The Conversation with Nadine Matheson
Welcome to The Conversation with Nadine Matheson, where best-selling author of the 'Detective Inspector Anjelica Henley' series Nadine Matheson sits down with fellow authors for insightful, honest, and entertaining conversations. Each episode dives deep into the world of writing, from the publishing journey to overcoming challenges, the experiences that shape their work, and anything else that comes up when great minds come together. Whether you're a fan of gripping stories or curious about the life behind the books, 'The Conversation' promises thought-provoking chats and moments of inspiration.
If you'd like to be a guest or have a message or question, reach out to us at theconversation@nadinematheson.com.
Finalist -Independent Podcast Awards 2024
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The Conversation with Nadine Matheson
Greg Mosse: The Devil's in the Details - Blank Pages and Big Ideas
What makes the difference between a forgettable story and one that lingers in your mind long after you've turned the final page? Best-selling author and playwright Greg Mosse reveals the secret early in our conversation: "Boring books are finished by their writers, and good books are completed by their readers, because there's space for the reader's imagination within the story."
This philosophy of collaborative storytelling runs throughout our conversation as Greg shares his remarkable journey from contemplating army life to becoming an acclaimed writer of both cozy mysteries (The Maisie Cooper Mystery Series) and futuristic thrillers (The Alex Lamarque Thriller Series). We also talk about creating authentic characters across different genres and his new novels, The Coming Fire and Murder at the Wedding.
Whether you're an aspiring writer seeking craft advice, a reader curious about how your favorite stories come to life, or simply someone who appreciates thoughtful conversation about creativity and identity, this episode offers warmth, wisdom, and a fascinating glimpse into the mind of a versatile storyteller.
First came the darkness.
Then the storm.
Now Alex has no choice: it's time to face the fire.
Following a fighter jet crash in the Haitian hinterland, special agent Alex Lamarque is taken captive by a violent, drug-addled gang, the only authority in this lawless territory.
Unknown to Alex, his lover Mariam Jordane has escaped the deadly flood of her home valley in the Pyrenees. But Mariam, along with Alex's mother Gloria, is trapped on the wrong side of the world, facing a crescendo of dangers: the AI viruses crippling the digital state; the breakdown of law and order; and unexpected, terrifying news from a Paris observatory.
And four thousand kilometres to the south, in the remote Sahara, the consequences of the cataclysm
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Boring books are finished by their writers, by their authors, and good books are completed by their readers, because there's space for the reader's imagination within the story.
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the Conversation with your host, nadine Matheson. As always, I hope that you're well and I hope that you're having a glorious week, and, of course, I use the word glorious because spring has well and truly arrived, the sun is shining and also it's Easter week, which means that we in the UK get a four day weekend, and I hope that you take the opportunity to just relax, hang out with your family and friends and also read. I've been reading so many books because I'm coming up to the end of my edits, which means that I'm able to just indulge in my books, because sometimes reading can feel a bit like work. When you're a writer and I do miss the old days, the old days when I could just I don't know just pick up a book and it was just pure indulgence. And sometimes it can feel a little bit like work You're like, oh my God, look at my TBR palms, look at the amazing proofs that I've been privileged to receive and that I have to read and that I have to provide a quote. And sometimes I look at my TBR palm and I'm like, oh god, I am never, ever, ever going to get through this. But, as I said, right now I'm just reading, just reading and enjoying it. I think I've read in the past week and a half, I think I've read three books, which is quite good. It's quite good going for me. I started another one yesterday, so I'm quite happy.
Speaker 2:And I also have a request of you, a request to my amazing listeners, who are growing every week. Can I ask if you are enjoying this podcast, if you're enjoying the conversations that I have with my amazing guests? Could you please please? If you're listening on Apple Podcasts, could you please please? If you're listening on apple podcast, could you please leave a review? If you're listening on spotify, please leave a review, and you can also leave a comment on spotify, which I will see and to which I will reply. I'm not sure where else you're supposed to leave reviews. I don't know. If you're listening on youtube music or watching on youtube, you can also comment or leave a comment. So that's all I have to say, my little request, and I'm going to thank you in advance. Now let's get on with the show.
Speaker 2:This week, I'm in conversation with best-selling author and playwright, greg Moss. When you Google him, google Books describe Greg Moss as a writer and an encourager of writer and I absolutely love that. And Greg Moss is also the founder and leader of the Criterion New Writing Script Development Programme at the Criterion Theatre in London and he's the author of the Maisie Cooper Mystery Series and the Alexandra Lamarck Thriller Series, and his new novel, the Coming Fire, is out on the 17th of July. But if you can't wait that long, you can listen to listen, you can read, I suppose you can listen, naturally, if you get the audio books, so you can listen or read the first two books in the series, the Coming Storm and the Coming Darkness, featuring Alexandra Lamarck. And in our conversation, greg Moss and I talk about navigating class and identity in a new world, how real life encounters inspire thrilling characters and the art of creating vivid worlds. Now, as always, sit back or go for a walk and enjoy the conversation. Greg Moss, welcome to the conversation.
Speaker 1:Hi there.
Speaker 2:I'm only laughing because Greg and I have been chatting way before I started recording this conversation. But, Greg, I have a serious question for you.
Speaker 1:Oh no, Not before we start.
Speaker 2:It won't be that bad. Did you know from the very beginning, a young boy, that this is what you wanted to do? Writing novels, yeah.
Speaker 1:Writing novels, yep, specifically so like like most tortured adolescents, I thought probably poetry was the thing I ought to write, so I did ever such a lot of that then.
Speaker 1:I had because I had a broken home life without any you know structure and support. I had this idea that I would join the army. So I went to a South East England what's the word? Comprehensive school, you know? Bog standard school like the politicians talk about and it felt like that would be both escape and direction. You know what I mean. It would be structure and purpose. And I wasn't a very deep thinking sort of person at that time. And this was proved because very soon after I'd taken that decision, I did a school play and I happened to have a good role and I sang this lead part in the school play and I thought no, I'll go to Goldsmiths College in South East London, I'll become an actor. Those things couldn't be further apart, really, could they?
Speaker 2:well, they are because you know, one end of the spectrum you've got. I'm going to join the army. You know, get myself in order on the other, hand, I'm going to do? I'll say acting. I'll say could be unreliable, because you don't know what's going to happen. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, how your career is going to do. I'll say acting.
Speaker 2:I'll say could be unreliable because you don't know what's going to happen, yeah that's true, yeah, how your career is going to end up and you'll go to your move down to the new cross yeah, but here's the, here's the thing where there is the similarity between them structure, structure and collegiality.
Speaker 1:Right, you're a member of? In both things, you're in the men, you're a member of a community, and there are. So you know, when you're a grunt, when you're a member of in both things, you're in the men, you're a member of a community, and there are. So you know, when you're a grunt, when you're at the bottom of the chain in the army, there are, because I, I knew quite a lot of, um, uh, adults around me when I was young who were in the armed forces. Anyway, you, um, you have deadlines that are imposed from outside. Right, you have objectives and you right, theatre is like pregnancy there is an opening night, there is no turning back, you have to be ready, okay, and so that sense collegiality and community and a real strong direction and purpose. I think so. There are similarities, but they are different too, obviously.
Speaker 2:What was it like for you, though, down to southeast London, considering where you grew up, because it's such a contrast?
Speaker 1:yeah, it is a complete contrast and in fact in those days you would fill out an application form for university and put down five courses, yeah, and then you might get interviewed by two, three, four or five of them, depending on what they thought of your application. So I had one at Canterbury and I had one at Hull and I had one somewhere else. It was basically all the courses that offered a degree in drama and English, because I was still interested in literature you know proper literature, the canon right and so I didn't want wholly drama. The first one that invited me to interview was Goldsmiths.
