Maureen Johnson Is Particular About Clues Transcript

Caroline: I hear a lot these days about writers who are bringing aspects of golden age detective fiction into contemporary crime fiction. It's an occupational hazard of making this show during a moment when the interwar puzzle style of mystery is the height of literary fashion once again: my inbox is bulging with notifications and press releases about new books that are following in the footsteps of Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr, Dorothy L. Sayers and the rest.

As you will know from being a reader today, though, not all of these attempts to join or improve upon what has gone before are made equal. Not everybody jumping on this trend has the deep understanding and grounding in the original material to make it work. One writer who definitely does, though, is Maureen Johnson — author of the hugely popular Stevie Bell mystery series, as well as other standalone works. She's been a guest on Shedunnit before, to talk about the challenges of writing crime fiction for younger readers, and I thought she would be the perfect person to help me understand what it takes to innovate in the classic crime space in 2026. Turns out, she's been pretty busy since last spoke...

So Maureen Johnson, welcome back to Shedunnit. It's been five years. It's lovely to have you again. 

Maureen: How has it been? Five years? It's unbelievable. I don't feel that I've been gone because you're always in my ears. 

Caroline: It's nice to know that we're in touch. So in that time you have published a load of very interesting things, so we're going to have a little bit of a tour for people.

Maureen: Okay. 

Caroline: Let's talk about Your Guide to Not to Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village, because I think that's probably the earliest one. As the title suggests, people who like Shedunnit, I think will very much feel like this is a book for them, would you say? 

Maureen: Oh, yes. It was based on, I can't even remember which book.

It may have been The Hand On the Wall, which is one of my Stevie Bell mysteries. I was asked to write an article for CrimeReads, and so I wrote a list, which I called "How Not to Get Murdered in A Quaint English Village", which are basically all of the tropes that I have absorbed from a lifetime of watching every single English murder mystery procedural, only reading Agatha Christie and Associated books as child, but also the fact that my husband, who is English, comes from the New Forest, a small village in the New Forest called Minstead. And whenever I went there, it truly was, you know, everybody was angry at the vicar because somebody ordered gravel for in front of the walkway that was five millimetres instead of 10 millimetres.

There was this big fight about where the Village Pond used to be. So I just put them into a list, which someone then said, an editor said, please make this into a book. And I thought, oh boy. Okay. So I did something that turned out to be the best move I've made, which is I enlisted my friend Jay Cooper, who is an illustrator and author.

Also we went to college together and he was also like, well, my last college boyfriend and we moved to New York together and we have always been in touch, stay in touch. And I said, you want to illustrate this? And Jay is very, very, very funny. And together we created a thing that is both illustrations and a guide to when you do go to the English village, which you shouldn't, how to avoid the fact that everybody in the village will try to murder you.

Caroline: You immediately made me think of near where I live, there's been a big controversy about a post office being painted the wrong colour red and sufficient local uprising that the post office has had to repaint a slightly darker shade of red, which feels very murderous to me. 

Maureen: This book kept evolving, so we created this book.

Then, from out of just this one, we were asked to make a game. So we're making a game of it now, which is a, we played it last night. We did a final test around. It is a very chaotic murder mystery game that will be out probably not for another year, but also, because my mother-in-law, they've since moved.

They, she used to write the music and was one of the people in charge of the local pantomime for the children, which was weirdly in March and not in December. As an American, I also had never seen a pantomime, but I was asked to write it. So I wrote a pantomime called Minstead Murders: Mud and Boots, which was about a true crime podcaster coming to people that, that people kept coming to the village and disappearing.

And there were two little policemen that came in and sang. There was a, I was very proud of a. A murder, a song I wrote called Allegedly, which is about, because all the alleged murders of, you know, the arrow in the eye and the, all of these things. And also there's a tiny Richard Osmond in it.

So because Richard Osmond comes in, gets kidnapped, and so there's a big musical number in which a very small child and a big suit and a Richard Osmond face mask is, wrapped up in a sack and is bouncing around the stage. I spent a surprising amount of time writing this pento mind for these children.

Caroline: It sounds excellent. Is that your first crime on stage experience? 

Maureen: I've committed other crimes on stage, but that's the first one I've written. I spent so much time writing these- I was sort of singing, just, you could have film of just the writer and ear, like write these pantomime for these kids, and had to watch hours and hours of pantomimes on YouTube because I didn't know.

