Acclaimed Australian broadcaster and wordsmith Kel Richards is passionate about classical mysteries, and the Golden Age of the 1930s when Agatha Christie and her fellow authors were writing them... Kel is also an Anglican lay canon, deeply immersed in Narnia creator and theologian C.S. Lewis' Oxford college world and his circle of friends, including Prof. J. R. Tolkien. Bring all of them together and you have Kel’s Country House Mysteries, featuring Jack Lewis and friends solving brain teasing "closed door" mysteries in 1930's Oxford. Hi, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler and today on the Binge Reading show Kel talks about his love for old fashioned clue puzzle mysteries – the sort that aren’t generally written any more – as well as his passion for Australian English – one of the richest vocabularies in the world, in his view. 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DOWNLOAD MYSTERY & THRILLER FREEBIES https://books.bookfunnel.com/thrillingfreebies-jun/nr6fg5wdhw PLUS - KOBO THRILLER AND MYSTERY SALE - GET OF GOLD & BLOOD THREE BOOK BUNDLE And there’s a deal on the first three books in the Of Gold & Blood mystery series - another Kobo multi genre sale offer.  Three long form mysteries, at a great sale price... get three books for price of one https://www.kobo.com/nz/en/p/june-thriller-sale Before we get to Kel – a reminder You can help defray the costs of production by buying me a cup of coffee on buymeacoffee.com/jennywheelx And if you enjoy the show. Leave us a review so others will find us too. Word of mouth is the best way for others to discover the show and great books they will love to read. Links to things discussed in this episode Dr Johnson mysteries, Lillian De La Torre,: https://www.amazon.com/The-Dr.-Sam-Johnson-Mysteries-4-book-series/dp/B07CQB6YKR#: Charles Dickens Investigations, J. C. Briggs:  https://www.amazon.com/Charles-Dickens-Investigations-11-book-series/dp/B07MPBQLL2 Teddy Roosevelt as detective, Lawrence Alexander:   https://www.amazon.com/Speak-Softly-Theodore-Roosevelt-Mystery/dp/1561290327 Jane Austen as detective, Stephanie Barron:  https://www.goodreads.com/series/40959-jane-austen-mysteries Master of the Closed Door Mystery:  John Dickson Carr:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dickson_Carr#:~ Kel Richards’ G. K. Chesterton mystery: https://www.amazon.com/Murder-Mummys-Tomb-Chesterton-Mystery/dp/1589199634 English humourist P.G. Wodehouse: https://www.wodehouse.co.uk/ Performing Flea, P.G. Wodehouse: https://www.amazon.com.au/Performing-Flea-P-G-Wodehouse/dp/1841591912 J R Tolkien, The Ents:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ent#: The Inklings:  https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Inklings The Eagle and Child pub:  https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/The_Eagle_and_Child The Nazguls: https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Nazg%C3%BBl Bill Ponzini The Nameless Detctive: https://www.fantasticfiction.com/p/bill-pronzini/nameless-detective Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe series: https://www.deadgoodbooks.co.uk/raymond-chandler-philip-marlowe-books-in-order/ The Aussie Bible: https://www.amazon.com.au/Aussie-Bible-Kel-Richards/dp/0647508486 SkyNews, Peta Credin, https://www.skynews.com.au/opinion/peta-credlin Austral English; E.E. Morris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Australian_National_Dictionary What Kel is reading P.G Wodehouse Mr Mulliner Short Stories: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meet_Mr_Mulliner Why Shoot A Butler, Georgette Heyer: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/311134.Why_Shoot_a_Butler_ Where To Find Kel online: Website:  https://ozwords.com.au/ But now, here’s Kel: Introducing mystery author Kel Richards Jenny Wheeler: , But now here's Kel. Hello there, Kel, and welcome to the show. It's great to have with us. Kel Richards: C.S. Lewis Country House mysteries Kel Richards: Nice to be here. Jenny Wheeler: Now you've made a real name for yourself as a distinguished Australian journalist and broadcaster and an expert on language, and we’ll to get onto those aspects of your career later on in the show. First of all, though, we want to talk to you about your mystery series, because this is a show for people who love popular fiction. So tell us, how did you get the idea to use an internationally recognized theologian as a mystery detective? Kel Richards: It sprung out of the fact that I like reading really old fashioned clue puzzle murder mysteries from the Golden Age of English murder mysteries, which was between the wars and the twenties and thirties. That's great stuff. I enjoy reading that because they're not written and published anymore. Now if you want to write something