Speaker 1:I didn't know London very well, so I got the train up from Sussex to Victoria and then, imagine this I got the Circle and District line out to East London, to Whitechapel, and then changed onto the South East London Metropolitan Tube line to get to New Cross Instead of getting the train like a normal person would. But I knew no better At that time. This is before the Docklands Redevelopment Corporation pretty much the whole of Surrey Docks mill wall. That area was breakers, yards and scrappage and dilapidated homes.
Speaker 1:Right. So what happened was there? I was pretentiously on the southeastern metropolitan line train rattling along, looking out of the window, seeing this landscape so utterly different from anything that I had ever known, and I thought this is where I must go, because it's different you didn't feel intimidated at all, or you're just like excited by it yeah, completely yeah, I was.
Speaker 1:Um, yeah, I was. I was thrilled when they sent me um an achievable, you know, set of grades that I could, that I could get, and I was pretty certain that that was where I was going. And and that happened like within a week I got that offer and so I cancelled all the other applications and I didn't even get interviewed at all the other places, I just just this one.
Speaker 2:It seemed like the right place they said, because obviously, growing up in Deptford and you know you're talking about the breakers yards and the scrap yards that is like those are my memories, actually, not even just being young, even it's only until recently, until they started building up everywhere and everything has become gentrified that all you saw was the scrappy jars. You know, if you wanted to get a half-bulk tyre for your car, you just went to the scrap yard.
Speaker 1:Or to get a car radio. At one point we lived next to a shop whose job was putting used tyres on people's cars, right, and he had. He had a special set of labels that he would glue to the flank of the tyre to say this is not a new tyre, it's not my fault if you crash. Essentially, that's what he said. He came round one night and knocked on the door and he said to us Greg, you and I, I think we know one another. Um, it might be noisy tonight, I'm sorry about that, but we're breaking up a car for parts. I think you know why.
Speaker 2:I said okay. Rick, yeah, okay you, just, you just given me a memory. We had this, um, we had this neighbor. Like we grew up like us and the neighbors, because we grew up together and the dad just suddenly disappeared and we just thought they split up, like he and the mum had split up. That's what we thought, and he was gone for about four or five years and then one morning I was, I think I was going out to work, so he was gone for a really long period of time.
Speaker 2:One was I'm going out to work and I just see him and he's like all right, nadine and I'm like what?
Speaker 1:where you been?
Speaker 2:you think he hadn't, they hadn't separated, he'd been in prison because he'd done a bank job.
Speaker 1:He's been detained at Her Majesty's pleasure.
Speaker 2:He got detained. We thought he just split up with the wife. Yeah, yeah. He had a little. It was.
Speaker 1:I know where you're going with this.
Speaker 1:It was a completely different world, and so I was not posh in background because I come from you know really horrible accommodation in a crappy rural village and tied accommodation. You know really horrible accommodation in crappy rural village and tied accommodation. You know tied to jobs. But when I went to secondary school I absorbed all of the trappings of the middle classes. I acquired the voice that I still have today. You know RP accent. I copied my elders and betters right and the pathway I followed in in school led me so far away from where I'd begun because I ended up being a um, a server in the cathedral. You know that. So I was an acolyte and a thurifer carrying a consensus ball on the chain and so on and um like really drawn into this um high church of England world and meeting, you know, very smart and very, actually very well educated, broadly experienced people, um, but I knew that I wasn't one of them and I think that played into southeast London and um. But you were asking if it was shocking or intimidating and there was. It was on arrival um, because when I there there was no accommodation for me. There'd been some blip in the admin. So you know the big tower out the front of Goldsmiths College. I'd had a first indication that that was. That would be my student room. And then when I got there, there simply wasn't Very fortunately, an actor from Chichester festival theater, where I've worked backstage as a stagehand uh, I happen to know, was at that point living in westcombe park, just beyond greenwich, and I had the phone number because he said call me if, uh, if you, you know, want to have, want to have um tea or lunch or something.
Speaker 1:And, very fortunately, there he was and he put me up for the first week and I found, you know, a room at the top of the house.
Speaker 1:And, uh, but look, nadine, that was another, another really weird thing, because the room that I found was at the top of a house at the bottom of Croom's Hill, you know that very smart street that goes down the side of Greenwich Park, and the husband of the family in the house was a parliamentary private secretary and the room was available because their kid had gone to Edinburgh, so it was only available term time while their kid was in Edinburgh. But there I was again, like a fish out of water in this incredibly posh, wellconnected household, yeah, of the family of Shirley Britton, in fact, the Labour MP that went over to the STP, so a really, really peculiar. So at the end of that first term I was really fortunate and I had made a couple of friends on the course and we all got a flat together in Lewisham and that was there. I felt much more at home on Lewisham High Street with, you know, normal people as it seemed to me.
Speaker 1:I don't. I don't sort of think like that anymore, because they're all normal people really. But when you don't know much of the world, you feel easily out of place.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Can I carry on on the out of place thing you can. This was really dramatic, you may recall, so this is back. I can never remember if it was 79, 80 or 81. Peter Haynes Anti-Nazi League met the National Front on Lewisham High Street on the same day we moved into the flat.
Speaker 2:Oh, did my mum and dad. Yeah, my mum's always told me about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was. It was extraordinary, um, it was extraordinary that it wasn't. I'm sure there was violence, but it didn't seem so. Do you know what I mean? There was this extraordinary confrontation, but it felt, it genuinely felt like this weird, obviously inexplicable to us, confrontation of ideas. It wasn't just closed minds meeting. Do you know what I mean? It seems different from today. Today feels like closed minds banging up against one another and no possibility, possibility of communication anyway. So that was, that was welcome to Lewisham you know?
Speaker 2:well, I'm only laughing because you know, I know. Going back to the tire shop, I think I know which tire shop you were talking about. Do you want to look? Yeah, because I may have gone there. Go on one or one or two or three or four times. They had a different name for it, though for the half-ball tyres, so they weren't completely illegal, but you could buy them.
Speaker 1:No, I think the idea of the stickers he put on the flank, I think the idea of that was it made them legal because it was a warning.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and then it was legit. Now I wonder if in your varied career in law and in writing, you've ever come across Winsome Pinnock, who's, I think, an important black female contemporary writer of theatre and also some television.
Speaker 2:Does that ring a bell? Her name rings a bell.
Speaker 1:OK, but that's as far as I can go with it.
Speaker 1:So she was on the same course as I was. It was very go with it. So she was on the same course as I was. It was very white. But Winsome was on the same course as I was and in one of the options I was doing makeup and I remember.
Speaker 1:So I'd been taught about what we used to refer to five and nine. Five and nine are the two makeup sticks that you combine to do a skin tone, more or less Something like mine, in different proportions five and nine. And so I'd learned all this stuff and there was a plan for what I was going to do and I was looking after about six or seven people in one of the dressing rooms and then, suddenly, a dress rehearsal, there was Winsome With completely different skin tone. All the things I had in front of me were utterly useless. What am I going to do? So I said I'm very sorry, I have not been prepared for this challenge. Tell me what you think would be best. So that was an eye opener.
Speaker 1:I saw Winsome quite recently because she was at, um, uh, university of Kingston, I think it was, and, um, I went with my wife, kate Moss, who was, uh, doing a presentation about the Women's Prize for Fiction and Winsome was there, and then again recently at um. She had a show in one of the North London theatres and it is extraordinary Again, I'm thinking about passing of time and how things are different today, how she was one black person in I don't know 40 or something. Yeah, and that will never happen again at Goldsmiths College in South East London, will it?