I haven't, I studied dramaturgy, but I'd never studied pantomime, so I had to understand what the concepts were. I was like, okay, there's a person in a green wig and there's always someone behind you. Okay, we can work with this. And then from there also then we did, I've started the first of two dossier murders, so I guess that's the next step, which is this one's called The Creeping Hand Murder, which is a dossier solve-it-yourself case in the vein of Dennis Wheatley.

Caroline: This exciting to me because I feel like we've had such a resurgence in the last five years or so. You mentioned Richard Osmond of people paying attention to more golden age like tropes. 

Maureen: Yes. 

Caroline: But this feels missing to me that the kind of actual play it alone. Play it yourself aspect of it. So yeah, I'm thrilled that you're doing it and the book looks gorgeous.

Maureen: Wait, so this is the in the US version. So it's just a case. It's like you've been given a case file, so you get all of the pictures, the documents, the interviews, then you have to solve the case, and there's a sealed envelope in the back in the UK version. I think it's behind a divider. Yes, it's behind a divider Also, it doesn't have puzzles in it. It's not like a "they left this" puzzle. It's strictly clue. I'm very particular about this. I see a big difference between the " I'm a serial killer, solve my puzzle", which is a different thing than actual just a case file, which this is. This is very classic.

Caroline: Yeah, so we're talking maps, transcripts, that kind of thing. Raw materials, basically for the detective to work on. 

Maureen: Raw material. 

Caroline: Yeah. And what's it like putting something like that together when you've previously worked in prose narrative, when you've been making your mysteries? 

Maureen: Wonderful, because I build a structure.

Writing interviews for me is very easy. That comes very naturally. They're very fun to write. And other materials. There's a New Yorker, a Fake New Yorker article in here. There are advertisements. But also if I needed anything, Jay had to do all the work. So, and he is the hardest worker. I've- he doesn't sleep, so when I say I need, you know, ransom notes, so he sourced something like a hundred old newspapers and he's very precious about preserving things.

These were, he got old advertisements, magazines, newspapers scanned, and then hand drew. So all of these are like legitimate letter forms. If he drew an object, he would go and buy the object. So if there's a lighter, he got the lighter and drew it. Jay is a maniac. But I did have to study all of these pictures over and over to make sure there weren't additional information that would cause a mislead. So I had to look. And he had lit candles, I was like, well, you have to take those out. You have to do it like you have to remove those because that wouldn't happen. I like the fact that you did funny wallpaper behind all the suspects, but you have to change it and make it completely consistent because they wouldn't all be behind funny wallpaper with skulls on it, like you have to get rid of it.

So we had to do a lot of back and forth. I had to remove a lot of his jokes, even though they were funny because I said, no, this is evidence we have to. Even though you're drawing things that are stylized and funny, these are real. They have to be read as real photographs. 

Caroline: That's fascinating. So, yeah, the way that in a, just an illustration, you might build out the world with interesting details.

It actually might distract, or as you say, confuse the story you're trying to tell in secret. 

Maureen: Or he would draw something and I would say that's a good idea. And then I would loop back around. And add something in. And so it was very, very fun. We used a big online whiteboard. We used Miro and I would fill it with units of, here's my story graph, and then little post-its of this image.

And then he would post images in and I would examine them and leave notes all over the image. And these little post-its like, okay, this is what I need. You know, a graph of reference images. You can build a whiteboard of infinite size. You can add little, little, tiny post-its all over and then shrink or expand the board, and then all, you know, I'd wake up in the morning and there would be things as opposed to when you write the book and you wake up in the morning and if you haven't worked, there's nothing.

It's just, there's just the fact that you haven't written that chapter yet. 

Caroline: It was just whatever you stopped doing last night. Yeah. Yep. And you mentioned that you've been dabbling in games as well. How's that been, transferring your skills over to that medium? 

Maureen: Well, I live with a game designer, but for video games he is constantly thinking about game theory.

And we were asked to make a game of this book and we said, okay, so we were making it, it's a very chaotic game, there's one tourist and then everyone else is a villager and everyone's villager's job is to kill the tourist. The tourist job is to survive, but there's very chaotic elements like Lord Tootsworthy's puma jumps into the room and therefore everybody changes locations and you can't get killed with the cricket bat because you're wearing a giant hat and that deflects it, or- it's very silly.

