 2 (30:00):
People who listen to this podcast will.
Speaker 3 (30:02):
Go out and get it. But tell your friends as well.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
I mean, you know, the boy has produced something a
bit special here, and yeah, people deserve to read it now,
mister Kahnt, I think on that note, that brings us
to the close of yet another episode. A very special
episode The Vassine Can't Special once again. If you've liked
the show, can we ask you to leave a review,
sign up for regular episodes using your favorite podcast app, and.
Speaker 3 (30:28):
Please do spread the word. So Vas.
Speaker 2 (30:32):
Do you think we're a pair of unreliable narrators, Well.
Speaker 1 (30:36):
If you're asking whether we're a pair of massive liars,
well yes, we are authors and we do make shit
up for a living.
Speaker 3 (30:43):
Do we not.
Speaker 2 (30:45):
Nope, everything I write is factual. You know, every word
I've lived. Every word of what I've written is a
lived experience. And on that nonsensical note, we have been
your friends, the Red Hot Chili writers on Murder Junction.
Please do go out and buy a copy of Girl
(31:05):
in Sale, because.
Speaker 3 (31:06):
Otherwise he's going to be miserable and make my life help.
Thank you,
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