Show notes
Welcome to The Best of Binge Reading 2023, Part Two, the second and final of our shows featuring the most listened to episodes on our popular fiction podcast, chosen solely on the basis of the number of times you, our audience, listened to them. It goes without saying they’re all best sellers, authors at the top of their game.
There’s something for everyone here, nerve wrenching contemporary thrillers from Ireland, to a French love story from a well loved TV actress; a World War II spy mystery by an Australian – set in the House of Dior in Paris, and a riveting journey into the world of the famous Mitford sisters, once acclaimed as London society beauties and then reviled as rotten traitors.
We present brief excerpts from each show, with links for where to find them if you’d like to hear more… As in previous years, we’ve selected shows that aired between Dec 1, 2022 and Dec 1, 2023.
So here they are – excerpts from the top six shows of 2023 on The Joys of Binge Reading.
Twisty Thrillers – Catherine Ryan Howard
Irish thriller author Catherine Ryan Howard with her latest nerve shredding suspense Runtime.
Catherine Ryan Howard – Thriller author
It’s a book that was shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards Crime Fiction Book Of The Year, and is a Top 10 Kindle Best Seller.
She been dubbed the Queen of High Concept thrillers for her intricate plotting which require a special excel spreadsheet…
First up I asked her about her revelation that Runtime was inspired by her actor brother, John Ryan Howard.
Jenny Wheeler: You’ve said that the original idea was inspired by your brother. Can you tell us about that connection?
Catherine Ryan Howard: Yeah, he loves when I do interviews about this book because he gets a mention. So, he is an actor, and a few years ago he was in an independent Irish horror movie called Beyond the Woods.
Of course, he was telling me all about the experience of being on set and one of the things he said, and in Beyond The Woods – if you read Runtime will sound very familiar because it was filmed in this house out in the middle of nowhere in the Cork countryside, in the dead of winter overnight.
They were shooting everything at night, and he said one of the first things they did is the director had to go to the local police station and say, look, if someone calls you at four in the morning to say, ‘I hear screens, I think someone’s getting murdered.’ They’re not.
It’s just us filming.
And of course, being a crime writer, I immediately thought, what if it’s someone getting murdered?
That’s a great cover story. You’re giving yourself a bit of a bit of time to get away a head start.
When I sat down to write the book, that idea went away and it turned into something else.
Movie making is murder
But that’s the initial seed, and I loved the idea of there being a script for horror movie that when the actors go to film it, the same things that are happening in the script start to happen on the set, because of course your first question I think would be, is this really happening or is my director secretly filming me or something?
It’s hard to know what’s real and what’s not, and I think that’s at the core of the novel.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes, exactly. You do open with a scene where the director and an assistant go and knock on someone’s door and say, ‘if you hear any screaming, don’t worry.’ And I immediately thought, oh, what a perfect cover for a crime.
Exactly that. The story does show a very close understanding of the filming process, what happens on set, and all the different roles that there are in the production side of things. I wondered if you’d had any personal experience of that yourself.
Catherine Ryan Howard: I really don’t like, first of all, my brother was a great resource, of course, and I have a couple of other friends who’d be involved in the industry.
So if there was something specific I wanted to know, I would go and ask them. And then I made sure after I had written it, that I had done it right. But I actually love movies about movies, so I love For Your Consideration and I love, there’s a great movie called The TV Set, which is about trying to get a comedy made and they’re both comedies themselves and I just love all that kind of ‘insider inside the industry.’
I wouldn’t have any deep knowledge of it, but I think there’s a lot of parallels. Between being an actress and being a writer in that you’re both in this entertainment industry, in a creative industry, and I just used every little thing I had heard about. There is some stuff that literally I got from people I know, especially there’s a scene towards the beginning.
Make it ‘confident but terrified’ Sure…
Where Adele, the main character, goes to audition for a commercial, and my brother has done lots of commercial auditions and I was asking him, what are they like?