But again, you split the details to make sure it actually works. 

Caroline: That's the best possible combination. Honestly, I think sometimes when people think about crime in relation- I, you know, I've, I've played a fair number of games that people send me that are based on Poirot or whatever. 

Maureen: They're not good.

Caroline: They're not always good, and the best ones are the ones that don't take themselves too seriously. I think sometimes creators like hear murder and think seriousness, when actually as people who are steeped in the genre know that those two things don't have to go together. 

Maureen: They really don't. I draw a very firm and bright line between murder mystery fiction and true crime. I'm very conscious that we're putting on a play, that we're living in a different space when we're writing murder mysteries. At least I am, I'm not writing hardcore procedural, I'm writing detective fiction. 

Caroline: Mm. Not losing sight of the fact that it's for entertainment, I think, is important.

Maureen: Yeah. I mean, all of these books, so to get back to the series, which the, I've written a series of detective. Stories, the Stevie Bell Mysteries, which are Truly Devious, The Vanishing Stair, The Hand on the Wall, The Box in the Woods, which is I think where I was last, Nine Liars, which takes place in England, in Cambridge, and also, not actually in Cambridge, in Cheltham and in London.

And then this one, which is The Velvet Knife, which is number six out of seven. In the interim, I wrote a standalone called Death at Morning House, which takes place in the United States between Canada and the United States in the Thousand Islands. 

Caroline: That, by the way, is my favourite of your books.

Yeah. I mean, I very much enjoy Stevie Bell, but I don't know. There's just something about that one that I really loved. 

Maureen: I wanted to write a standalone, and I put history though kind of- there's a backbone of Amer of history, a world or American history, and all of this about. Basically crimes that haven't been sort of addressed.

Like how does death at Morning House happen? And it's a keeper. It's a standalone murder mystery on an island with a big house. How did the big house get there? Well, it's a story of rampant kind of abuses of power and the American eugenics movement.

Caroline: I mean, I think that's part, partly why it appealed so much to me.

Because eugenics is a topic that really interests me in its relationship to detective fiction and culture at the time that I study. So yeah, it ticked all the boxes of me that way. But yeah, also on a different level, I enjoy a big house mystery on an island who doesn't, 

Maureen: I hadn't been to the Thousand Islands before and it's truly extraordinary.

It is. It's on the St. Lawrence River, which is enormous. Beautiful river. Parts of it look tropical when you go around, it has that kind of green, tropical water, beautiful houses, candy coloured houses, and thousands of islands. Some of them only contain one house and no space around it. So if you go two steps out the front door, you fall into the St. Lawrence River. You have a deep commitment to not wanting to see other people if you live there, but billionaires would buy bigger islands and build these enormous palaces on them. And then they would summer there and basically yacht from house to house or play poker races where they would hide cards on islands and then zip around on speedboats to find them.

But you would just go from island to island and that's how you would spend your summer and these weird, extraordinary, massive mansions, some of which have just completely fallen into ruin. 

Caroline: What that book does, which is something that comes up in Stevie Bell as well is multilayered time narrative.

So what, again, one thing I really liked about that book is that you have a strand of, you know, the people in the house, the billionaires, et cetera. And then you also have the present day strand of the young people who were working as guides to show people around the house. And yeah, I always just really enjoy that take on the sort of country house thing of the transformation from a rich people's playground to a tourist attraction. 

Maureen: And also the, here's the terrible thing that happened here years ago and actually resolving. But all of my mysteries have had a backstory. They have a backstory and a front story, and they always intertwine, of something that's happened a case that hasn't been resolved in the past.

In the case of the newest book, The Velvet Knife, it's about a cult. It's about a woman in the seventies who gets involved in a cult and some deaths that result from that, that have never been kind of resolved on the fact that she's sort of been on the run all of her life. But I thinking about this more and more, I kind of realised that in many ways, histories and mysteries are- they're cousins.

It's the mist where there's same thing where you're looking through whatever evidence you've got documentation, photographs, eyewitness accounts, and you're just trying to build a story of what happened. You build an interpretation of what happened based on the evidence, and many times in the past in history, you don't get the why, or you get somebody else's why.

But in mystery, we actually get that itch scratched. We get the why. We get the evidence in the why. Why did the history happen? Why did the murder happen? Why did this crime happen? Why did she fall off the building? Why is the child in the water? Why is the house on fire? 

