Sophie Gee

He looked at what was left of Alfred Meyer's head, buried among the fern and broken fairy lights, wet with champagne and with blood.

The two fat white hands grasped the edges of the nest.

Amazing.

It's a great death scene, isn't it?

Something I read pointed out that

We almost but never completely see the corpse itself.

You only get the very edges of it in this kind of contrast of colour between the green of the fern and the red of the blood and the scent of the champagne.

It's very distinctive.

It's right.

And it's fascinating when you look at the actual text of the book, she's very careful, isn't she, about the kind of setup of it.

She's really thought it through.

There's a diagram of how the pulley and the jeroboam

and then there's a diagram of the theatre.

So it's really clear that she's properly thought through how you could have pulled this off from a kind of prop management point of view.

All right, well, I think we should get into Naomi Marsh's biography, Jonty.

Yes, HSBC, yeah.

Yeah, it's fascinating, isn't it?

The other thing that's kind of struck me when I was reading the book and then did a bit of background on Naya Marsh's life is how often it's the case that these kind of sensational, very successful, very sort of plot-driven popular writers, and I'm including Bram Stoker here, I'm even including Oscar Wilde, that they have this theatrical background and theatrical interest.

They really seem to kind of go together and

And she really uses the theatre to, I mean, not just as the kind of plot device of the novel, but as this idea that sort of when people are highly trained, there's a lot of emphasis in Vintage Murder on the training and the polish and the professionalism actually of the actors in the troupe.