And he said, the funniest thing is you’re often given completely contradictory instruction so that you go into audition and they say your character is confident but also terrified. Show us that.
What are you supposed to do now? I just love all that.
I think it’s hilarious and I used as much as I could in the book to make it seem like I had some in-depth knowledge. Yes.
Jenny Wheeler: So it switches between the book that the film is based on and the film set itself, and it’s quite hard sometimes to think about hang on a sec. Are we in the book or are we in the movie? It gets very intense.
WWII Heart-Turner – Carol Drinkwater
Carol Drinkwater is the beloved star of the English TV show or All Creatures Great and Small, and is best known for a series of best sellers about her life on an olive farm in Provence – made into a TV show called Carol Drinkwater’s Secret Provence.
Carol Drinkwater – from TV to popular fiction
But Carol also writes fiction, and her latest historical romance, Act Of Love, is a heart wrenching World War II story about a French village that opened its arms as the Nazis closed in, set in mountains not far from where she lives.
Jenny Wheeler: Tell us about the story and how you came across it.
Carol Drinkwater: Well, though the story is entirely fiction, the incidents are not, and it’s part of the Alps where the book is set is in fact about an hour inland from Olive Farm, and i just happened to be there, reconnoitering around.
I came upon this village and there was the tiniest museum I’ve ever seen, which no longer exists, sadly. And in there, there were one or two… not exactly photographs, but there were just references to incidents that had happened in the Second World War.
And I dug a little deeper and found out that, in fact, this village, because this area was in the free zone of France — the Nazis came in and they took most of France, but they didn’t take this southern section down here.
And so Jews were down here, and those who thought that they would be in danger from the Nazis came to live in this corner.
And then as the Nazis started to move into the Free Zone, it became a dangerous area for anybody who was a target for them, particularly Jews. And this one small village inland of Nice, about an hour’s bus ride inland from Nice, voted a hundred percent to take in refugees.
Giving refuge to outcasts of war
It was a village of about 300 people, just farming people and mountain people.
And within, oh, six months there was almost a thousand people there.
And all the other people, of course, were foreigners. They were Lithuanian speaking, Polish speaking.
They were Jews from all over Europe who were fleeing the Nazis and they were safe for almost a year in this village. I don’t want to give the details away, because that’s what the story is inspired by.
It is the most remarkable story of how completely different peoples came together and created for a short while during a war, an area and an environment of peace and acceptance and diversity.
And it so inspired me that I thought I must write a story. My story is basically about a Polish Jewish family, but particularly the 17-year-old daughter who is on the cusp of her life, the verge of her life.
She’s about to step out, and wants to go dancing and do all the things that young girls want to do for. Fall in love, et cetera.
But there she is caught up in a war zone situation. However, within this village, she finds certain areas where she’s welcome and her life begins to open up.
So that’s the basis of the story.
Love in all its dimensions
Jenny Wheeler: And it is about love in all its dimensions, as you’ve outlined. Her most remarkable communal love, but she also does meet up and have an attraction to a young doctor in the village.
But the act of love that the book refers to is not just a simple romantic love. We’re not going to give it away, but she makes quite a self-sacrificing act for the benefit of others.
I wondered if you could talk about those terms of love at the heart of the book. As I say, it is a wonderful romance, but it’s much more than a romance, isn’t it?
Carol Drinkwater: Well, I think the point is that yes, it is much more than a romance and an act of love is actually, yes, it is the act of love.
What she sees is the risks the local people are taking to hide and look after 500 completely unknown foreigners whose lives are in danger.
If they are caught, they will be murdered. And if the villagers are caught, they too will be murdered.
She begins to see that actually, life is about giving. It is about opening yourself up to others and taking risks in order that we can all share the best of the world. And in the light of that, she makes a gesture, which I’m not going to say what it is. Obviously, she takes a step, which is extraordinary, absolutely extraordinary.
And there were young women who made similar gestures, similar steps, not specifically Sarah’s story because I’ve made that one up, but that becomes one of the most important parts of her growing process, of her maturity into womanhood is to understand that actually opening your arms to embrace, no matter what the risks are, actually what really makes life worth living.