Caroline: What was it that drew you particularly to a cult, and to the seventies?

Because I think I'm might saying that's not a period that you've delved into before. 

Maureen: The Box of Woods has a kind of camp murder that takes place in 1978. I come by that naturally as a kid, and certainly in the United States, you were brought up kind of thinking that eventually a cult was going to try to recruit me because there were so many of them and they were very, you know.

The Manson family, for example, a lot of people are fascinated, but I always was not in a kind of, oh, that's cool, but why? Why would these people join this little loser and live together in an old movie set and then kill a bunch of people and also believe they were going to go live in a home in the desert, you know?

But they, and commit these murders and then say, well wait, we have to go into the desert. And they lived in the middle of the desert with no shelter. They just, they lived in Death Valley and it's called Death Valley for a reason. Or Jonestown happened. Why did all of these people that join for a really good reason to raise money for charity and be equal end up in this compound in the jungle?

918 people died. So how do you get into those prisons of belief? How do we get into these high control groups? How? I've always, always, always read everything I could on this. I think it might be more of an American thing, but like, how do you get into these? Nobody joins them. That's known, but you know, whether it's an MLM that you suddenly find that you are on the hook for 5,000 spoiled pairs of tights.

That was actually, and then you're getting surgeries because you're in the cult that you have to sell these things or all of these, you know, Nexium, you get branded. Like they're actually sort of everywhere. I mean, I knew somebody that went to a theatre school that because they were associated with one of these groups, you had to go through a three day indoctrination.

Caroline: Oh, wow. 

Maureen: And it was mandatory. I wrote it into the book, but it really happened, that was, they were involved with it. And so you have to do this. You have to do this weekend. So I think there are a lot of various and types of high control groups, and especially now since we're talking about why do people do things that don't seem to make sense, or why do countries move in directions that don't seem to make sense?

Or large groups of people, how do those thought processes happen? 

Caroline: You are absolutely right. No, no one comes up to you in the street and says, Hey, would you like to join my cult? It's more insidious and gradual and therefore more interesting to a writer than that. 

Maureen: They're usually nice people who are lonely.

It's a lot about loneliness. Something's happened, or there was a very strange one recently that happened where at Sarah Lawrence College, where a man moved into- a grown ass man, moved into a door and said he was like a CIA operative, and then suddenly converted all these people in the dorm and they all moved with him to New York City and lived in a one bedroom apartment.

And it turned into this very, very insidious, horrific situation where they all lived in there and awful thing, but it's you. You listen, you're like, wait, what happened? And they were all living in an apartment. What? But people, when you're lonely, when you're lost, when you're stuck, people come up to you when you're vulnerable, they try to fill a hole and then suddenly it's- they're controlling what you're, what media you consume well, who's lying to you, who's telling you the truth, your sleep, your food consumption, et cetera, who you can be with, who you can be married to, et cetera. 

Caroline: You mentioned New York there, so that's another facet of The Velvet Knife, that it's Stevie in New York.

What was that like? I mean, New York to me is someone who's never lived there and only visited, feels completely layered in many, many, many decades of stories and mysteries. You know, you walk around and you feel like you see it on every street corner. What was it like to add a new one? 

Maureen: I wrote my actual neighbourhood in. I live here. I live in the East Village, and I wrote in even real places like the dog cafe I go to, that's where I got my dog at a rescue.

New York is a big character because it is a character. It's so many things to so many people, whether it's noir, whether it's some crime procedural, or Sex in the City or whatever, or 1930s movie. It has a personality that has to be wrestled with, but it's also just a home. So I kind of wrote it as the home part where you live in a building with a lot of other people who are all up in your business.

I wrote sort of veiled versions of a few of my neighbours, the ones that like to come over and tell me things, like "I stood in the, the Queen mother's bathtub and I know the royal Undertaker", and "I got these chairs at a, they're vintage chairs where you hold them for me for a day", and then they leave your chairs in your apartment for seven months.

And you know, like you see people in the elevator and you're like, oh God, you're just trying to walk around the, because you can't, you don't, there's privacy, but there is no privacy. I live in a building with hundreds of other people and that means, you know, if you want to, I live high up on a high up floor, which means I ride it down in an elevator, which means I'm constantly in interactions, sublime extreme, or just like the time I got on the elevator and a kid that was maybe 10 years old was holding a keytar and as we went down, he played the beginning of Axel F and he timed it exactly.