Speaker 2:But it's even crazy to think of that in southeast london at that time, just being one of 40, considering how diverse that whole area is yeah, yeah, it was clearly closed to its local community. Yeah, that pathway was closed yeah, that's like a lot of things, but you know what I was thinking of. You know, when you're talking about changing your accent and becoming more RP, it's. I mean, that's basically just what we would call code switching. Now, it is yeah yeah, because I I didn't realize I did it until.
Speaker 1:You must have done it as a lawyer. You got you, you're yeah, you must have been sucked into it as a lawyer to do it.
Speaker 2:Yeah that's when I realized I did it. But before then I didn't realize that I'd done it and it's only and it only dawned on me when I was in court and we're doing, we're doing a trial, and then I think I was we're doing closing speeches and you know, between me and the judge and the prosecutor co-defendant, we've all written different things down as to what a witness has said and I'd referred to it in the closing speech and the judge was like I don't think that's correct. So we had to go back and listen to the recording, because we don't have a stenographer in court anymore, so it's all digitally recorded. And we had to go back and listen to it. And the clerk she played the bit where I was questioning the witness and I didn't recognize it was me because my voice it completely. I was like who is that? She's? Like that's you, miss Matheson? I'm like that can't be me. Like it wasn't it was me.
Speaker 2:And then I was in Maidstone Crown Court and I was in the lift going up to court and some um, some guys got in to the lift, obviously going up to court, members of the public and someone asked me a question and I just answered it and then he said oh, I'm so glad to hear southeast London accent. And again, I hadn't realized that I I do switch between, yeah, not even between the two, because it's completely different if I'm at home and I'm with my family. Because my mum said to me the other day well, you don't talk with a Grenadian accent anymore. And I said I didn't realize that I did. But then when I was at school, you know, I'm South East London, cockney, all the way yeah, absolutely is.
Speaker 1:Is her accent fully um Caribbean like really strong, but does it have that sing-song rhythm to it? Yeah, it does, but I never it does.
Speaker 2:But when growing up I didn't. I never thought that she had a strong Grenadian accent. My cousins and my other family say, yeah, she does. I'm like, no, she doesn't, because it's just my mum. I just didn't. I didn't think she had a strong accent and I still don't feel like she had. I don't feel like my dad has a strong accent either, even though they're back in Grenada. But I think, yeah, how?
Speaker 1:are they? How are they? By the way, how's the house? It has a roof on it. I'm hoping we have a roof.
Speaker 2:Yes, we have a roof, thank god. Yeah, it sounds like a really strange thing to say, like you don't realize how much you need a roof, and there's water coming down through the house.
Speaker 1:Um, just following, following off on the accent thing and exactly what you're saying. A good friend of ours, um patterson joseph, who's a wonderful actor yes he's recently been slow horses on tv. He was in the willie wonka movie and so anyway and much earlier in his career in the rsc.
Speaker 1:So patterson and he's passing is also a really gifted writer and he's written this uh brilliant book and also he does this one-man stage show about ignatius sancho yeah, one of the very first black people to vote in a uk election, who lived on downing street and um and owned property and therefore he had the right to vote um in um in the 18th century. Anyway, as part of his stage show, which is about understanding, learning about ignacio sancho and where he must have come from and how he lived and all the rest of it, uh, patterson thinks about his own home life as well and how he was brought up, and he describes really vividly, through things that happened in his childhood, the division and the code switching that happened between himself and his parents and the fact that he never learned the creole that they would speak, in which they would speak to one another, never, ever. So he would know odd words, he would know he would know to say if somebody said, hey, pick, he would know that was him, yeah, but he couldn't express himself in it, you know.
Speaker 2:But I don't think that's not unusual. It's not, is it no? Because in Grenada we say our patois it's not the Jamaican patois, our patois is basically French. So my mum would always say, when I was younger, she would still talk to us in patois, but we can't really speak back. So you know certain things, because there was this thing that my grandmother would say to her like don't teach the children the old language, because we're here, so you need to teach them, you need to speak in English. So there are things she will say to us. Like we'll understand her, so we will reply back to her.
Speaker 1:It's a mistake, though, isn't it? Yeah, us like we'll understand her, so we reply back to her. It's a mistake, though, isn't it? There's yeah, I think so. There's millions and millions, I mean literally millions. It's not hyperbole of people who negotiate their lives in more than one language. And why not? It's not, it's not beyond us.
Speaker 1:Back in um, back in the early 80s, I became a translator and an interpreter, and I worked in French and Spanish and English, and I later went on to study at the Sorbonne, studied linguistics, because I was interested, because I remained a nerd. So I, just I. What I, what I discovered was that was that it's really logical when you say it out loud. Children are really well equipped, obviously, to learn the language that surrounds them, and they're totally well equipped to learn more than one language that surrounds them. But almost everybody begins to learn that capacity when they're 12, 13 years old, and what the linguists call the language acquisition device or the language acquisition system in the brain, it begins to shut down, which makes complete evolutionary sense, doesn't it? Because once you've learned your local language, you're done right, so shut it down.
Speaker 1:I was very fortunate that I'm one of the you know, unusual people who learn later in life. But I, I don't um, I don't um, I don't monitor what I'm saying. Do you know what I mean? I just talk. I just speak. I'm not thinking is this right, is this wrong? Yeah, oh, I should have said that. It just you know, for better or worse it comes out fluently, and but that's apparently very, a very rare thing, um, because most people that ability shuts down, say, it's why it's so mad that when we the, the point at which we start teaching children foreign languages is the point at which there's almost no time left well, it's true, because I didn't learn.
Speaker 2:I didn't start learning english, not english, I'm talking about french and spanish. I started learning spanish when I was 11, and that's when I went to secondary school, and I started learning French when I was 14 or 15.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's hard, yeah, and it's difficult.
Speaker 2:The French is a little bit easier because there's certain things I knew because of my mum. But my nephews, who are Japanese, they're half, you know, they're two and a half and four and a half, and they speak both Japanese and English Love that, which is great. Yeah, when did you? I always ask this question because I always think it's interesting when did you know that you could write, but not only write tell a story.
Speaker 1:So the degree at Goldsmiths was drama and English story. So, um, the degree at goldsmiths was drama and english. At the end of that I became um. Well, in the last year of that, as I was, you know, taking final exams and all of that stuff I, um, with a couple of other people, founded a theater company to perform in fringe venues in south london and actually took over the management of um.
Speaker 1:You may have even seen this pub, the New Tiger's Head, on Lee Green. Yeah, it's one of those big, traditional Victorian pubs with a ballroom upstairs. You remember how they've got? It's like two big rooms and a set of big, tall, bifold doors in the middle and that could separate an auditorium from a stage, which was actually just the floor. But it created that sense of being a small theatre. I think we sold out at like 38 or 42 seats, which was fine, and we put on a number of shows there. And so I learnt about finding. I learned about, you know, finding things in skips and painting them to make a set. I learned about actually, um, I was very fortunate that my grandmother had taught me to sew on her treadle sewing machine so I could make myself. In extremis, I could make myself a costume. Um, the, the smartest thing I ever made was a tailcoat, you know, for a restoration comedy, which you know, I guess You're a man of many things, Greg.
Speaker 1:I was obliged right, because there wasn't any money to hire a costume, even though in those days it was much easier to hire costumes. Even though in those days it was much easier to hire costumes, there was a brilliant costumier on Longacre in Covent Garden and you could go. It's moved out of town long ago but you could go in there and you could walk up and down corridors between rows of clothes all hanging on hangers and you could borrow something for two pounds a week or something, but still we didn't want to spend that money, not even that money. So making anyway, I also learned about lighting, which has been super valuable to me in my career several times.
Speaker 1:The point is that at first we were doing other people's scripts and then there was like a gap in our calendar and so I wrote something for the venue to fit that gap and performed it on my own as a one man show.