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Dior Spy Thriller – Natasha Lester
Natasha Lester featured in Encore, a show for guests who have already been on Binge Reading before, talking about her latest World War II saga, The Three Lives of Alix St Pierre.
A story that the best-selling novelist Kate Quinn has called “a triple stranded delight.”
Former American spy Alix returns to Paris in 1947, determined to build a new life for herself with a fascinating job in the House Of Christian Dior.
But among the bolts of silk and cocktails at the Ritz, an old enemy lurks. Alix must reach back into her wartime past to trap her former adversary, hoping it is not too late to build a new future from under his shadow.
Jenny Wheeler: We know from our last talk that you have got a longstanding passion for Dior. So tell us about that.
Natasha Lester: I have. But this book was a bit of an accident in terms of how Dior was woven into the story, I have to say. I mean, I love his gowns.
I think he really revolutionized fashion. He is one of the few designers who can lay claim to having changed fashion so radically.
But for this one, I was really interested in what happened to women after the war.
World War II gave women freedom
They had amazing independence, they’d been able to earn their own money, work in any job anywhere during the wartime, because all the men were away.
And then suddenly the men came back from the war and women were actively dissuaded from working and told to return to the home and return to the kitchen. And I wanted to examine what that might’ve felt like for women.
And tied up in all of that is the New Look. And Dior is often scapegoated as being part of that re-domestication of women. But I think that’s oversimplifying it.
I think it’s much more complicated than that. And in fact, I think that actually, his aim was to celebrate women, at a time where women were told to return to the background and he was trying to bring them back to the foreground.
So in some ways, he was doing the opposite of what he’s often blamed for.
For this particular story, Dior worked well because he was such a marker for what was happening with women at the time, given the themes that I was trying to explore, and it didn’t hurt that I do love his designs and his gowns as well, I guess.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s lovely. Yes. There is a very strong theme underlying it of how things changed for women after the war and just how utterly closeted they were in a sense. I don’t think I realized that in some places a woman had to get their husband’s permission before she could work.
No bank account, no trousers…
Natasha Lester: Yes. Oh, it was incredible to me when I was reading. I knew that there were things; like I knew women couldn’t have their own bank account, for example, at that time.
And women weren’t allowed to wear trousers into public places in Paris, and they weren’t allowed to wear trousers into restaurants in Manhattan.
So I knew there were some strange things like that going on. But I started reading Carmel Snow’s memoir, in fact, Carmel Snow being the famous editor of Harper’s Bazaar. And that was where I really began to see the way in which women almost had to be married in order to have some level of access to finances, because you couldn’t, as a single woman, own a credit card, get a loan, put it in a credit application to a bank.
You had to bring along a man to co-sign those kinds of applications for you. So this idea that a woman required a man in her life to be able to access those parts of society almost forced women into getting married, and it’s this very strange way of imagining society.
You know, particularly for me as a woman who’s always been able to have her own bank account and apply for a credit card and wear trousers wherever I please.
I wanted to unpick how that might have felt, once again, to have been able to wear trousers into factories during the war because that was what your work involved.
And then suddenly to have that totally taken away from you and the money that you earned to have no rights over that. That’s kind of a really tricky situation to be in and to not necessarily have the freedom to just choose to work, and to really be, I suppose, a possession in a way.
I mean, that’s really how women were, and that must have felt shocking.
Dark & Twisty – Liz Nugent
Strange Sally Diamond is the latest dark and twisted thriller from award-winning Irish novelist, Liz Nugent.
Liz Nugent – best-selling Irish thriller author
In this interview, Liz talks about why she loves writing gripping psychological bestsellers that are always laced with black humor, and explains how Sally is pretty close to herself; “Liz, without a filter.”
Jenny Wheeler: All of your books have intensely brilliant twists and your newest and the one we’re talking about today, Strange Sally Diamond, is no exception.