So when the elevator stopped, tipped down his sunglasses and got off, and that happens. 

Caroline: So what is it like trying to bring that into your fiction that, because I used to live in London in a similar kind of building, and sometimes things would happen and I would think no one would believe if I put this in a book.

Maureen: No. All of your life is lived out loud. You sort of know, you know what your neighbours do. You know the noises, you know what they're cooking. You don't know everything, but you have a sense of it. Sometimes I'm just in here, I'm writing. I prefer not to be perceived, but I can't help it.

It's, you know, and I walk a dog, so I'm always out with my dog. Just to convey that sense of, it's not a house, you're really a little bit more on view and your. Actions influence other people. If you are too loud or you leave your water running and you flood another apartment or whatever, just that's New York, but also it's walking around the village.

It is the smell of pizza. The thing I cannot convey enough is that we really do have the best pizza, and it's easily available and it's cheap and it's on every corner. And if I ever made a scented candle, it would be the smell of a New York pizza place in the winter. That smell pumping out is the most beautiful, intoxicating smell you'll ever smell.

And you just walk the streets and you're always in something. There's always a new thing, a new like the fact that our local barbershop has a litter of little Frenchy puppies that just sit in the window, all lined up, all eight of them, and everybody just sits by the window watching the Frenchy.

Like you know like this is the window with the eight Frenchy puppies, and this is the guy that always screams and here's where I get tacos. And over there as a museum, like it's a constant deluge of stuff, of people, of activity. 

Caroline: And writing about a place that you know so incredibly well, what was that experience like compared to other places like your, you know, Thousand Islands novel where you had to visit and research and imagine a lot more? I'm, I'm guessing, 

Maureen: yeah, in many ways it was harder 'cause coming into something like Thousand Islands, I was so struck by things. Here, you alm, you almost take it as red.

I'm like, well, of course there's going to be a certain number of rats. Like, you know, you're at the outdoor seating. Yes, there's a rat king under there somewhere, but don't get all uptight about it. Or yeah, you're probably going to get hit by an e-bike. I assume what those sidewalks feel like. I assume what that pulse feels like.

I assume what the air smells like. Whereas if I go to a new place, I'm very scent oriented. I'm always sniffing things. I could tell you exactly what someone's house smells like or a wind on a certain for. I was always very in love with London because at a certain time there was a smell that was very kind of steely that came through that I just always had this very fond memory of.

I'm like, that's London. That kind of, I don't know what it is, but I can feel it in my bones. But I'm used to that smell, and it's probably garbage to be honest with you, because for whatever reason, New York has a policy of leaving bags are collected by being stacked up on sidewalks. So we have walls of garbage along the sidewalk, and we're just used to, we're like, yes, that's a wall of garbage.

You're going to have a certain number of walls of garbage. 

Caroline: Right? Yeah. So you have to almost force yourself to appreciate your home, like you're visitor in order to actually register these things. 

Maureen: Yes. I live in fear that people are going to say, oh, this is like, it's Only Murders in the Building.

Which I've only, I've seen the first season, but not the others. And no, no, I, I live here. This is what it's like. And there's a bird in it. That is actually my Aunt Clara's bird. My Aunt Clara had a very tortured bird, a cockatiel named Teal, that she was always smoking on. It was very greasy and it smelled like smoke, this poor bird.

Caroline: And speaking of animals, dogs are very important in this book. Mystery fiction has a lot of famous dogs. So you've added to the genre. 

Maureen: Poirot is very respectful of dogs. I always think about the fact that Bob is a very good dog. He knew, you know, so I'm a dog person. I can, I'm looking over your shoulder at a picture of a dog, so I'm guessing you are also a dog person.

Caroline: Yep. That is actually not my dog, not Morris, the clumber spaniel. That is a picture that my husband found on eBay that looked so uncannily like our dog, even though it wasn't our dog that we had to buy it. 

Maureen: My dog is very beloved to me, and she is so much a companion. She's out with me.

You know, we walk together. We sort of see New York together in many ways. I see New York through her eyes because I have to know where she might react, where she might get a chicken bone, where it might be fun for her, might be somewhere that is not fun usually for people, but I'm like, oh, there's that spot with like, all that dirt.