Speaker 1:So I got, as a kind of double whammy, this idea that I could write something that had a beginning and a middle and an end and suspense, obviously crucially, where the climax to the script made the audience feel it was worth the journey that it took them to get there, and I had.
Speaker 1:Also in parallel, I had the experience of really selling it to the audience, being that character, so writing in somebody else's voice. And today, when people because on the wall behind me there's lots of posters of plays that I've written and produced um, when people ask me what it's like, you know writing dialogue where you're just constantly switching between people's, like fictional character brains, and everybody has to have a different way of expressing themselves and so on, I always say that it feels natural to be somebody else when I'm writing, and not just one other person but lots of different people. So when it comes to dialogue in my novels, you know how lots of people say dialogue's the hardest bit. It doesn't feel like that. Because of all the experience I have with playwriting, it doesn't feel like that because of all the experience I have with playwriting.
Speaker 2:See, I've never found dialogue to be the hard bit when writing my novels, and I don't know whether it's because I have an ear you do yeah for what people are saying.
Speaker 1:You definitely do.
Speaker 2:And I think, also being a lawyer. It's all about what people say and the words they use and how they use it, and you're listening to nuance.
Speaker 1:You are listening professionally. You're listening for nuance. No, I think, I think, I think that's absolutely clear you are. You are clearly a gifted listener in that career, because that's where your sense of character comes from as well, isn't it?
Speaker 2:yeah, yeah, definitely, because it's all about, for me, it's all about what people say and the meaning behind their words. And I think the difficulty, what I probably have in writing, well, I suppose, is when I get my editing notes back and my editor's like, what do you think she does it? It's, she does it less now because I can kind of anticipate it, but it's, you know, what are they thinking? So it's always that prose and the internal, yeah, thought process, but the actual dialogue, the conversation, I'm, I'm always happy with it. I don't think I've ever had an issue good it doesn't.
Speaker 1:Reading reading your really suspenseful writing, I've that's what I felt it feels natural. All everybody feel. All your characters feel natural, which is I always wanted, isn't it?
Speaker 2:yeah, I always wanted to feel like people, like real people, that you can go and sit down in a pub with, whether you're going to have a go at them or talk about, give them your darkest secrets, but I want you to have that relationship with your characters.
Speaker 1:But you know, you were saying just then about editorial notes. Obviously, I get that too, because more or less every set of editorial notes I have ever seen, the editor asks the writer to make the subtext to the surface because well, a, it feels cleverer for us saying it, but also, b, it's a part of the suspense, isn't it? It's a way of um, it's a way of getting the, the reader, to put themselves in the character's shoes and try and work out what it is that they're really thinking behind what they're saying. And, um, I was at a festival, um, a little while ago, and and somebody asked me, um, we were talking about exactly this thing, and I said the third thing.
Speaker 1:So I said um, boring books are finished by their writers, by their authors, and good books are completed by their readers, because there's space for the reader's imagination within the story yeah and if and if. Everything's on the surface. That's not true anymore.
Speaker 2:Well, no, and I don't think I'd be happy if I put everything out there, because it kind of defeats the object of creating a suspenseful novel, creating a thriller, because I want you to. I don't want everything laid out on the page for me, I want you to think of it and be your own investigator, that's what I want?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that too, Absolutely. What about? So? Because I write thrillers set in the future, in 2037, the Coming Darkness trilogy, and because I write Cozy Grime, which is completely different set in 1972 in southwest Sussex. They are different in this respect, right. So everybody, I think people expect a thriller to have sort of more sustained gaps in knowledge between characters.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:More hidden motivations that endure for longer. Characters, yeah, more hidden motivations that endure for longer. Um, whereas the cozy crime novels, you, um, I think people expect um periodic revelations, that sort of reward them after like a section of the novel for their attention, and then there's another period, another one and another one, like that do you find one easier to write than the other, or is it just both the same for you in terms of the code and the futuristic thrillers?
Speaker 1:so I know that you'll recognize this. Um, they take as long as they take, right, that's true. And if you enjoy writing, you don't resent that you're. You know it's another's, another day? Oh no, it's not, it's another three days. It's just how it is. That's just. It's just what the book requires.
Speaker 1:So I don't really think about it as easier or harder. If you, if you're, if you're writing something with like this huge global scale set in a future world, that you have to teach the reader about 2037 climate crisis, everything we're worried about today is much more urgent and oh, anyway, you've got in every scene. Probably you've got something new. That isn't necessarily what your reader can anticipate. You have to. You have to take a lot of trouble to keep painting in the details of this future imaginary world, whereas the past 1972, southwest Sussex I was 11.
Speaker 1:Everything that I saw then is very vivid in my memory, because at 11 I had nothing in my head. So I've got these very vivid memories of all of this. You know the class consciousness, the vicar's role, the big house up the lane. You know all of that stuff and that is genuinely easier, right, it's easier to write a novel in that setting. That I know well in memory and don't even have to think about that. I know well in memory and don't even have to think about. That is easier than having to research science papers about potential future scientific and technological advances and then imagine how they might play out in the lives of ordinary people.
Speaker 2:I think that's why the other day I was recording a podcast not my one, someone else's podcast and we were talking about the books I've written. And I've written the book I self-published I describe as contemporary fiction, family drama. And I said I always found that easier to write because to me when you're writing about a family drama, contemporary life it's, it's like our life every single day. So you're just kind of repeating it, but you know you're jazzing it up in certain ways. But I found I said police procedurals, even though I come from a criminal law background it requires more work because one is a procedural and I've never been a police officer, I've always been on the other side. So there's that more work in that way. Work, you know, trying to work out exactly how an investigation involves, the different parties, um, who are involved and literally how involved everyone is in terms of those parties. So that's where the work is harder and where I found it a bit more. It's more intensive than if I was just writing a family drama.
Speaker 1:I absolutely agree. I've spoken to a couple of publishers who, um, are interested in me writing something with an aspect of procedural and I've said, oh, that's very kind of you. No, thank you, no, thank you.
Speaker 2:What a good idea for somebody else it's not easy, like I'm always pleased when I get, when I when I do get feedback and I had one from a police officer emailed me and he goes. I just picked up your book, the jigsaw man really enjoyed it, and he goes and I have no issues with the procedure and I was like thank God for that.
Speaker 1:It's a straight jacket, yeah, but it's a straight jacket as well, isn't it you? I know that. I know that there is. There is this pervasive idea that we should be absolutely faithful to correct procedure. But should we really?
Speaker 2:I don't think you can necessarily in the sort of story. Can I say let's be realistic. In my story, if you had a serial killer case, you're not really solving the case in 10 days, unless it's really, really, really really. You know the killer's so bad, you're not going to solve it in 10 days. But in my books they're solved in 10 days yeah, actually that that's a.
Speaker 1:That's a thing that I realized, as the the more I write, the more tempted I am to basically have nobody go to bed nobody eat, nobody change their socks. The action is continuous. I know that's the thing, but that's probably an error, isn't it? I do remember the first time I read Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code and I thought to myself wow, I haven't done a wee yet.
Speaker 2:They haven't eaten wee yet they haven't eaten.
Speaker 1:no, definitely not but of course and I don't mind that that you know, when I was, when I was a kid, I thought the first, um, obviously I read all the books that I was told to read at school, but the first things that I wrote sorry that I read independently were so this would be probably like 1972, 73 or so on. They would probably be like stories from slim novels of adventure from the Second World War. That was quite a big thing early on Boys' school that I attended, and then the first thing that I really ever felt complete ownership of was the Lord of the Rings oh really, yeah, which wasn't fashionable then, except it was sort of bubbling under as something that and other science fiction and fantasy fantasy like Arthur C Clarke and Isaac Asimov yeah um and um.
