Gray Robert Brown

I'm Grey Robert Brown.

I'm a writer, a Christie fan, a Mary Westmacott fan.

Hashtag Westmafan.

Hashtag Westmafan.

We do.

We're bringing a friend along for the ride today who recorded from Los Angeles.

yes and you recorded from southampton and i recorded from london and now we're in devon yes and our first ever remote recording of anything actually it is we don't do it it's a strict rule of mine it's true and you're often strict and it and it is intimidating um but it's it's a it's a rule i agree with um but it's such is the importance

of this particular guest that we couldn't possibly not.

It is, of course, Kemper Donovan, our good friend Kemper from All About Agatha.

Yes.

Friend of the podcast.

Very much friend of the podcast, yes.

And yeah, he's going to discuss Absinthe in the Spring with us.

Let's go, shall we?

Let's do it.

Absent in the Spring is the story of Joan Scudamore who is on her way back from visiting her daughter in Iraq.

Forced to wait days for the next train, Joan is trapped without distraction and starts to ruminate on her life, family, childhood, everything up to this point.

With repressed memories bubbling up in the desert heat, who really is Joan Scudamore?

So she'd been married to Max for more than a decade at this point, right?

And I was thinking about how she had just been bombed out of Sheffield Terrace not long before, obviously the Blitz, and she's now living in the Isocon building.