Caroline Crampton

I think probably quite a lot of people listening won't have read much, if any.

Hopefully they've read this one because we're going to talk about it in some detail.

But so what do you think newcomers should know about his work before they jump in?

Hopefully that won't always be the case, but he's so prolific.

I wonder if publishers just get overwhelmed by the variety and the effort involved, perhaps.

This book, because it's a, I'm never totally sure on the difference between a serial killer or a spree killer, because it's a sequence of murders.

It almost feels like he's just throwing away great ideas for free.

Any one of the murder methods, you can totally imagine a whole book being built around them.

But he's like, oh yeah, that's one, on to the next.

Yes, it's a campaign, isn't it?

in golden age for detective fiction and this is probably the first realized one yeah i think it has a very strong claim to it i think i've seen a lot of philip mcdonald being cited as the first but obviously not i think it's so interesting that because i don't think the popular conception of golden age crime fiction is that it has things like serial killers that it's far too genteel or

I don't know, cozy or whatever.

But actually, as you say, it became quite a substantial thread.

My feeling about it as a reader is it's simply a great narrative device.

It's a great way to plot a book.

It's a way to be original.

Yeah, so the setting of this book particularly, I absolutely love it.

I think it's sketched so well.

It's right there in the title.

It's a book about a street and it's about the shopkeepers and the people who inhabit Praed Street in London.