Speaker 1:I've always I've always really respected the um, the scientific verisimilitude, the things that they invent that make sense technologically in terms of progress, and so that really felt important to me in the Coming Darkness and the Coming Storm and the third book comes out this summer, the Coming Fire. That all of that should be convincing, but I never thought that I should labour it so much that it should take over from the characters who want different things and who can't resolve their differences and so you know, you know who does it really well, I think it's michael crichton in the jurassic park books.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you know, if you're just thinking about the jurassic park films, you're thinking, well, the books can't be that great. But the books are fantastic and that's what I was always fascinated by with Jurassic Park is the no one does the scientific reports. Yeah, in there, and you're like I feel like this could be real. It doesn't feel like he's just made it up, it feels like these are actual scientific papers and this is research.
Speaker 1:That they've done, it feels really grounded yeah, it does.
Speaker 2:And then you have the thriller and that it does it so well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've read others of Michael Crichton's novels and I found them all really inspiring in that respect.
Speaker 1:But I have to move away from all these gentlemen I've mentioned and just say that the person from whom I learned to write novels was really Kate Moss, your wife, wife, but it is related to what we're talking about. But the person from whom I learned to write novels was really Kate Moss, your wife, but it is related to what we're talking about, because she puts for want of a better word ordinary people at hinge moments in history where there's a possibility they could be completely crushed by these huge events, like the crusade against the Cathars or the persecution of the Protestants in France in the wars of religion. And yet, because she is a historical adventure writer, they triumph, at least sometimes a mitigated triumph, but they do triumph. And the world, the historical world, that she'll research for a novel over perhaps six months of general reading and then more focused reading, as you know very well, doesn't appear on the page except in glimpses, but it makes everything true because she's done that research.
Speaker 2:This is the thing about research, and is that you can spend so well. You know you spend so much time doing the research, but you'll only probably use 0.0025 of it.
Speaker 1:That's what will appear on the page yeah, so, um, we're about to publish in. I've just published murder at sunny view, which which is the fifth crazy crime.
Speaker 1:In May we'll publish the sixth one which, like, closes the story arc of the subplots for my hero, maisie Cooper, over six books and genuinely in that entire novel the sixth one, murder at the Wedding. The only thing I had to research because I'd sent her fiancé Jack away to Newcastle to do a training scheme with the Newcastle Metropolitan Police. I had to research the city of Newcastle that I've only ever visited twice and I wanted to make it feel real, like the texture of their lives in that visit when they're together and it's very important emotionally for them because you know they're in love and all of that. But at no other point did I have to research anything in 1972 for that novel and you know it feels like a really fluent way of writing.
Speaker 1:I do know that people who like to research as they go along, so not like like Kate who does it all up front and then writes like a sprinter, but more like a um, a friend, a Tracy Chevalier, for example. So, tracy, when she wrote Girl with a Pearl Earring, she, she wrote the sort of first page of the book and then she had a list of 20 things to research and then she and she did that research and then she did some more, and so on, and so on. I don't think I could ever do that, because I like, I like momentum in my, in my writing. I like to, I like to write for three or four hours a day and in I don't know 50 days, have a draft.
Speaker 2:That that's, that's what I like to do yeah, well, that's what I was going to ask you, because obviously you're writing your plays and you don't just have one series. You've got two series actually. I've got two questions, actually one. Did you know that you were going, that they were going to be series, when you decided you were going to sit down and write the Macy Cooper?
Speaker 1:yes, but the reason for that is because I stopped writing plays, because the lockdowns made it illegal right it was illegal for us to come together, yeah.
Speaker 1:So I had to do something else and very fortunately, very luckily for me, I've recently been working with Luigi Bonomi at the Emirates Festival in Dubai doing some brilliant outreach in the Dubai prison was one strand that that we did. And and then for kids in the expatriate community in Dubai, creative writing. Anyway, at the end of some events, luigi said to me Greg, I think you should write Cozy Crime, I think you'd be good at that. And if an agent ever says that to you, dear listener on Nathan's Excellent Podcast, if an agent says that to you, trust me, you should do it. Listen to them. There's no downside, is there? Just do it. No, there isn't, try and make the best of the opportunity.
Speaker 1:So I went away and I I don't know, probably three or four weeks later, I sent him 20,000 words of possible like opening to a cozy crime novel and said is this what you mean? We had discussed it and he said, yes, but but not that so much, and this is a bit harsh, and so on. And he showed it to his wife, alison Bonamy, who's also an author, emma Orchard, who's very, very brilliant editor, anyway. So they gave me these notes and so I said, oh yeah, I see, right, I'll do that. Um, by the time we came to sell um the cozy crime idea of Maisie Cooper to Hodder and Stoughton, there were already three of them that oh really that or well, sort of two and three quarters, but by the time it was signed there were three yeah
Speaker 1:so they had, they had read two and they knew that the third one was going to be available in like a month or something. And I don't mean they were first drafts, because everything maybe you're the same. So I write the book, then I rewrite it, and that's the second draft that I showed Kate. She has ideas, I rewrite it, I show it to Luigi and Alison Bonamy. They have ideas. So it's the fourth to Luigi and Alison Bonamy. They have ideas, so it's the fourth draft that goes to the editor yeah, I'm the same.
Speaker 2:No one sees. No one sees that first draft other than me. That's just for me, yeah, for sure. So how much I want to ask you then, about the planning, because you are doing the plays and you've got these two series. Yeah, how I'm like I'm assuming you're a planner because I feel like you have to be I can't see how you could do manage all three so, um, so I don't any longer write plays because I don't have time.
Speaker 1:I do have time. I would have time to write plays because, right, a one act play, 55 minutes, is about 12,000 words. For a professional writer that's not many words, that's all. Yeah, 12,000 words, you know, a screenplay will be 20 or 22,000 words. For a one-hour 40 movie, a two-hour play, probably about the same 20,000 words, maybe a little bit more, and so, compared to I don don't know, your thrillers are probably 90,000, is that?
Speaker 2:right. My editor wishes they were they wish.
Speaker 1:Okay, um, so mine are 98 yeah the coming darkness, coming storm, the coming fire. They're all 98. The cozy crime novels are all sort of 85, 87, but I'm and I've worked to keep them at the same length, anyway. So I don't have time to produce plays, right, and if I wrote something it would be because I wanted to put it on. It wouldn't be so. It sits in a drawer. So that's why I'm not doing that at the moment. A draw, so that's why I'm not doing that at the moment. In terms of the planning of the novels, I know that the beginning of the novel has to be a new setup that introduces the reader to a new set of characters, a new moment in time, a bunch of competing motivations, out of which, somewhere around page 50, 60, there'll be a first murder, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Do you need to plan that? Or if you've done it five or six times already, can you write, knowing that that's your first destination? Okay, and so when I've got to that first destination, I tend to stop, and not for very long, like a day, two days at the absolute most and I'm thinking about it. And then I rewrite that chunk, the first 50, 60, 70 pages, and I make and I make it coherent with the decisions that I've made about the next bit, which is sort of the next quarter of the novel and what's going to happen, so that as I write on, that first chunk is already consistent with it. And then it's easy to guess what I'll do next, isn't it? I do the same twice more. So at a quarter, a half and three quarters, I review what I've got and edit. So then when I write the last quarter, the first three quarters are consistent with all the decisions I've made for the denouement. That's my planning. It's not actually planning, it's constant review listeners.
Speaker 2:It's time for a very short break. If you're enjoying this conversation with Nadine Matheson and want to help keep the podcast going, why not buy me a cup of coffee? Your support goes such a long way in keeping these conversations flowing. Just check out the link in the show notes. See what I did and I've only started doing this now about the last two. But I think because the more you write, you you learn what works out for you, you know what's best for you. And what I've started doing now is that because I do plan, but I'll write the first, but then I won't finish the final act, I'll leave it and then I go back and then I do, then I rewrite it and then because then in the rewrite I know exactly what's happening and then I can finish and that final draft it's not, it's not hard. Look that final act.
