00:00I'm David Farrer and I've begun very late in my life a career as a novelist, a very exciting thing.
00:10Until seven years ago I was a professor of English at Leeds University where I taught for 40 years,
00:18taught the great books, the great novels, and it struck me that I only get one life
00:24and why don't I have a go producing a novel myself?
00:27And I wrote three historical mysteries set in Queen Anne's London in the 18th century in my period
00:34and then I thought, I love crime fiction, why don't I do something different?
00:39So I thought I would try cosy crime and I thought I want to do something a bit more lively
00:45with that
00:45and yet not be a sort of noir fiction, you know, you know the lurid covers of red and black
00:53capitals with guns and everything.
00:56So that was why I hit on Graham. Graham, my, how can I put it, my warm-hearted, sexy, innocent
01:06Yorkshire hero
01:08who's a young novelist who loves the dark side and he's produced three novels about Stryker, his hero,
01:17the mean streets of Huddersfield.
01:19And his agent calls him in and says, look, Graham, Yorkshire Noir is dead.
01:24I'm going to rebrand you as Tamara Wilde, Mistress of Cosy Crime.
01:31Now, of course, Graham has no idea about this.
01:34The Cotswold village with the honey-coloured stone is not what he's thinking about.
01:38There's this idyllic Cotswold village which seems to be auditioning for his novel.
01:42People introducing themselves, he's drawn into the book group who all seem to be auditioning for parts in his novel.
01:48He decides who's going to be killed and who the suspects are and what their motives are.
01:54And, of course, when the man that he's decided to kill actually is found dead,
02:00the police look into his files and they find that he's got this whole scenario.
02:05He's got it all worked out.
02:06So he becomes a prime suspect and he's charged with murder.
02:11So he's in his own novel.
02:13He's entered his own plot.
02:15Suddenly sitting down and writing that first sentence was amazing.
02:20And at the end of the first page, I suddenly thought, I'm interested in this.
02:25I've set something up.
02:26There's a moment in time as a character.
02:28Let me explore it.
02:31And ever since then, I've always worked sentence by sentence, chapter by chapter.
02:37People always say that with crime fiction, you've got to get all the plots sorted out, all the chapters.
02:42Absolutely not in my case.
02:45I'm solving it as I go along.
02:47It's just lovely to have started a new life, really, in my 70s, you know, writing novels.
02:52Who'd have thought it?
02:53I never thought of it.
02:54But suddenly I'm producing stuff rather than just writing about it.
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