like that, you really need to write it as a historical detective novel. For some reason it doesn't work in the 21st century, but as a historical novel it does. And there's a whole bunch of those being written. It's become a whole class of crime writing that there are people who have written crime novels in using real historical figures, with people like Dr Johnson as the detective. Lillian de la Torre told a whole series of stories with Dr. Johnson as the detective. Teddy R, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen - all sleuths There have been stories with, people like Teddy Roosevelt when he was the police commissioner in New York as the detective. There's been at least one, probably more than one with Charles Dickens as the detective. There've been several with Jane Austen. There's a whole series, in fact, I think with Jane Austen. So, I thought about, and I did write one novel years ago, in which GK Chesterton was the detective and I thought, oh, now who would I like to write about in the 1930s, because that's the kind of book I'm doing. And CS Lewis sprang to mind because I'd been reading Lewis with great pleasure for a great many years. Jenny Wheeler: As you might expect when one of the central characters is a famous theologian, some readers dislike this and comment negatively on it, and others obviously positively like it. You are a declared lay canon in the Anglican Church, so it obviously is a topic close to your heart. How would you go about tackling that? Kel Richards: Well, just by knowing Lewis. One of the things I did when I was starting the series was to read his letters. His letters have been published in I think two or three volumes. And by reading the letters you get the voice of the person. And it was his voice I was interested in more than anything else because there's stuff that just comes out of him in a particular way, there's a particular lexicon, a particular vocabulary, a particular structure of sentences. Researching the books in Oxford I learned how that worked and I used that, and the kind of ideas that he kept springing to his mind would go to this. His mind would go to that. So it was from the letters, I got the flow of what the conversation might have been like, and that's how I said about constructing the character in the books. Jenny Wheeler: You do manage to make the Oxford of that time come alive. have you been to, Oxford, perhaps even study at Oxford yourself? Kel Richards: I never studied at Oxford. It would've been nice but that was never possible. But we did go there for a week, six days, something like that. But it was a really busy time and I went there knowing that I was interested in writing the series about Oxford. So we saw all the colleges. We saw Oxford We saw Lewis's old college, and actually spent a lot of the time in Oxford following in the footsteps of Lewis. So we went to the famous pub that he used to go to the Bird ‘N Baby, as he called it - the Eagle and Child. We met a bloke there. We set this up before we went, who had, when he was a boy, had known Lewis’s son... He was a friend of one of Lewis's sons, a friend of Douglas, his stepson. He used to go to Lewis's home, The Kilns. We spent time talking to him about Lewis, and looked at all of those places. When I sat down to write about that, we'd spent enough time there, visiting those places and thinking about that to really bring it vividly to mind. Classic "locked room mysteries" Jenny Wheeler: As we mentioned, they are brain teaser stories. So you set up situations which seem physically impossible. They defy the laws of physics and then you make it all happen. Kel Richards: The master of the Impossible Crime was a man named John Dickson Carr. He was American, but he lived in England and the best of his crime novels were written in the 1930s. His chief detective was Dr. Gideon Fell, who was modeled on GK Chesterton. He developed more than anyone else the idea of the “impossible crime.” The room which is locked on the inside and the keys missing from the door and all the windows are locked from the inside. And the person has been stabbed, not shot, and there's no weapon in the room or whatever. He does those impossible things and works out sound solutions for them really well. I'd spent a lot of time reading his stuff. I discovered when I set out to write them that the best way to do it was to do it backwards. You work out a really impossible situation that could never have happened, and then work out step by step how you would make that happen. You work backwards. Carr himself said, with an impossible crime, with a locked room mystery, He said, it doesn't have to be plausible, just possible. The secret: Work it out backwards All you need to do is to work out what might possibly lead up to this. Then of course,