You have to know that's actually going to be fun for her to go and sniff. Where I'm not going to say to somebody, come to New York. I know this spot. It's got a lot of dirt, dogs love to sniff it. But there are a lot of dogs that, it's just more of a social. I know a lot of people through their dogs. 

Caroline: Yeah, you do.

I know a lot of people around where I live and I don't know their names. I know the names of their dogs and a lot of things about their dogs, but we don't, we're not people interacting, we're people with dogs interacting. 

Maureen: Maybe I wrote because it, that is my New York experience is very through a dog's eyes.

You know, I wrote The Real Dog Cafe in, I wrote a little description of my dog, an actual neighbor's dog named Potatoes. And just like, I just want to put in some of the things I actually see. 

Caroline: Yeah, I think it does force you to, like you say, understand space differently as well. I realised a while ago when a visitor to where I live asked me where the nearest litter bin was, and I was able to reel off like five different options because of course I know where all the bins are.

Like that's, I have a kind of mental map of them in my head at all times. 

Maureen: Where I live, there are some very tall trees one time, but I was walking just along the path with my dog and out of the sky, I mean out of the sky, falls an entire slice of pizza. Just like, like it's been dropped from the heavens and it lands in front of my dog, who is like, what is happening?

And I had to sit and solve the mystery of why did pizza fall out of the sky? And it's because people just throw away when, and they get pizza sometimes they just throw it the extra in the trash. Squirrel takes a piece of pizza. Drags the pizza up the tree, all the way up the tree, goes out in the branch to enjoy the pizza, drops the pizza.

Pizza falls from the sky. So you get little mysteries like that too. But things can happen like the chicken fall outta the sky. 

Caroline: Does your dog now remember that place and want to go back there all the time in case it happens again? 

Maureen: Uh, that was our dog before this one, who was very food focused.

This dog walks over hot dogs in the sidewalk. She's not interested in sidewalk food, fortunately. 

Caroline: My dog is like your former dog where he remembers. 

Maureen: Oh yeah. Where she bought a hot dog. 

Caroline: Every single time, any tasty thing appeared and wants to revisit in case, even though it's years later, in case it's like respawned. 

Maureen: Oh yeah, there was a hot dog once.

And she's like, well, that's where hot dogs grow, so.

Caroline: Yes. Exactly. Yeah. No, I think dog lovers and dog appreciators will recognise a lot in The Velvet Knife. Your books are partly aimed at younger readers, right? I think I'm right in saying that.

Maureen: They're YA. Yeah. 

Caroline: Yeah. They're YA. 

Maureen: I don't think they, my description of YA is that that's just fiction that has a younger protagonist, a protagonist under 18 is basically all that is.

Caroline: Yeah. I've never felt like reading them that they were, I don't know, young people's fiction rather than fiction about young people. There's a difference between the two, but How has writing about young people changed in the last five years? 

Maureen: The last five years? Well, there's always shifts in trends. I actually, I think the trend is that there's less counting of trends aside from something like romantasy that YA has such a wide remit.

That you're actually going to see so much variety and so many types of stories that are told from- it's getting so much more inclusive. And frequently you'll find that in teen readers, they're actually more accepting and will read across genre in a way that adults won't. And whenever people say like, oh, it's youth that complain, I'm like, hey, listen, so you know, let's just say like in America, every train is raised to deal with school shooters. Like they go on shooting drills all the time. Many of them have lived through COVID or haven't gone to school. Ecological crises, political upheavals. The fact that the internet is like kind of, you know, roiling and destroying and access to everything and whatever.

And you're going to tell me that a kid can't handle the material and you are not understanding, you're not giving them credit. You have to give your readers credit and give them a chance. Write- not write down, always write to level because you know, as a kid I read whatever. I mean, there was no, I just read there everything. And also kids read everything.

They're reading and Oh, kids don't read. There is some of that, but the readers are readers. The reading community is growing stronger and stronger. And you see more and more events like silent readings, massive silent readings. People really- also kids saying, I take out time offline to read. I'm doing a digital detox to read.

These are the books I'm passionate about. So it's more pride in reading, almost. Reading itself, as you know, and really knowing that the damage that's being done and saying I'm giving myself space to read. 

Caroline: Sometimes when I read about this topic, I feel more worried for people in their late twenties and thirties than I do for people, say under the age of 25, who, as you say, have grown up with all of these simultaneous crises and seem to be more aware of them.

And their relation to them. 