Speaker 1:If you were here, I would be high-fiving that. Let's high-five that In the script development programme for theatre that I teach at the Criterion in the heart of the West End. It's something I keep trying to teach, or not teach, but persuade the playwrights of that once you've got to three, three quarters of the way through your play.
Speaker 1:So that's halfway through act two yeah you think about how it's all going to play out in the final quarter, rewrite it in order to prepare for that final quarter you've just decided on, and only then, with all the momentum of all those purposeful and clever changes, should you write on and finish it. At least that's what I think.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I agree. But if you told me that when I first started writing, I would have been like no, no, absolutely not. I need to write the whole thing from beginning to end. I can't just stop further away, further away to go. But I think it works better because I know exactly what's happening now.
Speaker 1:Agreed for the way to go, but I think it works better because I know exactly what's happening there. Agreed and in in playwriting. I've written several plays in in collaboration and a good handful of musicals in collaboration with my composer partner, who's also obviously he couldn't be a composer of musical theatre without being a gifted writer as well yeah and so um, when you're writing with people and you're sending drafts back and forth and collaborating, you can't get to the end on your own.
Speaker 1:You can't just like stride off into the future it's done now you do have to keep reviewing things and and agree at certain benchmarks and and then finish it.
Speaker 2:So that's it right before I ask you about the books, right, yes, what came, who came to? Well, who say who came to you first? Did your characters come to you first, like Maisie Cooper and Alexandra Lamarck, or was it the story so that first, so that first book?
Speaker 1:yeah, so in the in the thrillers, um the Alex Lamarck came to me because when I used to work as an interpreter so this was in international institutions in paris I met people, uh, like him, I met people who were clearly spies. I've done I've done a few events recently with um ava. So my good friend and colleague, christy Doherty, who writes as Ava Glass in the Emma Makepeace novels, which are like really thrilling, breathless spy adventures, and she talks about the fact of her experience of working within the Secret Service, not as a spy, but working within the Secret Service in London and meeting people of exactly the type you want at the centre of your spy novel. So Alex came first in the thrillers and the scene in which I saw him it actually happens about two thirds of the way through the book and it's the point at which he's just begun to piece together these disparate elements that will eventually lead him to the terrible act of terror that he must prevent from happening at the end. So he's there's lots of compelling and interesting things happening everywhere. He's discovered that he's been betrayed by so-and-so, that that job he did, that he thought was the right thing to do, was actually a criminal act. And he's just got to the point where he's putting together all of that and it's beginning to come clear, and he knows that from this point on he'll have to work in secret. See, that was a great sort of dramatic moment to visualise in an individual scene. Ok, so I saw him in that scene, but obviously I've got to write two thirds of the book before I get to that scene, otherwise it's meaningless, right?
Speaker 1:On the other hand, with the cosy crime novels, I said to Luigi I mean, this sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? Ok, well, I'm thinking of setting it in 1972, when I was 11, southwest Sussex, and that seems like a very cosy background to me. Who do you think the hero should be? And he said oh, you know, our friend Yvette, somebody like that. And I said, fair enough.
Speaker 1:And so I constructed, out of our sense of our friend Yvette, a character who could be 34 years old in 1972, a woman. And because I wanted her to be enterprising, I gave her an older brother, who's now dissipated and disappointing, but who had gone into the army from school and she, hero worshipping, had done the same. So she'd gone into the army from school and she, hero worshipping, had gone, done the same, so she'd gone into the women's um army reserve corps and because of that she has, you know, she's athletically capable, right. Yeah, she's enterprising, she's brave um, she can uncouple a wagon from a tractor, you know, because she did that with artillery and guns and so on in the army. It's like all all of that makes uh really interesting.
Speaker 1:And then I then I had this idea that her now sadly dissipated elder brother could have competed in the pentathlon at the melbourne olympics and this really worked in the timeline. And of course that meant that Maisie could have those same skills she could ride a horse, she could use a sword, she could shoot a gun, she could swim in open water and she could run half a mile. Right, that, even though it just came from Luigi saying someone like Yvette, as soon as you start making the web of intricacies that are the plot and things become fixed and fruitful and they generate more ideas. So that was how she emerged.
Speaker 2:I love the idea of like well you know our friend Yvette. I love the idea of like well you know our friend Yvette's face of character, because I'm always asked, um like, are my characters based on anyone I know? And I always say no, because they're not. They're not just one person. I feel like they're made up of lots of different people, especially like my villains. They're probably they're made up of something that someone has said or I don't know, an expression that I've seen from one of my, from one of my clients. Yeah, little personality traits and their amalgamation of so many different things and then they form this, this character.
Speaker 1:Yes, plus the each word that you attribute to them in description or dialogue fleshes them out further, yeah, and takes them away from that fragment of inspiration and they become real and three-dimensional, but out of your unique creative imagination yeah, that's what you always want.
Speaker 2:You want them to come across as being fully dimensional. You don't want them to be flat at all, and I think that's always the thing when you're writing. Whether you're writing procedurals or cosy crime. I think people have an idea of how a character is supposed to be, and if you just stick with that, they then become flat characters.
Speaker 1:I was very fortunate that I went with Kate. We were invited to the Goal Literary Festival in.
Speaker 1:Sri Lanka, which was just brilliant. I saw your picture was oh amazing, yeah Amazing. I mean it's the. I've been to a few places in the in the tropics and it was weirdly. It was like super hot, it was quite humid, but it didn't feel oppressive Like it's felt oppressive in other tropical locations like Cairns in Australia or in the Middle East. Anyway, it was a wonderful trip and absolutely delighted. I did this panel on dystopian fiction and for the first time ever I read to the audience from the beginning of the Coming Fire that comes out in.
Speaker 1:July, yeah, and the Coming Fire starts with a little prologue, which is the very first glimpse of the ultimate baddie in the trilogy of novels. So in video game terms, he's the big boss, the one that you confront at the very end. And it's quite unsettling when after that, people come up to you and they say, after that, people come up to you and they say that that character, he's very compelling or he's very interesting or I'd like to know more about him, and I'm thinking, no, he's the baddie man, he's terrible this is how I'm going to ask you about the coming fire, but this is how I fought with Olivier in the jigsaw man.
Speaker 2:I'm like he's the serial killer. He's the worst, he's like, out of the two of them between him and the copycat. He's the worst of the worst. He's not a nice person. Even I know, even though I made him. He's charismatic. He's got all these amazing, he's got these qualities which obviously appeal to people, appeal to readers, because I get so many messages. When is he coming back? When?
Speaker 1:is he?
Speaker 2:coming back, I really like oliv and I'm like you're not meant to like. This is not a man you invite into your house.
Speaker 1:No, no, it's true, it is absolutely true, and isn't it? Wasn't it in John Milton's Paradise Lost that it was said for the first time that the devil's the most interesting character, satan is more interesting than God and Christ, and so on?
Speaker 2:So what can you do? What can you do? Well, you can do great. Keep writing, I'm sure you can. You can keep writing. So, greg, do you want to tell the listeners about of the conversation? I can't speak. Would you like to tell the listeners of the conversation about the coming fire? And then I'll ask you about um maisie cooper's book seven.
Speaker 1:yeah, okay so the coming fire is the conclusion to the trilogy that began with the coming darkness. At the end of the coming darkness, alex obviously because it's a thriller with a hero he undoes the worst of the terrorists' objectives. In the Coming Storm, the second novel, he endures horrible loss because the team of people around him is decimated by a storm of further attacks. In the Coming Fire, he has finally tracked down the big baddie, the big boss, who he must ultimately defeat if he's going to stop the worst things occurring. Unfortunately, it seems that he's too late. So that's the trilogy of thrillers, right?
