Sophie Gee

That was virtuosic.

And the only thing I'll tag onto it is that by putting existentialism in the mix there, Jonti, you're sort of unseating the 19th century philosophy.

it's not a philosophy, 19th century system of thought that is conventionally connected to the rise of modern crime and particularly the queens of crime.

And that is, of course, Freud, with Freud's old friend, Karl Marx, and then kind of waiting in the wings, Friedrich Nietzsche.

And, you know, all those thinkers from the 19th century, Nietzsche, Freud and Marx, are all playing with this idea that systems are not what they appear to be on the surface, that there's a kind of, there's a substratum of

real meaning.

And if you can get at the analytic that will kind of uncover it, you can see the kind of meaning behind the surface and that the unconscious will kind of come to the fore and human motivation and human systems of behavior and kind of organization can be explained by this kind of underlying unconscious system of human motivation.

That's normally what people say

powers the rise of the 20th century crime novel.

And kind of what you're saying about existentialism is that it's kind of putting a lie to that.

It's saying that there is no underlying system, that there is no kind of coherent sort of hidden pattern that can kind of explain everything.

And, you know, it just says so much about what Ellingham is doing that is really fundamentally challenging these old systems

assumptions about the way that you tell stories and gets us into these much more contemporary crime writers like P.D.

James.

So, Jonty, I want to draw us back into the world of complete triviality and frivolity to wrap things up.

She's doing amazing things with existentialism, with the kind of crisis of the Second World War, mass migration, loss of identity.

loss of traditional social structures, et cetera, et cetera.

You know, these are deep themes.

She also has a great feel for one of my very favorite topics, Jonty, which is the gut reno, the massive overhauling of a kind of fixer-upper so that you can create a bourgeois interior to really have a great...

Lava gut Renault.