The opening is really mind boggling when you read that first paragraph. And because it is so striking, I wondered if you’d just mind reading that first paragraph to us.
Liz Nugent: I should have had this open before we started, but here we go.
“Put me out with the bins. He said regularly. When I die, put me out with the bins. I’ll be dead, so I won’t know any different. You’ll be crying your eyes out.” And he would laugh, and I’d laugh too, because we both knew that I wouldn’t be crying my eyes out.
“I never cry.”
Jenny Wheeler: In those few lines, you’ve already told us that Sally is different from other people,
Liz Nugent: Mm-hm… It establishes the fact that there is something not typical about Sally’s behavior.
She’s somebody who doesn’t cry and is quite confident about the fact that she doesn’t cry. The question asked in that first paragraph is, is she not crying because she doesn’t love her father?
Or is she not crying? You know what, why?
It just sounds off because they’re laughing together, and yet she’s not going to cry when he dies. There’s something strange about Sally.
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Shock openings learned from TV
Jenny Wheeler: That’s absolutely right. And all of your books that I’ve seen anyway, have exactly that same shock opening.
You’ve said that you learnt this from TV shows like Breaking Bad. Tell us a bit about that.
Liz Nugent: Well, I loved Breaking Bad and The Sopranos and all of those shows like Ozark, about very flawed and damaged people.
I think they’re far more interesting than the Waltons or Little House in the Prairie, which are all about like lovely families who are all very nice.
I just find flawed and damaged characters – in fiction I hasten to add – my husband is a very nice man, but I find those flawed characters very interesting.
In most of the other books now, I’m not talking about Sally Diamond, but most of the other books, they’re told from the point of view of a sociopath or a psychopath.
This is the first time I’ve departed a bit from that and written from the point of view of somebody who’s actually very good and straightforward, almost too straightforward because of her difference.
I really enjoyed writing her. It was quite a relief because I had always lent towards writing these monstrous characters before.
But writing Sally was a great relief to me.
I really loved her by the end of it.
Inside sociopaths’ and psychopaths’ heads
Jenny Wheeler: How do you get inside the heads of these monsters?
Liz Nugent: Well, alarmingly easily. I did some acting training. I trained as an actress many, many years ago, and I think that really helped me to get inside the mind of a character.
So when it’s a character that I’m writing myself, I think like they do, and so the kind of sociopathic characters that I’m dealing with, it’s not like they wake up in the morning thinking ‘Whose life am I gonna screw up today?’
It’s always that they have some rationale behind it.
“She shouldn’t have provoked me” or “he brought it on himself.”
Or “if he hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t have had to do that.”
There’s always some rationale behind the way that they’re thinking, so that they have a kind of a superiority complex and they have a logic behind their actions.
Even though it’s really askew, there is a logic to what they do, and a lot of it stems from background trauma.
And that is also the case with Sally, but because she doesn’t remember any of it, all of this happened, all of the trauma that happened to Sally happened before she was seven years old and for various reasons, which are revealed in the book, she doesn’t remember any of it.
She has no idea when we meet her, around the age of 42, I think she has no idea what her background really is.
Silver Rush Mysteries – Ann Parker
Ann Parker is the award-winning author of the Silver Rush mystery series set in 19th century Colorado. And yes, that is Silver Rush as distinct from the possibly more well known Gold Rush.
Ann Parker – Silver Rush mysteries
Ann talks about how a close family relationship led to her writing the Colorado series, and why being a science writer has been a big advantage in her career.
The series was initially set in Leadville, Colorado, but the latest book, The Secret In The Wall, is set in San Francisco.
Jenny Wheeler:
I understand you’ve got a family connection with the Leadville. Tell us about that.
Ann Parker: I have a lot of family history in Colorado in general. My parents were raised there, and I still have cousin and a brother who’s there.
But it was my paternal grandmother who was raised in Leadville in the late 19th century. And this was a bit of family history I didn’t know until I was, oh gosh, into my forties and heading toward 50.