Speaker 1:The sixth maisie Cooper novel comes out in, uh, may and it closes, as I was saying earlier, the sort of the two big subplots that evolve over six books. And I've been commissioned by Hodder to write two books in a new series, but in the same world. And so what we've done? What we've done is there's a character who's 16 years old, zoe, in the maizey cooper books, and she is the hero, 40 years later, of the french bookshop murder, which takes place, therefore, more or less in the present day. And maizey is now quite elderly, and well, not super elderly, but she's 74 or so years old, and she's in the background and Zoe is the protagonist in this new series of contemporary novels, but very much in the same style of a classical puzzle cozy whodunit.
Speaker 2:This is just because of the comic book nerd in me. Automatically that brings me to Batman Beyond, where Bruce in Batman Beyond it's in the future and there's a new Batman, terry, who's this young kid, I think he must be like 17, but the original Batman, bruce Wayne, is now like in his 70s, but he's just in the background now. I love it, yeah, brilliant it's like it's.
Speaker 1:It's like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where everything can be linked, but they can. But they can be standalone stories, but in the broader universe they're linked. And I've done that a lot in my plays. Um, I have, um, I have, uh, plays that have so-and-so in this play is actually the uncle of so-and-so in that play, but I like that. It's great, it's so satisfying.
Speaker 1:I mean I love it In Murder at the Wedding. The sixth, maisie Cooper. I love the fact that we are closing a six book arc on in two of the subplots as well as resolving you know a single identify the murderer, uh, suspenseful chase in the one book what?
Speaker 2:what's? What's next for you, though, in terms of thrillers?
Speaker 1:so, after you've completed the alex lamarck series or the trilogy, well, obviously, if the publisher, moonflower books, which is a brilliant indie publisher, asked me to write another one, you, I know exactly what that would be, um, but you know that that depends on how well the, the third one in the trilogy, goes. Yeah, I've also. I've also got another um novel that I've plotted um in. I don't know, I don't know if this is useful, but I've plotted it in my head and I can see several scenes from it and I know the overall shape of it. But I can't talk about that because I've not sold it to anybody yet. So it's uh, it's like a back burner project. I hope that the two new Zoe Pascal novels I'm just editing the French bookshop murder and I'm simultaneously which sounds a bit mad, doesn't it I'm simultaneously writing the second one, which is the French chateau murder, and I hope that we have I hope that Hodder want more of those. So you know, I'm keeping all the balls juggling in the air at the moment.
Speaker 2:I have a question Before I go on to your last set of questions how? Because you know you do all of these things and you've got the. You know you've got the workshops and you talk about being in Dubai. All of these things and you've got the. You know you've got the workshops and you talk about being in Dubai. How important is it, for this is like I pose advice for writers, especially new writers. How important is it for them to have a community of some sort?
Speaker 1:well, I'm obviously super lucky that I have Kate Moss, who is. You may have heard me say before the wave that I surf.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So you know that's super helpful. Yeah, then, because I am. Every fortnight I have a workshop at the Criterion, where I'm in the company of mid-career playwrights of diverse backgrounds and ages and we're all working together like a tv writer's room to develop each person's new play. So that's incredibly satisfying and keeps me practicing the knack of invention, which is so important for being a writer. You know and you must be the same you're never scared of the blank page, are you? The blank page is an opportunity for new things to happen.
Speaker 2:right, it's like having a new notebook. It's like I get to fill it and there's so much freedom there. Exactly.
Speaker 1:So I have, obviously.
Speaker 1:So I've got my wife, who's trapped in my house she can't get away from me and I have this regular thing.
Speaker 1:If I didn't have those things, I would seek out writers groups yeah, more than one in order to have a broad set of things to be talking about at least once a week, so that, like I say, I'm I'm constantly thinking about invention and connection, new things to happen that are meaningful because of the other things we made up last week.
Speaker 1:You know that process and being as involved in that process as possible. But the other side of it, of course, is that I need to be completely on my own between 6.30 and 10 o'clock each day. I'm just pointing into the corner of my study in that chair over there with my laptop on my lap on one of those terrible trays with a beanbag on the back of it, so it sits on my knees, and literally I need to be there six days out of seven every week, from 6.30 until 10 o'clock, in order to get all these things done. Yeah, and when that doesn't happen like I've recently been away to two festivals I become itchy and frustrated because the routine is failing and I need to get back to it.
Speaker 2:I only realised this about myself maybe in the last couple of years. I'm not someone who likes my routine being disrupted because if it's not. Yeah, and I thought I'll be, you know. You know, be spontaneous, go with the flow, but I'm like no, I do actually like structure and I like knowing what I'm doing and when it's interrupted by something and it throws me out and it takes me a while to get back into, yeah, so I know you'll be able to imagine this in the french bookshop murder.
Speaker 1:One of the editorial notes I've got is a really good editorial note which is uh, the there's people in the village begin to suspect that zoe is behind that murder. That happens page 60 or whatever it is. And uh, the editor has asked me to go through, as I go through the whole manuscript to try and make it clearer when people are giving her sideways looks and not answering with a smile and all of that. Yeah, now you can't do that. Like, I've got half an hour, I'll do a bit of that. No, you need these long stretches. Wait, because otherwise you're going to make it like really clunky and on the nose and too noisy, or you'll do it and it won't be visible enough. You know you need to be making clever, subtle judgments page after page. Yeah, so you need those long stretches you do right.
Speaker 2:So, greg, first question are you an introvert or extrovert, or hybrid of the two?
Speaker 1:so just for this occasion talking to you, I have agreed to be an extrovert, but I'm not normally.
Speaker 2:You're not normally. What are you normally? Extrovert, obviously OK. So what challenge? How about?
Speaker 1:extrovert in small, manageable doses.
Speaker 2:OK, yeah, you can do that. What challenge or experience and I always have to say this now it could be a good one, it's not to be a end of the world one but what challenge or experience in your life shaped you the most?
Speaker 1:well, it was two things that we've talked about. It was firstly the fact of moving from uh, as we say in french, you know, felted, soft, easy southeast, south Sussex, even coming from poverty, to like that much more vivid bit, dog eat dog, you know, racism, poverty of South East London, yeah, so that homophobia as well, let's not forget. And then the second one was when I got fed up with French theatre in London and not being able to live on it, and on the spur of the moment I went to Victoria Coach Station and got on the bus to Paris and started a new life.
Speaker 2:Night bus to Paris.
Speaker 1:Arrived in Place Stalingrad in North East Paris 7 o'clock in the morning, bought a cup of coffee. Thought I live here now and I was still there, like 4 years later isn't it?
Speaker 2:yeah, it's a bit going into politics now, isn't it amazing? There was a time when we could do that. Like my, one of my friend, one of my best friends. She just picked up and moved to Barcelona and she was there for three to four years you're thinking about Brexit yeah okay, so this is the thing I am old enough are you pre-brexit?
Speaker 1:I'm pre-european union, yeah, pre-eu, yeah. So when I, when I arrived once I'd been there for a little while in order to have a proper job, I had to go to the police station and get a carte de séjour and uh, and you and buy a timbre fiscal which is like a postal order which seemed to me incredibly expensive because it was like £7.50.
Speaker 1:It was very expensive for the money that I had and in order to have the right to work. So there wasn't. So this was. I mean, you're right today, Everything you're saying today. It's a shame that people cannot do that, especially young people. But yes, it was far enough ago that it was before freedom of movement.