Maureen: If you're born on a ship in a roiling sea, you're going to be aware of the sea monsters. You know, like you're going to be like, yes, they're monsters. Yes, the boat is rocking. We have learned to adapt. We have figured out ways of restoring equilibrium. 

Caroline: Yeah. Well that makes me feel encouraged that you've observed these things as someone who is writing things that these people want to read.

Maureen: Yeah. It's extraordinary when you see kids come up and they. They're hauling 12 books for you to get signed. They're obsessed. They're talking about this book, and I've read this and this and this author and this, and I didn't like this author, but I did like this author. I'm like, yeah, brilliant. This is wonderful.

Caroline: You are quite soon going to have what I think of as a pretty quintessential experience for a crime writer going down the decades, which is you're going to be writing the final instalment of a series about a mystery protagonist. 

Maureen: Yes, I am. 

Caroline: How are you feeling about this? 

Maureen: Writing the end, because I work backwards is always one of the easier lifts because I write- my procedure for writing mysteries involves something like a clockwork.

I imagine I'm building a small little spinning thing, some sort of beautiful little object. I always, always, always start with the question, why? Always because a murder is a serious, even though we're doing a play, it's a serious thing. Why did it happen? What is the motive? And it's harder if it's YA, you know, why would a teen do this?

But often it's an adult, like, why did this thing happen? And then I pull the threads out of who and how. And then I imagine that that's the centre of a spiral. And the spiral is time. So the time goes further and further out. And clues are just things that fly off the spiral. And, you know, they grow more, less frequent as time goes out.

They're richer in the middle. So if I'm, and I always build ending first, destination first. So I've had these destinations in mind. I have sort of the mother load of information, kind of, you know, it's, it's not that it's, but I have more of a sense of like, this is, this is where I've, I'm also a, um, I have over here just pulling out.

You won't be able to, but it's charting. So like physical charts, these were the seven books. 

Caroline: Wow. Right. Yeah. 

Maureen: There, this is something I developed, so I'm very good friends with Holly Black, who's an amazing author and you should read all of her books. They're not mysteries, but she's wonderful and I was worried what to do with these characters.

So we were probably on book four and she has a big old dining table and a roll of butcher's paper at the end, and she rolled it out. This is maybe midnight, she did this. Plunked down a box of crayons and said, let's work this out. On this huge piece of paper, she talked me through and we, I created this graph with her of these characters, which I then transformed into like a one page thing.

But I have it, it's eight feet long, but I had to think through all of their journeys and sort of where everything is going, because it's a big one. That means the last one means you can kill people. 

Caroline: Yes. You can give permanent endings if you want to. 

Maureen: Yeah. I mean, and who knows? I might spin her out if it, if it's, you know, but I enjoyed making a detective.

I want to make more detectives. And this was a very, I have such love. I was a detective reader as a kid. I was attached to my detectives and weirdly attached to their assistants. My love of Hastings was weird. I love Hastings. And Hastings is not smart, but I thought Hastings was great. I was obsessed. I reread all the Hastings parts over and over and over again.

Why? Can't tell you. 

Caroline: I don't think anyone's ever admitted to being a passionate Hastings fan to me before. 

Maureen: Oh, as a young teenage, 12 years old, just sitting there going, Captain Hastings, he's the best. Loved him. And then I, and then, you know, as an adult, you think back and you like, wait, Hastings? The one who was lying was like, gosh, like, always amazed like there's been a murder.

What? Here? With the detective? How could this possibly be happening? 

Caroline: So you've done your planning. 

Maureen: Yes. 

Caroline: You know, you know the landing. 

Maureen: Yeah. 

Caroline: But how do you feel about getting there? 

Maureen: Actually pretty good. I mean, what I'm going to write next is sort of a question, but I like sticking a landing.

I like those final chapters. I often write them first. So, you know, we're mystery people. We're about the landings. Don't mess up the landing. Always deliver. What you've placed in chapter three, I better know about. You have to be very aware of your things. You have to really track the locations of things and make sure you haven't contradicted anything or it's for detail people.

Caroline: Definitely, it's one of my least favourite things when I, certainly, when I read crime fiction, but also even I feel like I'm getting worse the older I get. Even when I watch, say, movies that are not crime related, if something is shown to me in the first third of the movie and they're not explained or developed or you know, resolved later on, I leave the cinema feeling frustrated and like someone didn't do their job properly.

