Welcome to The Deep Read, where we bring you news and interviews from the world of books and beyond!
This time you will find an article from author and journalist Robert Murphy, whose Bath-set true crime book To Hunt a Killer, written with ex-detective Julie Mackay, has been adapted into the ITV drama Gone, starring David Morrissey and Eve Myles. There is also a Q&A with Irish author Claire Lynch, whose novel A Family Matter is now out in paperback. For all this and much more, click below!
Hunting a Killer
Robert Murphy and Julie Mackay’s true crime book To Hunt a Killer, which outlines ex-detective Mackay’s attempts to crack a Bath murder case that had gone unsolved for 30 years, has been adapted by ITV and due to screen next month. Here Robert outlines what inspired the book and the amazing conclusion to the investigation…
Next month, ITV is broadcasting a new high-end crime drama series starring Eve Myles and David Morrissey, called Gone. It is the dreamchild of the brilliant screenwriter George Kay. George is behind some of the biggest shows on the planet of recent years: Hijack on Apple TV, Lupin on Netflix, The Long Shadow and Litvinenko on ITV.
It is inspired, partly, by a book I wrote, To Hunt a Killer, about how a detective (and my co-writer Det Supt Julie Mackay) solved the 30-year-old cold case murder of Melanie Road from1984. The TV show is very different from the book. All the characters are fictional. The main crime– the disappearance of a public-school headmaster’s wife – is a creation of George’s imagination. The lead detective, Annie Cassidy is not Julie Mackay. But the drama has taken some of the truths from the book, which is why the production company, New Pictures, optioned it for this series.
Julie is a big character: fun and funny, vibrant, determined. She had been a similar age to 17-year-old Melanie when the schoolgirl was found in June1984, stabbed to death near her home in Lansdown in Bath. A year behind her in school, at that time, Julie was going to the same clubs and bars and heard about Melanie’s awful death. And when she joined Avon & Somerset Police’s Major Crime Review Team in 2009 as a 41-year-old single mother of three, she became fixated that Melanie’s case was still unsolved after all these years. Because it seemed so solvable: There was a full DNA profile of Melanie’s killer, a trail of blood – the murderer’s – leading from the scene. They had a long list of potential suspects. And when Julie met Melanie’s mother, Jean, she made a vow that she would find the killer. Little did Julie realise it would take her seven more years and more dead-ends and red-herrings than any work of crime fiction.
I’m a TV crime correspondent – and Julie and I first properly met on the 30th anniversary of Melanie’s murder in 2014. It was still unsolved, and I left that meeting wondering how Julie would succeed where generations of other detectives before her had failed.
I didn’t realise two things:1. Julie’s ingenuity at inspiring her team. She organised ‘Suspect of the Month competitions’ and fought the powers that-be in the force for money and resources fora case deemed as unsolvable. 2. The deep bond that Julie had built with Jean. Julie herself was having a tough time, both personally and professionally. She struggled for understanding at work and at home. The one place she found support and salvation was at Jean Road’s house.
Julie would help often with Jean’s ironing, or in the garden, sometimes even bringing in groceries. Jean offered wise counsel and comforting words. In 2015, came the breakthrough that changed everything – the identification after 31 years of Melanie’s murder and his eventual conviction. To Hunt a Killer ends in a moment of pure drama as Jean Road – watched by Julie – gets to confront her daughter’s killer in court after three decades.
I wrote To Hunt a Killer as a story about two inspirational women as well as a work of true crime. Because I’ve never heard of a relationship like this. We were extremely lucky that To Hunt a Killer won ‘Best New Author’ at the True Crime Awards and was shortlisted for an ALCS Gold Dagger. And for the book to offer some inspiration to actors, a screenwriter and production company as talented as in Gone is a true honour.
By Robert Murphy
You can order a copy of To Hunt a Killer here. Gone begins on ITV and ITVx in March.
A Q&A with Claire Lynch
Claire Lynch, author of the magnificent A Family Matter, one of our Juliette’s favourite books, took time out of her busy schedule to answer some bookish questions!
You are on a long train journey but can only take one book. Which of your existing book collection would you choose to take to re-read?
I’ve been waiting for years for just such a journey to re-read Ali Smith’s How to Be Both, but this time the other way around.
What’s your favourite place/song/film?
Place: Whitstable sea front, ideally quite early in the morning.
Song: Florence + the Machine, Dog Days are Over, as loud as circumstances permit.
Film: I’m desperate to be a person who says something French and interesting but my family all know I’m a sucker for an old musical.
Where do you do most of your reading?
I do a lot of reading when travelling, making the most of time on trains and planes. I try to leave a book in the kitchen so I can sneak a few pages while stirring the dinner and another in my bag for queues and other emergencies.
What is on your “to be read” pile currently?
I’ve got Claire-Louise Bennett’s Big Kiss, Bye-Bye waiting for me on the tbr and Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional on my to be finished pile.
What would be the title of your autobiography?
At last an easy one! I’ve written an autobiography, it’s called Small: On Motherhoods, published in 2019 by Brazen.
What would your Mastermind subject be?
There was a time when I would have confidently said: Irish life writing since I have an actual PhD in that. Now I’m afraid it would be: Bluey.
When you visit a bookshop, which section do you go to first?
Biography and memoir. I love the titles, Pam St Clements’ The End of an Earring is yet to be bettered.
What three words on the book blurb would make you want to pick it up?
Powerful, funny, pocket sized.
What was the last book that made you cry?
What do you want to be when you grow up?
A Blue Peter presenter. I fear time is running out.
The ultimate dinner party – who would your top three guests be? (real or fictional!)
Margaret Atwood, Cynthia Erivo, Lucy Bronze. Just imagine the after-dinner game of UNO.
Interview by Juliette.
