Dear United States Of America,
My first novel, The Thursday Murder Club will be with you very soon. I hope you’ll love it, I really think you might, especially if you love a classic mystery tale. I have to let you know, however, that it is very British. British countryside, British quirks, obscure British references you will have to Google. Cookies are biscuits, fries are chips and, let’s face it, homicide is murder. I’m just thankful we both have the same word for ‘Thursday’.
There are red post boxes, there are black London taxis, there are pubs, and there are plenty of cups of tea. That is honestly how things are over here, we’re not making this stuff up. Rest assured there are also plenty of murders, and there is plenty of British humor. If you can handle Agatha Christie then you can handle The Thursday Murder Club.
But why does Britain provide such a satisfying backdrop to a murder mystery? I think it’s because pretty much everyone in Britain is a potential murderer. All of us. The vicar? Murderer. The elementary school teacher? Murderer. The old lady collecting for charity in the park? Serial killer.
Brits are all so unfailingly calm and quiet that you literally suspect no-one. Which means, of course, that you end up suspecting everyone.
In Britain everyone is incredibly polite, right up to the moment they murder you. That’s how we operate. If you bump into me in a supermarket, I will apologise, and tell you it was entirely my fault for standing where I was, minding my own business, looking at pasta sauces. If you serve me bad food in a restaurant, I will smile and say ‘thank you, this is delicious, you must give me the recipe.’ But we don’t mean these things, we just never want to make a scene. But we do want revenge. Revenge on pretty much everyone, at pretty much all times.
In fact, we keep our emotions under such a tight rein you will never know if a Brit is an insanely jealous homicidal maniac, until it’s too late. In a British crime book, when a character says ‘Good morning, isn’t your garden looking lovely?’ they either mean ‘Good morning, isn’t your garden looking lovely?’ or ‘I know you are having an affair with my wife, and this evening I am going to kill you with a pick-axe in a churchyard.’ There is no middle ground.
This means that, in a British crime novel, the more polite a person is, the more suspicious you should be of them. Which makes them a lot of fun to write, and a lot of fun to read. The moment a character says ‘would you like a slice of cake, dear?’ you immediately think ‘ahh, I bet you murdered the Mayor in the drawing room.’
There is an awful lot of politeness in The Thursday Murder Club, everyone seems so nice. And yet people keep dying. So someone’s fooling you. But will you be able to work out who, and why? I promise you will have fun trying.
What else makes all Brits capable of murder? Well, Britain has been around for so long, we all have family secrets which are hundreds of years old. British families can harbor grudges which are older than New York City. Who needs infidelity or blackmail as a motive, if your Great, Great, Great Grandfather once stole a cow from my Great, Great, Great Grandmother? We’ve all upset someone at some point in the last 400 years, and therefore everyone in Britain has a motive for killing everyone else in Britain.
Also, no-one in Britain has access to guns, and so we’re all very good at thinking of inventive ways to kill people. Killing someone with a candlestick or a wifi router is child’s play to the average British person. It is very easy to walk into a crowded bar and shoot your victim, but it takes a very British imagination to lure your victim into a secluded belfry at midnight and kill them with a poisoned dart you stole from the British Museum.
All of this makes us much harder to catch. If you murder someone politely and inventively, and with a motive dating back to the sixteenth century, it is very difficult to work out that you did it. Especially when the police tend to be very polite too. ‘I’m terribly sorry, it seems I am going to have to arrest you for murder. I will let you watch the rest of this cricket match first though.’
Britain just doesn’t seem like the sort of place you are going to be murdered. You don’t expect to be murdered outside a timber-beamed manor house in a village called Nether Wallop, or Steeple Bumstead or in a seaside ice-cream parlor in West Wittering. All of these are real place names by the way, we don’t even have to make these things up. ‘The Thursday Murder Club’ is set in a beautiful retirement village in Kent, a county known as ‘The Garden Of England’. The orchards are heavy with fruit, the hedgerows glint with morning dew, and the peace is broken only by birdsong. But this is Britain, so murder is in the air. Would you expect anything less?
The Thursday Murder Club is very British, but don’t mistake that for being cozy. Britain just looks and sounds cozy. The quaint country lanes, and the sleepy market towns. The quiet people, just going about their daily business. What could possibly go wrong? What could we possibly be hiding? You’ve read enough Agatha Christie to know that appearances are always deceptive. You’ve read enough PD James and Ruth Rendell to know you must never, ever, ever trust us.
I mean, I genuinely think you’ll love The Thursday Murder Club, but can you trust me? I’m British. Who knows what I’m planning?
This is why Britain so perfectly suits a classic mystery tale. We never say what we mean, and you’ll never know what we’re thinking. And by the time you work it out, someone is murdering you with a bow and arrow at an antique fair. That’s just how we are I’m afraid.
But I do know that Americans love the Brits, just as we love the Americans. I know that you love Dorothy L. Sayers and Kate Atkinson, the way we love Harlan Coben and Shari Lapena. We love each other’s culture and idiom and personality, and we love each other’s murders.
I sincerely hope you enjoy The Thursday Murder Club, and I can’t wait to come out and meet as many of you as possible, as soon as possible. And, as an honest Brit, you can trust me on that.
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