Maureen: Right. I'm fussy, but you know, I have read a few books recently that have just been, I don't know if you've read Murder At World's End. 

Caroline: Mm-hmm. 

Maureen: I just want to shout it out because it is delightful because it was sort of, you know, touted as a funny mystery and I'm always a little suspicious of, give a little side eye go.

How funny? How mystery? But it is a country house based on the, I think it was 1906, the Hayley's comment. A man who thinks the Lord of manner is part of a society that thinks the world is going to end and gases are going to come. So the house is sealed up and every room is sealed up and there's still a murder.

It's so good. I don't know why I shouted that out, except that I was just thinking of murders that recently delivered for me, and I was like, that delivered. It did it. It delivered. 

Caroline: Absolutely. Yeah. When one does, it's all the more exciting, I think. Doing what I do, I feel like crime fiction comes at me thick and fast and yeah, knowing when it really, really works is such a pleasure.

Maureen: For this one, I reread things I like as well just to kind of get my head in the right space. And they may not be mysteries, but they often are. But just all whatever history or whatever inputs I'm trying to get or, but I've been rereading The Murder of My Aunt, which is absolutely one of my all time, and if you haven't read it, I highly recommend it.

The British Library Crime Classics has reprinted it, which is a kind of reverse mystery in which a man desperately wants to murder, and it is one of the funniest murder books I've ever read. 

Caroline: That was something I wanted to ask you actually, whether can you read mysteries while you are writing a mystery?

Maureen: A few, and I feel like that one, because it's a, it masters something that's really tricky and it is so funny. It is so much about the logic of someone who's trying to commit a murder, but I tend to read other sorts of materials. I feel like a book I would pick up. I Capture the Castle or certain tonal things.

Cold Comfort Farm is something I often pick up or reread a couple chapters of just to hear certain voices or get certain angles or The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pot. Like all of the Alan Bradley. Those are so incredible. Just the character work in them is so deep that sometimes I just want to hear someone do really beautiful character work.

Caroline: Sometimes people say, when I interview writers that, oh, you know, I can't really read anything while I'm writing because it distracts me, or it takes me out of the headspace, or I feel like I'm just, I suddenly start trying to write like Doty Smith or whatever. 

Maureen: Right. 

Caroline: But I don't know, just in my own experience as a writer, I find that I lose all patience with things that aren't of supreme quality.

Things that are, are really inspiring and helpful. 

Maureen: And maybe not read all of it that frequently. I'll pull a couple books from my shelf and just pull down and read certain passages or chapters. Just, you know, I think that's how you do it. You hear, you see the technique, you look at the vo- you know, oh, this is beautiful technique.

This is a, just something to think about. This is a hook, this is a transition. This is a- there's so many treasures, beautiful treasures to go. I imagine that you're going to like a cabinet of like potions. You're like, Ooh, this. Yes, I need this one, and this one and this one. 

Caroline: Yeah. Sometimes you just need to read one chapter of Gaudy Night.

Or one Sherlock Holmes story, and then you're okay. Again. 

Maureen: I don't know. I don't think you can read one chapter of Gaudy Night. It's so- 

Caroline: No. True. 

Maureen: It's so good. 

Caroline: True. Well, thank you so much for coming back, Maureen. It's been wonderful to have you and hopefully we'll have you again soon. 

Maureen: Thank you for making this podcast because truly I think it is such a gem.

If you love mysteries, then this is, it's just so, I've had so many, so many lovely moments with you just listening to you talk about mysteries and go through, and the only ones I've turned off are the ones I haven't read that I didn't want to get spoiled. 

Caroline: Entirely fair.

Music

This episode of Shedunnit was produced and hosted by me, Caroline Crampton.

Many thanks to my guest, Maureen Johnson. Her latest book is The Velvet Knife, a Stevie Bell mystery, and that as well as all of her other work can be found on her website, maureenjohnsonbooks.com.

You can find links to everything that we mentioned in the episode description and at shedunnitshow.com/maureenjohnsonisparticularaboutclues I also publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.

If you'd like more from Shedunnit, join the Shedunnit Book Club now at shedunnitbookclub.com/join, because I publish extra episodes for members as well as leading monthly golden age detective fiction readings.

Shedunnit is edited by Euan McAleece and production assistance came from Leandra Griffith.

Thanks for listening.