A Masculine Ending

"Joan Smith wrote a series of five crime books; A Masculine Ending was the first. The main character is a feminist professor of literature called Loretta Lawson. The reason I put it on this list is that it was one of the books that inspired me to try and write crime myself. I loved the main character—her being a professor of English ticked a few boxes for me, of course! I loved how clever the book is – not ‘cerebral’ in the way that the Martinez is, just very knowing, very witty. Everything about it drew me in, I wanted to try to do something just like that myself. Loretta is a professor in London, and she has a friend called Bridget, who lives in Oxford. Loretta goes to Paris for a conference and borrows someone’s apartment. She gets there the first night, quite late, and realises there’s a man in one of the other bedrooms. She thinks, ‘Christ, I didn’t realise there was going to be anyone else here!’ and goes into the other room and locks the door. In the morning, he’s gone, but she’s shocked to find there’s a huge bloodstain in the bed. There’s also a critical theory journal in the man’s room, which Loretta takes back with her and it proves to be a big clue, which is brilliant—the idea of a journal about how one interprets literary texts becoming a clue in its own right. The dead person turns out to be an Oxford professor, so a big chunk of the book is set in the Oxford academic environment, during the 1980s equivalent of the culture wars, when the structuralist and deconstructionist spat was going on in English faculties. That was fun for me because I was here at Oxford at that time. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The other four books in the series are just as good. The BBC made the first two into movies, with Janet McTeer, Imelda Staunton, and Bill Nighy. They were fantastic, but I just can’t get hold of them – if anyone has a DVD they could lend me, let me know! You can still get Kindle versions of the books though. I met Joan Smith after I started writing, and we’re now very good friends. She does still write, but nonfiction, and she’s probably most famous for Misogynies, published in 1990. At the moment, she’s finishing a book on femicide in ancient Rome: The Julia-Claudians: Femicide and Resistance in the Early Roman Empire , which is coming out this year. So for me, A Masculine Ending is not just a book about Oxford—it has a much more personal angle and that’s why I wanted to finish with it. There are six that are out, and the seventh is on its way (it’s scheduled for release in February 2025). Ideally, you would read them in order, but only to follow the lives of the police team. The stories are all standalones: the crime in each case does not require any previous knowledge. About three books in, I realised there were going to be readers coming to the series who might not have read the previous ones, so I started doing a little summary at the beginning about the police team. It’s a list of characters and how old they are and those sorts of details. I’ve had so many people come back to me since and say, ‘This is fantastic. Why does nobody else do this?’ I thought, ‘Hang on, this is nothing new—it’s just like the Dramatis Personae in a Victorian novel!’ It just seemed such an obvious thing to do. People seem to like it so I’ve carried on doing it. It was a break for him and a break for me! One of my other friends who writes crime series refers to doing standalones as a palate cleanser, which I think is a very good analogy. Murder in the Family was set in London and all over the world—I had the characters going to Australia, Canada, Greece. It was nice to ‘get out of the town’ for a bit! I had the idea of writing this one entirely as a screenplay. It’s taking mixed media to its furthest logical extension—there’s no conventional prose in the book at all. There’s no ‘me’ in the writing. It’s a screenplay with stage directions, with e-mails and voicemails and documents thrown in. It was so much fun. It was the most fun I’ve ever had at a laptop! I loved doing it, and readers seem to like it too—it was a New York Times bestseller, which was a life goal for me and a big thing for any Brit book. Yes. I’ve been lucky. Sometimes, you’re just in the right place at the right time. I’ve always believed that you earn your luck, though, through hard work. That’s what puts you in that right place when the luck comes knocking. It came to me as the twist, which is the big thing about that book—everybody talks about the twist! I remember once hearing Sophie Hannah at Harrogate History Festival. She had just started writing her Poirot Agatha Christie novels and she said, ‘You know you’ve got a really good twist if you can get it down to four words.’ If you think about The Murder of Roger Ackroyd , which is one of my favourite Christie books, the twist is: ‘the narrator did it’. For Murder on the Orient Express it’s: ‘they all did it’. You can do that with Close to Home . Close to Home has a four-word twist. Usually. When I wrote Close to Home , I had no idea it would be a series. I didn’t even think of it as a police procedural. It became that, at least in part, because it had to. When there is a missing child, there’s always going to be a police investigation. Adam Fawley just evolved as a necessary piece of plot machinery. In a way, that was good because I didn’t think of him as someone who was going to have to carry a series. He just evolved in his own way through that book and became a character people were interested in. But that was luck, really. The second book came to me not as an ending but as a beginning: a girl is discovered in a basement, locked in this big old house, with an old man living there who’s suffering from dementia and claims not to know who these people in his basement are. That book was triggered by the Fritzl case—the man in Austria who held his daughter captive in the basement for years. So some books come to me as a beginning, some as a twist at the end. They almost never come to me as characters. Some writers do that, they’ll come up with a character and think, ‘I can turn that person into a story.’ But I tend to think plot first and character second. That was the one based on a real case in Australia. I watch loads of true crime TV, because I’m fascinated about people’s motives. These are real people who did real things, and I want to understand why. Why would you do that? That’s what I watch true crime for. My husband’s cousin put me on to 60 Minutes Australia and I saw the episode about Keli Lane, who’d had five pregnancies when she was still living at home with her parents, and three full-term births. The first and third babies were adopted, but in 1996 the second baby disappeared. In 2010, she was convicted of killing that child, but the body has never been found and she still claims she is innocent. There’s footage of her, a few hours after the baby disappeared and she gave birth, in a white dress, at a friend’s wedding, acting as if nothing had happened. It’s just staggering. I don’t think I would have got away with Hope to Die as a plot if I couldn’t have said to my editor, ‘It’s based on a real case!’ Keli’s story fascinated me because I was trying to think myself into the mind of someone who would behave like she did. And what if the child that had gone missing came back one day, what then? So that’s where Hope to Die came from."