Phil Hall
speaker
50 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Phil Hall’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
So last summer I walked up here and bought my ticket and spoke to the wonderful people at the Wilden Cave Society who gave me a little tour, showed me a few secrets and some stories which I've tried to sort of feed into the book as we go along. So as the detectives are solving the case, they're also telling a little bit of the story about the history of the Baron's Cave.
So people would recognise all of these places.
It is, but not in this particular story, but that was in the very first story. That's the first one. I've got a series of three, and when I started writing about things I knew, I'd started playing tennis. So what better thing to do than kill off the coach? I've met the coach, yes, he's a nice guy. But you didn't call him Russell, did you? I did, actually.
I did, I did. Did he mind? No, he was very good about it. I let him read it, and he changed the surname, interestingly. But he was very happy about it, very good about it. I did write a nice chapter about him, which suggested he had a very good Wimbledon history, where he'd taken Roger Federer, who was his hero, taken a couple of sets off him before the rain...
came in in a Wimbledon of a few years ago so that was a bit of invention but yeah it went down really well with the tennis club and lots of tennis club people have like read the books and like them you see now I think your next novel number four should feature a young handsome podcast presenter
Well, all of it, really. But it's interesting because you talk to people about murder stories and everybody wants to be in a story. Usually people want to be the murderer. I recently did a day with the vote in the polling stations, not for the general election, but for the local election, and I was thinking of setting one around that idea.
And I spoke to all the people there, and almost without fail, everybody was going, oh, yeah, yeah, I could be the murderer, I could be the murderer. People seemed to have this fascination about it. But, of course, they all want to get away with it, whereas you've got to have a happy ending, really. I was thinking more like an Eddie Shoestring kind of character. Do you remember Shoestring?
I do, then, but she was saying, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So how far ahead are you thinking of your next stories? I tend to do one a year, and I've got this idea around a ballot box murder, which I'm partly a little bit nervous about because... there'd been a couple of politicians who were killed in service. So I wanted to make it before they were a member of parliament.
And actually I thought of the idea a while ago, sort of like May time, hoping that the general election wouldn't be until like November, December, and then I could have it written. So it could come out like the next day. But of course it's happened already. Or the other idea I've got half an idea for is parkrun murder. Because I do a lot of parkruns and there is one in Reigate. And so the idea of,
a lot of rivalry in it because although it's meant to all be fun and games people who do it often will see that there's a certain undercount of people who want to be first so i'm thinking a lot of intricacy involved a lot of planning because you've got to have the red herrings you've got to have a
Yep, you're not wrong there. I get an A3 piece of paper and I start with the murder in the middle and I do a little spider map of this leads to so-and-so and so-and-so and so-and-so and then this does so-and-so and this person does that. And then I will map out the chapters and I will write underneath it
plot, and then Scott and Ron, my two leading detectives, and dialogue, anything clever I want to say in that particular chapter. And then I'll start to make a few notes in it, so I know roughly what's going to happen in each of the first six or eight chapters before I even start.
Yes, more or less exactly how it works. I went to a writer's conference where this guy was talking about not knowing who was the murderer until the end and creating four or five plausible killers because he felt otherwise his writing would give it away if he knew the answer. I've never been able to do that.
I always know the answer more or less when I start that it's going to be X or it's going to be Y. Then I'm building the red herrings around it as I go along kind of thing.
I don't think any writer could get away without having a few of the proofreaders around. I've got a guy I actually went to school with when we were five. We started school together. A guy, Andy Lipson, now lives in Edinburgh. He was known as the walking encyclopedia at school. So we have a deal where he does my proofreading every year and I send him a bottle of whiskey. So it works really well.
Okay, Phil, finally, here comes the plug. The new book is The Cave of Death. You can get them on Amazon if you search Phil Hall, The Cave of Death, or go to my website, which is philhallauthor.com, and you'll find links to them all there.
Well the East Surrey Morris Men were formed in 1926. The Morris was in a bad state in the late 19th century and it was saved from extinction really by Cecil Sharp who was a folk music collector. and the English Folk Dance Society was involved in training new people to dance the Morris, having collected the dances from the Cotswold area in particular.
East Surrey Morrismen were formed from the English Folk Dance Society's East Surrey district in 1926. to perform the Morris dances that have been collected. What are Morris dances? What do they signify? What are they for? What's their point? They're not really for anything. They're for enjoyment and they're an artistic expression.
So nothing to do with fertility dances for crops or for anything else? There's no strong evidence for that. I mean, there's some dances that are clearly related to that. So we do a dance called bean setting, for example, where you use the sticks to poke the ground and...
Showing 21–40 of 50 · page 2 of 3
← Previous
Next →