Caroline Crampton

The very opening of the novel...

really recalls, for me, Howard's End by E.M.

Forster, where he talks about the different characters of the different London stations.

And Rhodes starts this one by saying, Parade Street used to be one way, and then they plonked Paddington Station down on it, and the street has never really recovered from this indignity.

But he just so perfectly paints this picture of this kind of slightly mulish backwater street that's got too many people in it for its liking.

And as you say, it established this kind of, I suppose, would you say, lower middle class or upper working class community there of shopkeepers?

And that's among whom our victims start appearing.

Of course, yeah.

I think it's a brilliant piece of writing.

And I think that's, for me, one of the great pleasures of reading this kind of fiction is when it's so specific and recognisable that I don't really enjoy detective fiction where it's just generically London or generically Edinburgh or whatever, because you just know the writer either had never been there or couldn't be bothered to be specific.

But yeah, this one, one of its great features for me is the setting and how specific and recognisable it is.

We have this great setting.

We start being introduced to these characters.

As you say, immediately he starts drawing in the light and shade for these people because we've got here's our character.

He's a grocer, but he's got a daughter that he's educated to be a scholar.

And she's her father has all these dreams about how she's going to be a typist and then she's going to marry a professional.

And one day he's going to open the illustrated news and he's going to see a picture of her at Goodwood.

He's got these class aspirations for her.

Which in the grand scheme of the novel is not very important.

It doesn't really tell you anything about the murders or anything like that, but it tells you about the people.