And as a family genealogist, I was shocked because truly all she ever talked about was Denver, Colorado and how wonderful it was and how she met grandpa and stuff.
When my uncle told me that my grandmother was raised in Leadville, I was like, what? What’s Leadville? I’ve never heard of this place.
And my uncle got very excited and said, ‘Oh my gosh. It was just the biggest mining area, in the country at the time, with silver mining.’
People came from all over. It was like the Gold Rush in California. He says, oh Ann, I know you’ve been thinking about writing some fiction. You need to research Leadville and set a novel there.
I just followed my uncle’s directions and it’s been quite a journey. I gotta say.
Mining silver two miles high
Jenny Wheeler: Was it a bigger area than the Nevada area in its time?
Ann Parker: In its time it was, People came from all over the world to Leadville and many of them didn’t realize it’s up at 10,000 feet in the Rocky Mountains, so it’s like almost, like two miles.
And, there was no infrastructure at first and no railroads. People would get up there and spend their last pocket money and be stuck in a place where winter lasts nine months out of the year.
There were some harrowing stories from up there in that time. Yes, it was quite interesting.
Jenny Wheeler: Your lady sleuth is Inez Stannert. She has been on quite a journey herself, because she started out on the East coast and she ended up in Leadville. In book one she makes that transition. Tell us a bit about Inez and where she came from.
Ann Parker: Okay. first of all, I’ll just say this right out. Inez Stannert is my granny’s maiden name. Now Granny was a very proper woman but I just loved her name. I thought it had such a strong ring to it and I wanted to honor her in some way.
I asked the family, the ones that were left, she was long gone, ‘Do you think Granny would be okay if I took her name and gave it to this, rough, strong minded, strong willed woman who runs a saloon?’
They said, ‘oh, she’d love it. she’d just be tickled. She’d think it was great. that’s how the name came about.’
Jenny Wheeler: Tell us about The Secret In The Wall?
The body that was forgotten
Ann Parker: I’m always on the lookout for ideas, plot ideas that show up in either historical documents or newspapers.
And this body in the wall thing was born from a real incident in San Francisco. where they were digging in the basement or sub-basement of a San Francisco house, and unearthed a coffin containing a perfectly preserved body and they had no idea who this was.
How did they end up down here? It turns out that the house was sitting on top of what used to be an old cemetery in San Francisco.
All the bodies had theoretically been moved but they missed a few, including this one. I read that article back in 2016, I think, and it just sat in the back of my mind.
I was thinking, that is so cool. And then, when it came time to write this book, it’s like the body just moved into the wall and it was like, whoa, let’s see what happens from here.
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Mitford Madness – Marie Benedict
And in the final excerpt from this year’s Best Of 2023 episodes, biographical fiction author Marie Benedict talks about her latest best seller, The Mitford Affair, the story of the beautiful and notorious Mitford sisters, famous as the debutante daughters of an English Peer and then infamous as World War II traitors.
Marie Benedict -biographical fiction that comes alive
Critics rave about Marie’s uncanny ability to unearth untold woman’s stories – from Albert Einstein’s first wife to the hidden life of Agatha Christie – from JP Morgan’s personal librarian- to Andrew Carnegie’s maid, she’s written about them all.
I asked her what attracted her to the famous Mitfords?
Jenny Wheeler: With The Mitford Affair, which has been described as Downtown Abbey Meets The Crown – you’ve got six extraordinary sisters who enthralled England and much of the world,
They looked, in the mid 1930s, like they were totally destined to marry lords and have a rich and an aristocratic life. And because of the way things turned out politically with the war, it didn’t happen like that at all.
Now you excavate the rivalries between the sisters very well. Was that part of what drew you to the story, the way they all six worked together or against each other?
Marie Benedict: Yes, it was fascinating to me. I am the oldest of six – four sisters and two brothers, and my family is not like theirs. Nobody’s is like the Mitfords.
But at the same time, I have seen first-hand the way in which sibling relationships dictate our personalities, our belief systems, the decisions we make, and sometimes it’s unconscious.