Speaker 2:The whole Brexit thing. How did it affect plays? Did it affect it in any way?
Speaker 1:Yeah, the big thing in theatre is being able to invite foreign nationals to come and work in the UK. Like it's a whole rigmarole and it completely changes the deal of the cards and makes it much harder.
Speaker 2:How annoying.
Speaker 1:It's really big in opera. I have friends who are big fans of opera, who sponsor, who have sponsored young performers in particular from South Africa, and that's become so much harder that a couple of them now live in Switzerland rather than London and therefore don't perform in the UK because it was so difficult. That's just mad, isn't?
Speaker 2:it. It is, yeah, it's mad and frustrating, and so many different, so many things, okay. So, greg, if you could go back to when you were 25 years old and give yourself one piece of advice, what would it be?
Speaker 1:well, it would be the advice that I used to give myself all the time, which was it'll probably be all right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, whatever I did, like decisions I made, it'll probably be all right.
Speaker 1:I'll give you an example I had.
Speaker 1:So this is like sort of three and a half years into living in Paris, I decided to start learning Arabic and I wanted to, so to extend what I could do as an interpreter, even if it was quite a low level, and I was planning to move to Morocco what I could do as an interpreter, even if it was quite a low level, and I was planning to move to Morocco I wasn't sure exactly where, but probably Casablanca and where there's also French, obviously. So I thought I could be useful, see the world, get a new job, learn new things, et cetera. And the only thing of real importance in my life then occurred I had to come back to the UK in order to for my mother's birthday. It was quite a yeah, and I got off the train, the plane at Gatwick, and I got onto a train and I sat opposite Kate Moss, who I had been who had been my girlfriend very happily for me, when I was at school, and then we'd gone to university in different, separate ways and I'd gone abroad.
Speaker 1:but there she was again and nothing else of importance have I ever done except sit on that seat on that train on that day.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 1:And you see, I so that meant that I abandoned that whole North African adventure in Arabic language and but because it really genuinely was my approach, which was it will probably be all right, it wasn't. I didn't feel like I was sacrificing anything. I was doing the next thing. That was the right thing to do. So that's the advice that is great.
Speaker 2:My advice has always been to see what happens.
Speaker 1:Sometimes I end up in lots of situations I'm like, hmm, that is great. My advice has always been to see what happens. Yeah, there you go. What's the word? Just?
Speaker 2:see what happens. See what happens, yeah, which is why sometimes I end up in lots of situations I'm like, hmm, maybe I shouldn't have said that, but normally, no, it's too late then it's far too late. Before I go into your very last question, it's my little extra one. Now what piece of advice would you? What is your? No, what is your non-writing advice to writers?
Speaker 1:oh, non-writing advice. Well, you, you won't be surprised to hear that it's um, even though people can be very annoying, do try your best to be nice to people. Yeah right, just try your best to be nice to people. I mean, you know, I meet people who support Trump and it's tough, it's not easy, to be nice to them, given the consequences of the thing that they're supporting. But the reason that they support Trump, the reasons are like huge and complicated and they're out of background and the experience and so on, and they're wrong. But you know, do try and be nice to them and maybe there will be a middle ground found.
Speaker 2:I my nice advice. Always what I tell the baby lawyers, I'm like be nice to everyone, be nice. You're not above anyone just because you're a lawyer, so just be nice to everyone, ok, so finally, yes, no, this is even wrong. I don't know what I've got written down. Finally, uh-oh, finally, let's get back on track. Finally, where can listeners of the conversation find you online?
Speaker 1:Oh well, I have a website which is gregmosscom. Um, like almost everything in my life is just my name, um. That said, um, I'm I. I don't run a brilliant podcast like you do or do anything like that. I love meeting authors at festivals, so I do quite a few of those. Um, but you know I I'm. Probably the best version of of me is the one in the books.
Speaker 2:So read the books, read the books oh, can I ask you another question before we go? Yeah, do you know? Obviously, when you're writing plays and being in a theatre, I feel like it's all about the reviews. You know what those first reviews are going to be. Do you read your book reviews?
Speaker 1:Do you have that same like I need to read, I need to know what the reviews are? No, I absolutely never do, and if ever I come across them, I move on as quickly as possible, because you'll never be happy, will you? You can read a good review. You'll only remember the one quibble Right, and you know that thing we were saying just now. So I sent the fourth version of my new novel to the editor, who has some ideas, so I change it again.
Speaker 1:Fifth draft yeah, and then she has some more ideas, so like more detailed ones. So I change it again. Sixth draft. Then it goes to the copy editor who points out some stupid things that I've said and I fix those seventh draft right and then somebody reads it on the bus on the way home from work and posts a review. Come on, I know what the book is worth, right, I don't.
Speaker 2:I remember getting I get really sarky, not on, not online, but someone messaged, they emailed me or sent a dm about you know, basically reviewing the book and something was. I mean, they didn't agree with what they thought was wrong and my response thought in my head was what, what can? What do you want me to do about it? Like there is nothing I can do about it? And even if there was something I could do about it, I wouldn't change it anyway.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, I actually had the experience with a play that I wrote, uh with a co-writer, uh at at the hundred year commemoration of the end of the First World War, the Armistice.
Speaker 1:So it was a play set in the trenches in 1918. And somebody wrote to me. So there was this bit where one of the characters, their glasses are broken and somebody else goes out, sees this corpse in no man's land and goes out to get the reading glasses off the corpse and bring them back. And somebody wrote to me to say that that would never happen and so I sent them the documentary evidence, the story that I had stole it from did they reply?
Speaker 2:no, of course not.
Speaker 1:I'm still right but you know, dude, I stole this story from real life and you're telling me it would never have happened. Come on.
Speaker 2:I don't know, I'm going to let you go, but my equivalent of that is obviously the first book is set. It starts by the river and you know River Thames and some woman. I woke up on a Sunday morning and she emailed me. So you know it's an email, like it was a Amazon review and she goes I really enjoyed the jigsaw man but, um, you know what you said about rivers is incorrect. I'm not what she's talking about.
Speaker 2:She goes you know rivers don't have tides, I know. So obviously I said you know it's low tide and Henley and Ramuta they're walking along the riverbank, which you can do. You can literally say almost you can always walk from debtford to greenwich along along the riverbank, yeah, at low tide. And I'm like what is she banging? And I thought no, because I'm like I live by the river, I grew up by the river, it's the thames, it has tides. And I emailed her back. I thank you so much, glad you enjoyed it. Um, but it. But the River Thames is a tidal river, it has low tides and it has high tides. So you know, thank you, but you're wrong. She didn't come back to me, she didn't say, oh, I made a mistake because she was in America. So I don't know if she was thinking. I don't know if the Mississippi River is not a tidal river.
Speaker 1:I don't know if the Mississippi River is not a tidal river, I don't think.
Speaker 2:Well, it is by the time you get down to New Orleans, isn't it?
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, it's not it isn't, as it comes down through Missouri it won't, and Mississippi it won't be.
Speaker 2:But you know, maybe she was in Missouri, anyway, but she didn't come back to me. Greg Did not come back to me. Oh well, I'll get over it one day you'll pull through, I'll pull through, we'll both pull through. Well, greg, that just leaves me to say, greg Moss, thank you very much for being part of the conversation it's completely been my pleasure thank you so much for listening to today's conversation with Nadine Matheson.
Speaker 2:I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. Be sure to tune in every Tuesday for a brand new episode featuring more amazing guests. Don't forget to like, subscribe and leave a review. It really helps the podcast grow and if you'd like to support the show, you can buy me a cup of coffee or sign up on Patreon. The links are in the show notes and if you'd love to join the conversation as a guest, feel free to send an email to thecon at NadineMappersoncom. Thanks again for your support and I'll catch you next time.
