Kel Richards – Country House Mysteries

The Joys of Binge Reading

Kel Richards – Country House Mysteries

June 04, 2024

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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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, when you write the book, though you worked out the puzzle backwards, you write it frontwards, so you use what authors call plants.

You keep putting in those things, which are going to when you get to the resolution of the whole thing and the solution of the puzzle, people will say, ah, yes, I should have seen that. Because you were planting them there on through as little hints of who knew what and what this was about and who was where at what time.

Putting the plants all in so that you’ve got those and can refer back to them when you get to the solution is the secret to making it look possible, even if not plausible. To set it up. I start at the end. I start with something that looks impossible.

Can I tell you about the one that I wrote about G.K. Chesterton, set in Egypt in 1919 and in that one, there is the ultimate locked room mystery, because what happens is they discover an undisturbed, it’s an archeological dig in the south of Egypt near Thebes, near Luxor – and they discover an undisturbed tomb.

There’s this tomb dug straight into the cliff face. It’s been filled with limestone chips, which is what they used to do in those days. Then there’s a plaster wall, a ceiling off the tomb itself. They break down the wall and the senior archeologist and his assistant go in and there is a mummy’s sarcophagus.

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The mystery of the Mummy

They take the lid off and inside, instead of being a mummy is the dead body of one of their own the people they’d left on the surface. One of their own team members. You think, okay, that’s the result I want to get. How do I get to a result like that? That’s what you do. You start at the end and then work backwards to build up to it.

Jenny Wheeler: You have to then do a full outline of the stories before you start filling in any detail. In this debate writers have about whether they’re a Plotter or Pantser, you would definitely be at extreme end of the scale?

Kel Richards: No one but an idiot writes without a fairly well constructed outline. One of my favorite writers is P.G. Wodehouse. And Wodehouse used to write incredibly complex and detailed outlines before he wrote the first word of the story.

He needed to know what was happening, to whom and when and where in a lot of detail.

And he used to write outlines that just got longer and longer. He’d end up for a 60, or a 70,000 word book, with a 25,000 word outline.

There’s a really good book, which is actually called Performing Flea, which is an exchange of letters between P.G. Wodehouse and one of his friends, Bill Townend in which he talks about the craft of the writer.

And what you do as a writer if you are going to have a really well constructed book. And the joy of Wodehouse is that, not only are they some of the funniest books ever written, but they’re architecturally perfect and perfect because they’re set in detail ahead of time. It’s the only way to go.

C.S. Lewis was a “clubbable man”

Jenny Wheeler: And his friends, they were brilliant men, but do they hold a particular attraction or interest for you?

Kel Richards: He was a clubbable man. He belonged to clubs. He belonged to an undergraduate club called The Martinets, and then he started his own club called The Inklings, which included Tolkien and Neville Coghill and a whole bunch of really interesting and colorful people.

There’ve been a whole bunch of books which have been biographies of Lewis, which I’ve read obviously, but there’ve been quite a few books written about The Inklings, which is a clever name for a book of authors and would be authors. And they used to meet once a night, once a week, every Wednesday night in Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen.

And then they’d read on meet also on Monday mornings at the Eagle and Child at that pub I mentioned. And they were collectively an interesting group of people. Charles Williams joined them during the Second World War. Their books are interesting and collectively they must have been a really interesting bunch.

In the last book in the series, I actually describe an Inklings meeting which obviously comes out of my imagination, but it’s on all the very detailed accounts of those Inklings meetings that exist. So yes, as a group, a really interesting group.

Inksters a very creative group of writers

Jenny Wheeler: Intellectually brilliant as well.

Kel Richards: Just very creative people. I think just with very rich imaginations. If you look at Lord of the Rings, the point about Lord of the Rings is Tolkien’s imagination never stops. It goes on and on.

Just when you think he can’t possibly imagine anything new or anything inventive suddenly comes up with The Ents or something amazing like that. And the Nazgûls, the same. The richness of the imagination just goes on and on.

In fact, no one except J.K. Rowling has managed to, I think, equal that level of constant rich, imaginative invention and that’s just enjoyable.

Jenny Wheeler: Have you read the Harry Potter books?

Kel Riachards: Oh, yes. Yeah. I read all the Harry Potter books. They’re good fun.

Jenny Wheeler: I was intrigued by another of your series., the four books in the Ben Bartholomew series. Here you combine differing scenarios into another multi genre story – a kind of New Testament time travel series. One reader called it Biblical Noir. It’s First century New Testament stories set in contemporary Caesarea with pizza parlours and mobile phones. Where did this come from?

Kel Richards: It didn’t start as a series. It started as a single book. I was approached by Hodder and Stoughton for a book because I was on radio and I was well known and they asked me for a book. I don’t know what they expected. Maybe they expected me to write a book about being in the media or something.

First century Bible setting with Marlon Brando

I’ve got no idea. But I had this strange idea of writing a book about a private eye in Jerusalem in the first century. Which meant that you could use all the sort of slangy stuff from Los Angeles private eyes from Philip Marlow and the rest of them and have a lot of fun with it. But also tell a story from that period of time.

I imagined a situation where there was this private eye, this Ben Bartholomew, and after the crucifixion of Jesus, the high priest Caiaphas calls him in and speaking a bit like Marlon Brando in The Godfather says, ‘bring me the body of the Nazarene.’ Having pictured that I then had a story and a plot line.

The first book in the series was The Case Of The Vanishing Corpse and to be honest, if I was being really frank, I’d say in order to avoid having to do lots of detailed historical research, I decided to do the books full of deliberate anachronisms so it’s supposedly set in the first century, but a fun version of the first century where 20th century things happen.

When there are phone numbers, for example, they’re all in Roman numerals which just looks absurd when you look at it. There’s an advertising slogan for a beer called Achilles, and it says Achilles heels, H-E-A-L-S. I was having a lot of fun with that sort of concept, that I really enjoyed.

Jenny Wheeler: Many critics have commented on your humour and I loved some of the hilarious tongue in cheek names you gave people and places…I n Book #2 in the series for example, The Case of the Secret Assassin, cafes and bars are called things like Herod’s Leftovers or Ad Nauseum or Delirium Tremens. Did you have a lot of fun dreaming up these names?

Whimsical humour in Wodehouse style

Kel Richards: That’s probably the Wodehouse influence. Wodehouse was brilliant at playing with words, and of course he’s my favourite comic writer. There I was writing these books in this anachronistic version of the first century telling a story but having a lot of fun with it. That kind of whimsical humor. That’s the way to describe Wodehouse. Whimsical humor, I ended up writing it.

One of the reviewers, I have to say, actually said it was very Wodehousian, and that was the best praise I’ve ever had.

Jenny Wheeler: You bend genres in your fiction – something publishers generally don’t much like because they say readers won’t buy them so readily. Did you come up against that problem?

Kel Richards: Some genres are easy because they have really clear flags. The private eye genre I think is really easy. There’s a bloke named Bill Ponzini, who writes a series of private eye novels called the Nameless Series because his central character who narrates them, never has any name in the stories.

And they’re just classical examples of that particular genre. I discovered the private eye genre from radio, because I’m old enough to have grown up as a boy listening to radio serials. And there was a private eye called Larry Kent on radio. And he was the classic private eye. The genre and all its telltale signs was there in my head and I didn’t have to work at producing that kind of thing.

It was just fun to work with.

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