And when I got to know the Mitford story, they weren’t super well known to me, until I did some research for another book I wrote about the Churchills. I wrote a book about Winston Churchill’s wife and the Mitfords, who were related to the Churchills – kept on coming up.
And that was when I learned more and more about the role these women played first as social luminaries who defied everybody’s expectations that they’d marry well, right? (Except for one sister.)
Sisters on dramatically different paths
And then these darker pieces of their past and that story overlaid with this sibling relationship and the way in which these sisters each followed dramatically different political paths at a time period of great unrest and great polarization.
It was just fascinating to me to see how those things evolved.
Particularly when you look at our own society and the way in which we have so much polarization today. I’m always interested in the way in which the past reverberates into the present, and I couldn’t resist their story,
Jenny Wheeler: Their mother Lady Redesdale apparently once said, “whenever I see the words ‘peer’s daughter’ in a headline, I know it’s going to be something about one of my girls.”
Marie Benedict: Yes, exactly.
Jenny Wheeler: And she wasn’t exaggerating, was she?
Marie Benedict: No, she wasn’t. I mean, they were regularly in the newspaper. Now, admittedly in the earlier years it was more society reports. You know, the girls were all debutantes. They were always at the best balls and, their outfits and the people they danced with, all those things, that was another interesting part of the world.
And yet, as the years went on, what they were most known for was the scandals in which they became embroiled. Beginning with Diana, the, third oldest who had been, oh my gosh, she’s the one who started out marrying well, right?
What was Sir Oswald Mosley’s secret?
She married the heir to the Guinness Beer fortune, she had this fabulous life with her adoring husband and her two young children, and she left it all for a married Sir Oswald Mosley, who was the leader of the fascist Unit in Great Britain.
And it was just unfathomable to people.
Jenny Wheeler: Mosley, I could not really understand the attraction for him. And when I Googled around a bit about him, I found that he was an absolute philander who had right at the beginning made it clear that he wasn’t going to leave his wife
She understood right from the beginning that wasn’t going to happen. Did you ever really get a sense of why he was so utterly tempting?
Marie Benedict: You know, it’s such a great question. and you and I are not the only two to, muse on that. Sometimes when I give speeches, I like to show pictures. Her first husband was stunning and smart and kind and adored her.
And then you’ve got this other guy who’s a cad and he’s married and he’s sleeping with his sisters-in-law.
And he’s just awful in every sense of the word. And I don’t know that we’ll ever really know why, but I think my personal pop psychology view, having spent way too much time with Diana, is that it was the thrill of the chase. You know, Mosley was never, ever, hers.
Not even when they married, not even in later years. I don’t want to give too much away, but when they were social pariahs, when they had children together, he was a challenge and Diana was very smart. She lived in an era where careers weren’t something that women, at least women of her stature generally did.
And I think she was horribly bored by all that adulation and easy life that Brian Guinness offered.
Mosley was a challenge, and she went after him with her heart and her mind. She became fully enamored of his belief system, she was an apolitical creature prior to being with him.
She adopted his views as her views, and I think everything she did was in service of keeping Mosley close.
That’s my personal view. I think he never really was hers and that was a great challenge for her.
Next time on Binge Reading
Introducing a month of romance for Valentines Day: Remember we’re fortnightly now, so the next show will run January 31, with Rochelle Weinstein’ s What You Do To Me – a trip back down memory lane with a background of nostalgic hit songs and a terrific Spotify playlist to accompany it…
Journalist Cecilia James is a sucker for a love song. So when she stumbles across a clue to the identity of the muse for one of rock’s greatest, she devotes herself to uncovering the truth, even as her own relationship is falling apart.
That’s next time on The Joys of Binge Reading.
If you’ve enjoyed this round up, follow up by listening to these and other episodes in full. There are no nearly 300 interviews with a wide range of popular fiction authors with something to suit every reader.
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That’s it for today. See you next time, and Happy Reading!