A Family Matter is out in paperback now – buy your copy here!
You may remember our Non-Fiction Lead Sam taking part in previous international competitions for his other great skill: memory! Well, now he’s off to Denmark to take part in the European Memory Championships – here, he takes you a little deeper into the peculiar world of memory sports…
It was an odd walk to Mr B’s today. I saw a cheetah chasing a speeding slug down Julian Road, Teletubbies engaged in street warfare on the Royal Crescent, Moomins changing a car tyre on John Street… Honestly, it’s amazing that I was only five minutes late.
It might sound like a trip, but this is part of my training for the European Memory Championship in April. Taking place in Taastrup, Denmark, this will be an international competition where memory ‘athletes’ from around the world will come together to push human mental capacity to the limit over two days of competitive memorisation.
Memory competitions have ten disciplines, all to do with memorising information against the clock. Some of the disciplines have a useful overlap with real life, like ‘15-Minute Names and Faces’, where the athlete is presented with a gallery of faces with names written below: after fifteen minutes the names are taken away, and the athlete must write down everybody’s name. The athlete who writes out the most names correctly wins the event. Other disciplines are extremely abstract, like ‘30-Minute Binary’, which is half an hour of staring at pages of zeroes and ones, followed by trying to write them out in order. Each row has thirty digits: if you get two of them wrong, you score nothing for the row.
If this sounds difficult, it is, until you introduce a few techniques that anyone can learn. Part of the fun of competitive memorisation is creating and perfecting systems and strategies. Through an easy-to-learn encoding system, the numbers 671044, 515341, 303184 become those three little scenes that I ‘saw’ on my walk to work: colourful, active, surprising scenes that stick in the mind. Those numbers feature within my recent training for the ‘5-Minute Numbers’ event.
People gifted with good memories exist in literature and in real life, but I’m not one of them. Elif Shafak’s wonderful novel There Are Rivers in the Sky features King Arthur of the Sewers and Slums, an impoverished Victorian Assyriologist who translated The Epic of Gilgamesh; in the novel the character has a near-photographic memory and is able to remember details from every day of his life. He’s based on the real-life and intellectually gifted George Smith. Julian Barnes’ triumphant final book Departure(s) opens with the Russian journalist and mnemonist Solomon Shereshevsky, a man unable to forget.
When I first began bookselling in 2011, I worked with a very gifted bookseller who could remember precise details of books, names of customers, the phone numbers for the different distributors, and all manner of other interesting and useful stuff. It was meeting this bookseller that got me interested in memory. I wondered: could somebody like me–completely ungifted in terms of natural memory–learn to do that? In the same year a book was published by Joshua Foer called Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, which answered with a resounding ‘Yes’.
Fast forward to today, and I am an International Association of Memory certified memory ‘Expert’, which is hilarious to me. Since 2024 I have been England’s representative in international memory sports, competing in the World Championship in Sweden and the French Open in Paris. My colleagues and friends at Mr B’s generously crowdfunded my travel to Paris, and are very kind with their enthusiasm for what is objectively a weird hobby.
Alliteration is what’s driving me to Denmark: if you get really good, you can surpass the title of ‘Memory Expert’ and become a ‘Master of Memory’. Doesn’t that just sound cool? Who could stop at ‘Expert’ when ‘Master’ is available?
Training in memory sports is similar to training in physical sports. When I trained for running a marathon, I designed my training to be harder than the event: wearing heavy clothes and running up and down hills even though the marathon route was mostly flat. I do the same for my memory training, choosing to train in public spaces with lots of distractions or while listening to death metal. The artificial difficulty you add to your training adds confidence when you tackle the real thing, counteracting some of the pressure. The real competitions are the quietest places on Earth: guitar shredding is frowned upon.
Similar, too, to physical sports, is the reassuring reliability of getting what you deserve. If you train, you make marginal gains. I’m some way off where I want to be. I find snippets of time to train in between bookselling, reading, and childcare. My nemesis is the ‘Speed Cards’ event, in which you compete to memorise a deck of cards as fast as possible. You score only up to the first mistake, so there’s a balance to be struck between speed and accuracy; my over-abundance of caution leaves me with glacial speeds compared to my competitors.
Anyway, thanks for reading. It would help me if, whenever you see me in the bookshop, you thrust a book in my face and give me five seconds to memorise the ISBN. If you’d like to have a go at any of these disciplines yourself, you can train on the competition software here. To learn the memory techniques that memory athletes use you can visit my personal website here.
By Sam Drew
Click here for Sam’s favourite books on memory!
*PROUD DAD ALERT*
Quick Romance New Single!
You may be aware that ex-Mr B’s bookseller Mattie – also the daughter of Mr B’s veteran Ed – is now lead singer of the upcoming rock ‘n’ roll band Quick Romance. And if you didn’t know that, where the hell have you been?
Either way, you should absolutely check out their cracking new single, Brian Jones Hair, available now as a 7″ vinyl, or available to stream on Spotify.
Little Bear, Big Journey
The team at Bloomsbury Publishing sent us a very cute little bear to accompany our copies of The Big Journey, the new picture book from Michael Rosen and Daniel Egnéus, and we are whisking him off on an adventure of his own…
The Big Journey is the most uplifting picture book of the year, a glorious sequel to the bestselling The Big Dreaming, brimming with hope, heart, and adventure.
To celebrate, Little Bear (pictured above) is setting off on a journey of his very own across the UK. Tucked under his paw is his own copy of the book, along with a very important Bear Passport ready for stamps, scribbles, and stories.
Mr B’s is the very first bookshop on his grand adventure. From here, we’re waving him off into the wide and wonderful world as he travels onwards to our lovely friends at Book-ish in Crickhowell, South Wales- and who knows what adventures awaits him!
By Becky Cann